As dawn broke over Windermere on Tuesday, Pete Kelly set off in his kayak from the north shore of England’s biggest natural lake, armed with three test tubes. The water did not look tremendously inviting, a film of luminous green algae lapping up on the shingle beach at Waterhead. You should have seen it last week before the rains came, he said: “All of the water up this end was really dense and green.”
All summer Kelly has been paddling around Windermere collecting water samples for the sort of bacteria that upset swimmers’ stomachs – officially for a Dutch academic project, but also as the owner of Swim The Lakes, an adventure swimming company.
On Wednesday he was supposed to be leading 15 swimmers on the Millerground Mile, a guided swim from Windermere’s western shore. But after multiple positive bacteria tests this summer, plus confirmed cases of poisonous blue-green algae at 10 different spots around the lake in the past month alone, he has switched the swim to nearby Rydal Water.
Fearful that bad publicity will deter visitors, some tourism businesses around Windermere play down the grim state of the lake, dismissing claims of the lake’s death as “scaremongering”. Tell them the Italians would never allow Lake Como to be so abused and they will wave you away with an eyeroll.
“We have blue-green algae every summer,” sighed Caroline Smith, community and health manager at a paddle-boarding hire operation at Millerground. “Yes, some of the blooms this year have been very big but we have had exceptionally hot, dry weather which always makes it worse. When it rains they dissipate … I think a lot of this is scaremongering on social media.”
She said she’d never heard of a human dying from ingesting blue-green algae, caused by high phosphate levels in the water: “And anyway, our customers largely stay on top of the water.”
The same is not true of Kelly’s clients. He has little time for the local water company, United Utilities, which insists its “pollution performance” is “industry leading”. It says it has reduced overall pollution by a third in the last few years, with the effluent (treated wastewater) better quality than ever after a £40m investment to reduce phosphate levels.
But the firm – which made a profit of £610m last year – is still allowed to pump thousands of litres of untreated sewage into Windermere every time it rains and its storage tanks become overwhelmed. This is not rare in the Lake District: in 2021 the storm overflows at the Ambleside treatment plant were open for 1,044 hours, for a total of 62 “spills”.
“It stinks, literally,” said Kelly. “You can smell it going into the lake when it rains … The businessman in me thinks ‘this is really bad for business’. But the outdoorsman in me thinks ‘this is outrageous, something has got to be done’.”
Visitors braving the vaguely green waters of Millerground on Tuesday agreed. Paddleboarding with his toddler, Bertie, Jack McAuley-Howard blamed the government. “The Tories have got to take a lot of blame for this,” he said. “They are letting the water companies get away with it. I don’t see any benefits to allowing raw sewage into Windermere apart from someone getting rich.”
As well as upgrading its wastewater treatment works at Windermere and Ambleside, United Utilities has also built a new 6.5km sewer running up from Bowness. It’s a good start, said Kelly, but not enough. “It’s like pulling a splinter out of someone’s foot when their other leg has been chopped off. All I’m asking for is: please don’t let me swim around in shit! Is that an unreasonable request?”
The conservationist sounding Windermere’s death knell loudest is a young zoology graduate called Matt Staniek. He became obsessed with local water quality after breaking his neck in a car accident and taking up wildlife photography as he recovered. He is behind a petition signed by more than 137,000 people demanding the lake be saved from “sewage and an environmental catastrophe”.
This week he announced he had sent a sample of a recent blue-green algae bloom for testing. It exceeded World Health Organization guidelines for a plankton called anabaena, which he said could produce toxins as dangerous as cobra venom on a weight-for-weight basis.
Though he sees United Utilities as the main villain of Windermere, he also points the finger at the estimated 1,900 septic tanks in the catchment. Many are old and leaky; others cannot cope when old homes have been sub-divided into holiday lets with multiple toilets. No one monitors or regulates septic tanks and Staniek wants the Environment Agency (EA) to be given funding to do the job.
The Guardian asked the EA if it would like that responsibility, and a spokesperson replied with a statement: “Windermere is a national asset and is definitely not dying. Over the past decade the Environment Agency has invested over £700,000 in projects to improve water quality, improve ecology and better understand the Windermere catchment.”
Since July, the EA has led a project alongside United Utilities called Love Windermere, “a long-term commitment that works to develop a science-based plan to set out a road map for environmental protection that can be replicated across the UK”.
Staniek calls it “greenwashing”. Hugh Cavendish, a Conservative peer and chair of the South Cumbria Rivers Trust, said he remains “pretty cynical” about the partnership, which includes the Lake District national park authority, National Farmers’ Union, National Trust and South Cumbria Rivers Trust.
“I saw their first press release in which they said they would first find out what the problem was. Well, we’ve known the problem for 30 years,” said Cavendish.
He owns the 6,880-hectare (17,000-acre) Holker Estate in South Lakeland, which includes the River Leven, which drains Windermere from its southernmost point. The estate sells angling licences for the Leven and the quality and quantity of fish have plummeted in recent years, he said. “To give you an idea, a very short time ago, people in the lower Leven were declaring a catch of about 400 sea trout a year. Now it’s two.”
He said the Environment Agency didn’t want to know, effectively telling anglers who complained that “the river had moved from moderate to good and you’re just a bad fisherman”. The agency had been “defunded” by the government, he said, with the result that “it is hopeless, just simply isn’t doing its job”. He added: “It’s not on. It’s a lack of accountability and it’s absolutely scandalous that our waterways should deteriorate like this.”
Back on dry land at Waterhead, Kelly tested his three water samples for bacteria to see if he was right to switch the venue for Wednesday’s swim. All came back negative. He shrugged. Windermere’s plight is fluid.
What is Windermere’s problem?
Nutrient enrichment, or eutrophication, has been Windermere’s main problem over the past two centuries, according to the Freshwater Biological Association (FBA), which has monitored the lake for decades.
Eutrophication causes an increase in algal blooms in open water and around the lake shore, and deoxygenation at depth. “They are becoming more prevalent because climate change is creating the warm, stable weather conditions that the algae likes,” said Louise Lavictoire, FBA head of science.
She said sewage treatment processes have genuinely improved in recent years. “A lot has been done on Windermere to help with the nutrient enrichment. Water treatments are stripping phosphates out of the sewage before it goes back into Windermere as effluent.”
As a result, there is now less phosphate in the lake than there has been since the early 1990s, she said. But as the lake responds to more recent pressures, including the climate crisis and the expansion of non-native species, further action to improve the ecological health of Windermere will require nutrient inputs from agriculture, septic tanks and wastewater treatment works to be identified and reduced.
