We've been awarded £13,500 to monitor water quality

2026-09-17

Every year the estuary takes a battering from storm-overflow discharges, agricultural run-off and road drainage, and most of it goes unrecorded. Official testing covers only a handful of designated bathing spots for a few months of the year, which leaves the creeks, cockle beds and mudflats that people and wildlife actually rely on almost entirely unmonitored. Without that evidence it's very hard for anyone — residents, swimmers, fishers or the regulators themselves — to say what's really going into our water or to hold anyone to account for it.

That's the gap this grant helps us close. Thanks to £13,500 from the Thames Environment Fund we'll be running a year-long pilot sampling water quality at key sites along the Southend coast line, testing regularly through the year and again in the hours after storm-overflow discharges. We'll be training up local volunteers to take the samples, and publishing everything we find openly on this site so the community can see the state of its own coastline. If you'd like to be one of the volunteers, get in touch — we'd love to hear from you.