The Beverley Brook’s water originates from treated sewage from the Hogsmill Sewage Treatment Works. As water flows along the urban areas of Sutton and Merton it collects hydrocarbons, heavy metals and other pollutants from roads, as well as foul sewage from misconnected domestic sewers.

Further pollutants are collected from Wandsworth and Richmond, alongside sediment from our river banks. According to the Environment Agency’s Catchment Data Explorer, this water has a moderate ecological status and fails on chemical status which means that the Beverley Brook contains unacceptable levels of Priority Hazardous Substances, like ‘forever chemicals’ and other Priority Substances like cypermethrin, a neurotoxic insecticide.

This is where Community BlueScapes comes in. Our sustainable interventions can improve water quality for residents and communities. Likewise, we hope that our ongoing commitment to community engagement and cocreating water solutions with you will empower residents to improve water quality on their own.

We are launching a multi-year monitoring programme to investigate a number of indicator parameters in the brook’s water to give us a clearer understanding of what is going on, what the problems are and where they occur, working alongside our partners in the Beverley Brook Catchment Partnership. Making significant improvements will take time and we cannot do this alone – we need your help.

This week we have been collecting baseline data that we can use to measure future water quality levels. Once we have collected and finalised our data, we will need citizen scientists – members of the public – to continue this work and help collect water quality data for us. We aim to run surveys over several sites four times per year, in order to visualise seasonal variation and annual changes in water quality.

Watch this space, as we will be communicating more about this programme in Summer 2024. If you are interested in becoming a citizen scientist and improving water quality in your area, contact Tarun at [email protected] to find out more.