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These Things Keep Catching Me Off Guard- reflections of an academic researching water justice movements

Writer's picture: Grace Wright-AroraGrace Wright-Arora

Updated: May 25, 2024

When academic Grace Wright-Arora followed the Rave On For The Avon movement for her research and found herself not only in the film but part of the cause.

Grace (right) pictured at a campaign event in a still from Rave On For The Avon

Grace Wright-Arora is a PhD student at Oxford in Geography and the Environment. She writes in this blog about her time researching water justice movements in Bristol for her MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance.


'I realised how serious the river pollution in Bristol is when I moved here in June 2023, with the intention of writing my Environmental Governance master’s thesis on swimmable water access in the city. I did my undergraduate at Bristol, and living here during the pandemic, had developed a deep love for the Avon. It provided me with a desperately needed sense of freedom and connection to nature while I was stuck in a seven-person student house writing my dissertation alone in my bedroom.


Conham River Park received the third most sewage spills in the UK in 2023.

When I started speaking to potential interviewees last summer, however, everyone told me not to even think about getting in the river, because they kept getting sick after swimming. Literally every person I spoke to had either been ill, or knew someone who had been, following a dip in the Avon. Worrying about illness was something that had crossed my mind when I was living in Bristol before, but I had often put my head underwater, as had many friends of mine, and none of us had ever got ill. The story is starkly different now.


A still from the documentary Rave On For The Avon showing evidence of sewage spills; wet wipes pouring from a sewage pipe in Conham River Park
It quickly became apparent to me that the issues surrounding swimmable water access in Bristol are entwined with how polluted the river is. Once I started investigating further, I couldn’t look away.

I saw that not only is the river horribly unwell, but that many, different and beautiful forms of activism had emerged in the city in response to its pollution. I saw activists fighting for both the rights of the river to be clean and safe for its own inherent value, and for the rights of communities in Bristol to be able to swim for free in their local river without becoming violently sick afterwards.

I saw how the lack of access to safe, clean, swimmable water impacts low-income Bristolian residents the worst.

It is these people who cannot afford to swim in Clifton Lido (and how many people can, at £25 a pop!) or become members of the exclusive Henleaze Swimming Club with its years-long waiting list, and who, if the river’s health is compromised, lose out on any chance of swimming entirely.

A still from the documentary Rave On For The Avon of local swimmer Aggie finding joy in her local swimming spot

Observing the culture surrounding the Avon, I saw how treasured the experience of swimming is for so many Bristolians – 9-5ers swimming before work on a misty morning, children playing in the river on a hot Saturday, and people recovering from chronic illness or tragic loss who hold their ability to swim as an invaluable lifeline for healing. Multiple people told me that if they could no longer swim in the Avon, they would leave Bristol. They said they would rather take the risk of getting sick, or being caught swimming where they weren’t allowed to, than stop. The Avon is a beloved, and non-negotiable part of Bristol for many of its locals, and so people decided to rise up when they felt that their river was being insufficiently safeguarded by those in power in the city.

A still from the documentary Rave On For The Avon of Debbie and Amy who swim before work through the winter. 'The water takes the pain away' shares Debbie in the documentary.

My masters research tells the story of river pollution and river protection in Bristol. It examined the impacts of underfunded government bodies, privatised water companies, and inadequate regulation on communities who just want a safe river to live next to and swim in. It tells the story of activists, women mostly, who have so much love for the river that they are willing to work tirelessly, for free, on top of 9-5 jobs to raise awareness about river pollution and hold the government to account for failing to correctly regulate water companies. I argued that the harm that is being done to the Avon, and to many other rivers in the UK at the moment, should be considered an environmental justice issue. The fact that only 14% of rivers in England have merely “good” ecological status (not one is “excellent”) is not only shocking, it is an injustice to both English rivers themselves, and to locals who have so much to gain from being able to swim regularly and for free, and so much to lose when this is taken away from them.


A still from the documentary Rave On For The Avon showing local campaigning group Conham Bathing test the water

The activism that protects the river in Bristol has taken on many different shapes and sizes. Just like Rave on for the Avon documents, my research explored the citizen science of the Conham Bathers, the art-activism of Save our Avon where poet Meg Trump-Avon (nee. Trump) ceremoniously married the river, and the adventure activism of mermaid Lindsey Cole who swims Bristol’s waterways dragging an inflatable “poo”. To do this research, I (very happily) immersed myself in the culture of activism surrounding the Avon, going on pilgrimages with Meg and Emily (pictured left), helped out at the Save our Avon community day, and supported Linsey as she arrived at Clevedon after swimming the Bristol channel.


Everyone was incredibly open and helpful, happy to be interviewed and to discuss the issues surrounding the Avon. The biggest takeaway from this research, for me, was how all the different river activists in Bristol are trying to reshape how we see the river.

In their different forms, the groups were trying to encourage a perception of the river as a living, breathing thing with its own rights to be well and healthy, as well as citizens’ right to access these clean and safe rivers.
A still from the documentary Rave On For The Avon showing Meg communing with the river Avon following her wedding ceremony.

In her wedding speech, Meg encouraged us to think about rivers as their own entities, looking to rivers such as the Wanganui in New Zealand which has now been assigned legal personhood status. She quoted the inventor Buckminster Fuller,


"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.

To change something, make a new model

that makes the existing model obsolete."


Meg was one of three activists involved in river campaigning who cited that quote to me last summer. Between applications for Bathing Water Status, developments towards an ‘Avon Charter’ that sets out the rights of the Bristol Avon, and hosting art workshops to develop Bristolian locals’ care and attachment to the river, these activists are building the new models that might just help us to truly Save our Avon.


Grace will be sharing her research in more detail with Director of Rave On For The Avon Charlotte Sawyer and others at an evening of talks Exploring creative expressions of water justice hosted by Oxford University's School of Geography and the Environment on Tuesday 28th May.



For more information on the film please visit the film's website.

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