Thames Water, The New River Path and us (ie the path’s users)

Although the New River is more than 400 years old and was once immensely profitable (see The Mercenary River by Nick Higham, published 2022 by Headline), its present owners, Thames Water plc, are much in the news for reasons of high finance.  This must be unsettling for TW’s many employees who carry on its business but who have nothing at all to do with its financial difficulties and who have, arguably, suffered from the abusive practices by some of TW’s controlling shareholders.

My garden runs alongside land belonging to the New River (and thus to TW) so for the past 44 years we have been neighbours and I have been on nodding terms with a long line of TW people working along the River.  I greatly appreciate their work which is not always pleasant.  In the 1990s I was in favour of opening the Wightman Road to Hampden Road stretch of the river bank for public access which is when the green high-security fencing was installed.  As most of the path’s users will be aware, there have been some downsides. For instance, some users leave bottles and drinks cans lying about, other malefactors are attracted by the surfaces available for spray painting, others use the path for fly tipping, last year some down-and-outs started to establish sleeping quarters under our windows.  In earlier years, schoolboys were to be seen skulking harmlessly behind TW’s huts (now gone) having a fag.  More recently, teenagers sometimes gather with inflated balloons while making a hullabaloo (laughing gas I suppose).

Periodically, TW’s contractors appear with mowers and strimmers and cut the grass on the riverbanks including along the path.  I know that the contractors are told not to cut any Japanese knotweed that they find but I don’t know what instructions they have for picking up extraneous stuff they encounter or for taking away any clippings that can’t sensibly be left to degrade naturally.  Obviously, if you run a heavy mower over discarded beer cans, they are likely to be shredded.  After the contractor’s recent visit, an accumulation of stuff was left near the Wightman Road gate (see pictures below).  I am writing this now because this very morning, one of TW’s finest appeared and removed all of the rubbish shown.  I don’t know whether this is normally his duty on a Sunday, nor whether he resented this task, nor whether it was a result of the initiative by Cowper and his team of volunteers.  What I do know is that some TW people are still doing a good job for us and that I, for one appreciate it.  It is also clear that some of the rubbish he took away was left by people using the path and it is good to know that some residents are willing to clear up the mess left by less responsible users of the path.