Ellie Platt

The River Wandle in South London is the perfect muse for an environmentally-minded textile artist. A rare chalk stream habitat, once a site of textile production, now restored by a grassroots campaign to a blue and green corridor running through four London boroughs.

 

During the 18th century, the Wandle was described as the hardest-working river of its size, with more than 90 mills processing everything from flour to vellum, snuff to gunpowder. Textile production was a key element of the river’s economy for hundreds of years - the fast-flowing, clear water of this rare chalk stream habitat was not only perfect for turning mill wheels (imported dyes like logwood and brazilwood were milled on the Wandle as early as the 16th century) but also for calico bleaching. “Bleaching grounds” occupied the banks of the river, with Wandle water used to wash the cloth clean after a mixture of wood ash and quicklime had been applied to bleach the fibres. Huguenot weavers brought their skills to South London in the 18th Century, and set up calico printing works. Famous names in textile production soon followed, including William Morris and Libertys, and the textile industry of the Wandle presented a fascinating microcosm of some of the problems still present in global textile production today. 

 

Complaints made by textile factories downriver in the mid 19th century cite dyestuffs and heavy metals used by factories upriver as pollutants in the river water they wanted to use for their printing and dyeing. William Morris rejected the new aniline dyes that had become all the rage in the 1850s in favour of using traditional natural dyes, in keeping with his ethos and aesthetics. He even created a “Wandle” pattern, “to honour our helpful stream”. 

 

The Wandle’s mills were replaced by other heavy industry in the 20th century, with factories using the river as a convenient drain. As the area became more urbanised the river was culverted into a concrete channel, and by the 1960s it was declared a “dead” river as it had become so polluted. In the 1970s, a grassroots campaign began to save the Wandle, involving stakeholders from the entire river catchment. Borough councils, local businesses and Thames Water, then a publicly owned company, worked to ensure that the river could be kept free of pollutants, and the Wandle Trail was created along the banks of the river, linking green spaces from Croydon and Carshalton to Wandsworth and providing access to the river for anyone who wanted to enjoy it. 

 

 This nature corridor became a lifeline during the pandemic in 2020, with local people running, walking or cycling the trail and sitting in parks as life moved outside. This is also the time I developed my own Wandle-specific art practice, collecting lost clothes and textile waste to create my “Wandle Wardrobe” quilts, a comment on our accidental interactions with the natural world and our relationship with our clothes. My focus on textile pollution through overconsumption soon expanded to include other forms of pollution that affected the Wandle and its ecosystem. On a river clean-up with South East Rivers Trust, I pulled what I believed to be ropes of textile waste from the river. I was horrified to learn that this was in fact a rope of wet wipes, discharged by Thames Water into the Wandle and shaped by the river’s flow into streamers, a mockery of the trailing ranunculus or water crowfoot that characterises a healthy chalk stream. 

 

I couldn’t shake this imagery from my mind and it became the inspiration behind “Wandle Vs The Wet Wipes”, a work of wearable art made from upcycled plastics; the spirit of the Wandle conjured to life mid- battle with sewage pollution. Unfortunately, in the years following the Wandle’s reincarnation as an ecological success story, Thames Water, now privatised and profit-driven, has been dumping increasing amounts of untreated sewage into the Wandle from their Beddington treatment works. Initially allowed by the government as an emergency measure during extreme weather events to prevent sewage flowing back into homes, this loophole has been exploited and in 2023 Thames Water discharged untreated sewage into the Wandle 326 times. 

 

As an artist, I feel it’s my calling to convey the unpleasant facts of our current systems (systems that exploit people and planet for profit and leave us with an increasingly polluted world), in a way that engages people, especially if they’re not familiar with the issues. A mix of beauty and humour breaks down defensive barriers and allows space for curious conversations. My latest “pollution portraits” project creates surprising visuals to highlight citizen science undertaken by Earthwatch Europe. Taking part and doing my own nitrate and phosphate tests on a clean-looking section of the Wandle opened my eyes to the invisible pollutants our rivers also have to contend with. Embroidered pictures of the river with the indicator colour of a nitrate test prompt learning and discussion. 

 

The River Wandle has given me so much; I want to repay the gifts it has given me by not only celebrating its rarity, history and beauty but also by bringing attention to its problems and demanding better for this extraordinary entity.