In a country often said to be racked by division, criticising the condition of rivers is one of England’s few unifying pastimes. Sewage dumping, which occurred for nearly 4m hours in English rivers and coastal waters last year, has become a potent source of anger, inspiring campaigners to push for cleaner water. Despite the concern that people show for England’s rivers, however, it is remarkably difficult to stroll along their banks, let alone take a dip.
The Guardian’s recent reporting on the River Dart in Devon has shown that large stretches of its bank are privately owned, and many of these are difficult to access. The researcher Lewis Winks, who used Land Registry data to map the Dart’s ownership, found the 47-mile long river has no fewer than 108 separate owners. The Duchy of Cornwall owns 28 miles of riverbank; two aristocratic estates own a further 13; 11.6 miles are owned via offshore companies.
Wilks’s map gives a snapshot of a national problem. Only 4% of English rivers are open to the public. As the demand for swimming spots has surged, many paddlers and kayakers have been reprimanded for trespassing. Paths alongside rivers often meander far from their banks to avoid privately owned land; one can “walk” along the River Test in Hampshire, for example, yet much of its bank is inaccessible. In 2020, visitors to one of its few access points found it blocked by a barbed wire gate.
The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs told the Guardian that England is a “nation of nature lovers”. But the nation’s feudal patterns of land ownership put much of nature off limits. Forming a deeper connection with the environment can inspire people to care for it. Campaigns for bathing water status, which compel the Environment Agency to improve water quality in rivers designated for swimming, are testimony to this. They are driven by people who directly experience these landscapes, and so want to protect them.
Labour pledged to improve access to nature and protect wildlife in its 2024 manifesto, but its ministers have since diluted both promises. The government’s new planning bill will weaken environmental protections by allowing developers to offset their destruction of natural habitats, rather than avoiding such destruction to begin with. In opposition, Labour vowed to introduce a right to roam. In government, it U-turned on this promise, bending to pressure from landowner groups.
Its plan to create nine new “river walks” is a paltry compensation. The government has given no detail on where these walks will be located or how it will create them, and its plan will probably be thwarted by the same “permissive” model of access that campaigners object to, where rights of way depend on the goodwill of individual landowners. To create a walk along the length of the Dart, each of its 108 landowners would have to voluntarily allow the public to use their land. The Dart is small: longer rivers will pose even greater challenges.
Landowners have long attempted to shield their estates from public view. “Concealing wealth,” writes the land campaigner Guy Shrubsole, “is part and parcel of preserving it.” A plan by the housing minister Matthew Pennycook to open up the Land Registry will make it easier to see who owns England’s riverbanks. But this doesn’t go far enough, since there is no guarantee that landowners will allow the public to enjoy these landscapes. This, surely, has to change.
