The Wandle Trust: restoring London's 'hidden gem' river

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Forty-five metal pipes and poles, 22 tyres, 15 shopping trolleys, 12 bicycles, nine carpets, five traffic cones, three suitcases, two mattresses, two vacuum cleaners, two safes, one car door, one washing machine... This is just a selection of the rubbish pulled from a 50-yard stretch of South London's Wandle river in November by 65 hardy volunteers, all organised by the river's self-appointed guardians, the Wandle Trust.

Forty-five metal pipes and poles, 22 tyres, 15 shopping trolleys, 12 bicycles, nine carpets, five traffic cones, three suitcases, two mattresses, two vacuum cleaners, two safes, one car door, one washing machine... This is just a selection of the rubbish pulled from a 50-yard stretch of South London's Wandle river in November by 65 hardy volunteers, all organised by the river's self-appointed guardians, the Wandle Trust.

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A registered charity and one of 38 rivers trusts across Wales and England, it began life in the 1990s as a community group interested in maintaining the river, adopting its current name in 2006.

Only 12 miles long, the Wandle was one of the hardest-worked rivers in the world during London’s industrial heyday: its fast-flowing waters powered as many as 90 mills at one point, from snuff mills and tanneries to the print works of William Morris and Liberty's.

'Over the years it was treated as a waste dump, somewhere rubbish would flow away, out of sight out of mind,' says Dr Bella Davies, the trust's development officer. 'Rubbish, effluent, industrial waste... It's no wonder that in the 1960s it was declared an open sewer, like many of London's rivers at that time, including the Thames. It was pretty much biologically dead – we were lucky that it was wasn't put underground like so many others to reduce the incidence of disease.'

Things began to change in the 1970s with new pollution legislation, and from the 1990s communities began to realise that they too could play a part. By that stage the Wandle was still full of rubbish and fairly polluted, though recovering from the extremely poor state it had been in.

Guardians of the river, the Wandle Trust harnesses community spirit, mobilising an army of volunteers to collect rubbish, improve biodiversity and perform myriad other river-related tasks. Regular mass clean-ups takes place throughout the year, on the second Sunday of every month, rotated between the four boroughs through which the river flows: Sutton, Croydon, Merton and Wandsworth.

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