Steven Fairhurst Jones 🇺🇦🇬🇧

Before & After… If anyone doubts the power of community action over the @EnvAgency’s spineless inertia, you can walk to the outskirts of Ilford & walk along an ancient lost river to see for yourself. With 10 days of intense effort by dedicated volunteers, the river River Roding Trust managed to clean up & restore 250 metres of the Aldersbrook (about 1/3 of the brook). This allows a direct comparison between the parts of the brook we restored & those we haven’t got round to yet. These photos & videos are all from May 2026. The first is on a part of the Aldersbrook still to be restored & shows the old flood defences which are no longer needed & are killing the river but which the EA won’t remove unless we volunteers pay them £50,000 just for surveys. These defences have caused 2-3ft of stinking sludge & silt to build up over 70 years, such that the water in the brook is just a few centimetres deep. Combine with huge amounts of rubbish & and out of control knotweed infestation & the river ecosystem is essentially dead. A river that is older than England destroyed by official indifference. A hundred metres away, and it’s a different story. The rubbish & the invasive species (I sprayed the knotweed myself last autumn) are gone. The silt that used to clog the river is now spread on the banks & rapidly providing fertile ground for native plants. Instead of sludge, there’s 2-3ft of water, so fish have returned to the brook for the first time in decades, along with dragon flies, herons & a nesting moorhen. We river guardians knew our intervention would make a difference, but have been shocked at quite how quickly nature has come back. The restored Aldersbrook is now a rare jewel: pretty much the last fully natural tidal brook in London. The EA now has a choice. It can salvage some good from this situation & work with us to restore the remaining sections of the brook, or it can continue to do nothing. If the latter, river guardians *will* be back this winter to finish the job & the EA can see how well prosecuting volunteers for restoring a river without permission goes for them.

“What’re you in for mate?” “Cleaning a river without a permit. What about you?” @EnvAgency is really plumbing new depths of malevolent uselessness here.