Paul Powlesland loves the River Roding so much that he lives on it, aboard a narrowboat in East London. He is also an environmental lawyer, and for years he watched a tributary called Alders Brook choke under sewage, silt, and dumped garbage.

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 Paul Powlesland loves the River Roding so much that he lives on it, aboard a narrowboat in East London. He is also an environmental lawyer, and for years he watched a tributary called Alders Brook choke under sewage, silt, and dumped garbage.



He says he asked the Environment Agency again and again to clean it up. Nothing happened.


So this past winter, he stopped waiting. Powlesland gathered volunteers from his River Roding Trust, hired a digger, and spent ten days clearing the brook by hand. They hauled out roughly 200 bags of rubbish, including needles, household appliances, and even weapons.


It worked. Within weeks, he says, the water was flowing freely again and the wildlife came back. Fish returned to stretches where they had not been seen in years, along with herons, dragonflies, irises, and reed beds.


Then the letter arrived.


Within a week of the cleanup finishing, the Environment Agency, the same body he says had ignored him for years, opened an investigation. Not against the utility accused of pumping sewage into the river, and not against the people who dumped the trash, but against Powlesland and his volunteer charity. The charge: doing unpermitted work in a floodplain. The maximum penalty is two years in prison.


The agency says permits exist for good reason, to make sure well-meaning work does not accidentally worsen flooding or harm the wider environment.


Powlesland sees it differently. After decades of ignoring the real polluters, he said, the authorities finally sprang into action, against the one group trying to bring the river back to life.

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