If you were to pick up a postcard showing a typical British August bank holiday scene it would probably feature a beach crowded with candy-striped windbreakers, an ice-cream van and dozens of people splashing in the sea.
What it wouldn’t depict is raw sewage spewing forth from a giant pipe into the water. It might not show murky clouds of waste mingling with clear blue ocean. There would be no tourists being violently sick after paddleboarding. That, though, is the alarming prospect facing holiday-makers this long weekend, with areas of the coastline designated as having “bathing water status” now polluted by sewage in the scandal of the summer (one of them, anyway).
