About us

Last updated: June 2, 2009.

For the last 10 years, the UK Rivers Network (UKRN) has been helping to protect rivers and inland waters across England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales by promoting community-centered, grassroots environmental projects and campaigns.

Photo: River Itchen watermeadows, Winchester, Hampshire.

Who... or what is the UK Rivers Network?

The UK Rivers Network is based on a simple idea: we try to bring people together to protect the river-environment across the UK and Ireland. The community of people working on river issues in the UK is very large and diverse so we decided, early on, not to be a membership organization: instead, we're a loose umbrella of a network—like a big tent where friends with similar ideas can meet up or a magazine read by like-minded people. We work informally; like a river, we're guided along a fairly well-defined course by our objectives, but we flow and change all the time so we (hopefully) never stagnate. Most of our efforts are currently focused around this website. If you follow the site or contribute to it and if you share our broad objectives, you're part of what we're doing and part of the network.

Our objectives

UKRN's objectives fall under four broad headings: campaigning, networking and community work, education, and (to a lesser extent) policy. We've been active in every one of these areas over the last 10 years.

Campaigning

• Defend, protect, and conserve UK rivers from various kinds of threats (e.g. major developments of various kinds, pollution, etc.).
• Adopt a variety of campaigning techniques from attending public inquiries to supporting peaceful protests.
• Help local groups by putting campaigners in touch with experts or others who have fought and won similar campaigns elsewhere.
  

Networking and community work

• Promote grassroots, community-centred projects for river restoration and regeneration. For example, helping local communities to "Adopt-a-river".
• Promote a "positive river culture": Help to shift the mindset of river activism from "defending against the negative" to "protecting the positive". For example, using rivers as the focus of environmental education activities in a local community, or using a river that has fought off a development threat (or been restored by a local community group) as an educational, recreational, or sustainable tourism resource.
• Get together with other groups and individuals to share experiences, expertise, and support, and cooperate on joint projects.
• Act as an informal information intechange for the UK rivers community.
  
• Act as a UK contact for international campaigns that concern the UK people or its government.

Education

• Maintain our popular website and continue to provide regularly updated UK river news.
• Extend our educational coverage to make connections between a range of environmental problems and solutions (for example, between cleaner rivers and organic farming).
• Help to communicate information of mutual interest between local community groups and the wider community.

Policy

• Help to communicate policy issues to the wider river community through our website.

Despite our name, the UK Rivers Network is not just interested in rivers. We get involved in all aspects of the freshwater environment, including canals, lakes, estuaries, and wetlands. We're interested in ecological protection, recreational uses of water (fishing, bathing, kayaking, and other watersports involving inland waterways), water quality issues, flood defence, impacts of climate change, implications of new national and European legislation/policy, river regeneration projects, developments that adversely affect rivers or groundwater, water pollution, and so on.

Our approach

Think positive!

"Campaigning against the negative" is only one part of saving the environment and only one part of what we want to achieve through the UKRN. An equally important part is promoting positive action for river protection, restoration, and regeneration, particularly through community initiatives.

In the United States, there is a notable culture of community involvement in river protection. Throughout the country, community groups, councils, and voluntary bodies work together on river improvement projects. One of the UKRN's major objectives will be to try to promote similar schemes in the UK—to get ordinary people involved in protecting rivers as a community resource rather than leaving that responsibility to government agencies, local councils, or other "official" bodies.

Adopt-a-river

Some parts of the US operate "adopt-a-river" and "adopt-a-stream" campaigns —some adopt whole river basins—and we'd like to work with local communities to set up similar initiatives here in the UK. We would like to be in the position where we can stop inappropriate river developments and long-term deterioration of rivers not through hastily organized campaigns or protests, but because of a well-established, positive culture of community river protection in the UK. You can find out how US groups operate community river protection and regeneration projects by looking at the ODP page "Rivers and Streams", which we helped to compile a few years ago. And if you have any ideas or you'd like to adopt your own river or stream, take a look at our guide Adopting a river: How to get out, get dirty, and make a difference!

With all due respect

We know many groups and individuals have been working on river protection, conservation, and restoration in the UK for many years and we are very keen to learn from and share that wealth of experience. We're not interested in empire-building or reinventing wheels. Our mission is simply to help improve UK and Irish rivers by sharing best practices from community groups and river alliances around the world. We believe ordinary people and local communities must ultimately be at the center of any successful effort to protect the environment, so we encourage people to take positive action by joining local groups and campaigns and taking part in festivals and other events.

Our history

Photo: Teigngrace river campaign, Devon, 1997.

The UK Rivers Network originally grew out of a successful 1997 campaign and 1998 public inquiry to prevent the diversion of the rivers Teign and Bovey to make way for an expanded clay quarry in the village of Teigngrace, Devon.

One of the things we noticed during that campaign was the difficulty in building a strong alliance of campaign groups to prevent damage to threatened rivers: lots of groups will rally around a threatened SSSI, AONB, rare species, or archaeological site, but no-one really looks out for rivers in quite the same way. People simply assume rivers can look after themselves. We'd found similar problems working on the Newbury bypass campaign, where two internationally important rivers were largely forgotten in the battle to defend other, no less important parts of the environment.

After campaigners won a public inquiry at Teigngrace in 1998, the idea of setting up a wider rivers network was suggested to us by Phil Williams, founder and former President of the International Rivers Network (IRN) and we remain very grateful to Phil for his support and encouragement over the last few years. UKRN was finally born in summer 1999 (our website followed soon after) and formally constituted in spring 2001. We held our first national conference in Salisbury in September 2001.

After working intensively on a number of campaigns between 2001 and 2004, we ran out of money and temporarily ceased our operations during 2005. We returned in 2006, with a new injection of funding and enthusiasm.

In 2009, we've begun the process of decentralizing the network and turning it over to anyone who wants to contribute by making our website into a "wiki". Our current focus is to improve the way the website works as a loose information interchange for the UK rivers community

Past campaigns

We've been involved, to a greater or lesser extent, in a number of high-profile river campaigns in the last few years. Here's a small selection:

• No New Nukes: Our mini-site opposing the construction of new nuclear power stations in Britain.
• Save Stonehenge!: Protecting the priceless Stonehenge landscape, including the Rivers Avon and Till, from a new highway and related developments.
• Teigngrace: Proposed diversion of rivers Teign and Bovey for a clay quarry in Devon.
• Newbury bypass: Road construction over Kennet and Lambourn river valleys.
• Salisbury bypass: Proposed road construction over River Avon watermeadows.
• Hastings bypass: Proposed river valley crossing opposed by the Hastings Alliance.
• Birmingham Northern Relief Road (BNRR).
• West Wellow: Proposed wetland landfill site near Romsey.
• Trigon: Proposed quarry landfill site Wareham.
• Dibden Bay: Proposed international container port at Southampton.
• Greenfield housing in Hampshire and nationally.

Photo: Rivers just the way we like them: the River Test, Mottisfont, Hampshire.

Copyright etc.

Any words or images created for this website are published under a Creative Commons License and you're very welcome to reuse them elsewhere under the terms of the licence. Please note that this applies only to material created by the UK Rivers Network.

Contact us

We try to work as a completely decentralized network so we have no single point of contact. We're sorry, but that means we no longer answer direct enquiries by email and phone. Instead, please use the editable (wiki) pages on our website to tell anyone and everyone about your river group, event, or campaign. If you have media enquiries about rivers, please direct them to one of the many groups on our list.

If you need to report a pollution emergency, please click here for contact details.

Website privacy policy

Please see our privacy policy page.