“I’m furious,” says Jo Armstrong, 75, sitting on Brighton beach with her daughter and granddaughter.
Armstrong lives in Lewes, a town 8 miles from Brighton, and usually goes swimming in nearby Seaford in East Sussex every day. But over the past week the water there has been too polluted to swim. “Brighton beach was the only place that stayed clean,” she says.
In the week Friends of the Earth ranked the UK’s water companies for their environmental damage, and news of further sewage leaks emerged, the Guardian headed to Brighton beach to talk to swimmers. According to public data, a sewage alert was issued twice at the beach in August, and 158 alerts recorded overall in 2025.
“There’s a tiny bit of rain and then the sewage comes, I just don’t understand it. It’s extraordinary that we can’t have clean beaches,” says Armstrong.
This summer England has endured record-breaking heatwaves during which scores of people have spent time on beaches and rivers. In Brighton, the state of the country’s water is an issue on many people’s minds.
Hildi Mitchell, 55, runs a programme called Pool to Pier, where she teaches pool swimmers to swim safely in open waters. Increasingly, she is finding that pollution is stopping people from taking the leap to the sea.
“There are swimmers who have swum with us in the pool all year round but won’t come out in the sea in the summer because they’re worried about becoming ill,” she says.
When it comes to the safety of the water, checking for sewage spills has become as important as checking the weather and tidal patterns. “I would love to be able to swim anywhere, rather than thinking about trying to avoid pollution,” Mitchell says.
Through Pool to Pier, Mitchell offers free workshops to children from families on low incomes. “These families already have limited things they can do in the summer to keep their children active, healthy and entertained. Swimming should be something that’s free and available to local families, but it’s not and that’s really sad.”
Greg Veros, 59, has lived in Brighton for 22 years and swum all his life, but after falling ill due to what he believes was sewage pollution a few years ago, he now spends more time at Brighton’s outdoor swimming pool than he does in the sea.
“I’m an enthusiastic swimmer, I can’t get enough of it,” Veros says. He used to have to skip his daily swim if there was a rainstorm or a sewage scare, but now the pool has given him an alternative. “It’s the best thing to have happened to Brighton,” he says.
But for Mitchell, there is nothing that can replace swimming in the sea.
“It’s about freedom. You’re not constrained by the black line on the pool. Nobody’s in your lane, you’re not worried about getting in anyone’s way. It’s a place where you can just swim in the way you want to swim,” Mitchell says.
Anna Field, 54, moved to Brighton so she could swim regularly, but, like Mitchell, she says checking for sewage spills is as important as checking the weather. There have been several times when she has come down to the beach and could smell the sewage, although this has been less common this summer amid the dry weather. When pollution stops her from swimming, it’s a bit like not being able to walk in the park because it’s raining, “except with this, you feel people [are] to blame”.
She is more angry than sad. “I absolutely love being in the ocean. It’s got its own personality, you look out of the window in the morning and it’s a different colour from yesterday or on some days it will tell you, no, you’re not coming in today,” Field says.
“Swimming is such a nice thing for people to be able to do and it’s public, anyone can go in – it would be a real shame if that was less accessible.”
A Southern Water spokesperson said: “The official bathing water in Brighton is classified as “good” or “excellent” by the Environment Agency. Brighton has a giant storm tunnel 30 metres below the seafront built by us in the mid-1990s and is capable of holding 150,000 tonnes of rainwater and there has not been a storm release close to Brighton for the last four years. Any storm overflows are passed down the coast to our state-of-the-art treatment works in Peacehaven.”
