London's other sewage scandal

Today, as on most days, someone on an upmarket road in Crouch End will send untreated raw sewage out of their building and directly into the capital’s river system — and they might not even realise they’re doing it.

It’s just one of the thousands of properties across London that have their sewers plumbed directly into London’s ancient network of local streams and rivers. Experts say there could be tens of thousands more cases across the capital, collectively dispatching “Middle Ages levels of sewage” into the Thames.

For once, Thames Water aren’t the biggest villains in this lesser-known story of river pollution. Instead, it’s a potentially more troubling and hard-to-fix scandal that has largely gone under the radar. It’s caused by an ever-growing number of dodgy builders and DIY plumbers — and it’s a problem that threatens Sadiq Khan’s promise to clean up London’s rivers.

London Centric is telling one of the most overlooked pollution scandals in the country by chasing the output of a single illegal pipe on its journey across the capital, pieced together through dozens of environmental information requests.

For the first time we’re also publishing figures showing how many similar cases are in each London borough — enabling you to see if your neighbours are contributing to the mess.

Words: Rachel Rees, Photography: Jennifer Forward-Hayter, Illustrations: Carly A-F, all commissioned by London Centric.

1. The scene of the crime: Park Road, Crouch End

Park Road is an upmarket street in Crouch End, in the shadow of Alexandra Palace, North London’s Victorian ‘palace of the people’. It is home to organic shops, wine bars, extensive playing fields, houses that sell for more than a million pounds — and a property that is a small part in one of the capital’s biggest sewage scandals.

Mass sewage discharges by the embattled Thames Water tend to hit the headlines. They take place when rainstorms overwhelm treatment plants, forcing the company to discharge untreated sewage directly into London’s rivers. The issue has become politically and environmentally toxic, symptomatic of how a privatised water industry has failed to invest in its infrastructure. Thames Water, with its rapidly-increasing bills and financial insecurity, also serves as an easy-to-hate target.