A jewel in the crown

Just a generation ago the Stour was in a sad state. Heavy pollution had taken its toll and turned it into a virtually lifeless river. Yet partnership working and a multimillion pound investment programme, has transformed the fate of this West Midlands river. Today it is at the heart of a revitalised town centre in Kidderminster and, against all odds, wildlife is beginning to thrive again.

Just occasionally miracles do happen. For Tony Willetts it was the day he first saw salmon in his local river. For years the Stour was famous not for its wildlife but for its rainbow-coloured water – indigo, ruby red, amber, emerald – every rainbow shade. It regularly changed colour depending on what dyes were in fashion at the Kidderminster carpet factories that flushed their waste into the river. But it was not just the dyes that took their toll on the river - the pesticides used for moth-proofing carpets also wiped out many of the waterborne bugs that fish depend on for food.

When you take out the bottom layer of a food chain it has a profound impact.

“I grew up on the banks of the Stour and it had always been polluted - first from the steel and ironworks upstream in the Black Country and then in the ‘60s and ‘70s from the carpet factories. I am now 69 and started fishing when I was seven, but as a child and teenager I never fished on the Stour as there was very little that was alive in it,” says Willetts.

By the late 1990s the river had started to recover from decades of pollution and at last Willetts was able to take up fishing on his local river. “It was the summer of 2000 and I was fishing near Kidderminster when I first saw salmon – it was really unbelievable, overwhelming. I had lived and worked on this river for much of my life and I never, ever thought I would see the day that salmon would breed here,” he says.

Salmon may be the king of fish but is also a canary of the water world. They are one of the first species to disappear when water quality deteriorates. As an Environment Agency fisheries officer, Willetts was well aware of the significance of his sighting.

“I remember ringing the office and telling them I had seen salmon on the Stour and they thought I must have made a mistake. They didn’t think it was possible for salmon to survive in the river. But I knew what I had seen and a few months later the agency was doing a survey and they found not just one salmon but several in the Stour. It was amazing to think that the adult salmon had travelled all the way up from the Atlantic, through the Severn, to the waters of the Stour. It was a real indicator of just how much the water quality had improved.”

He adds, “I felt so proud that my work had contributed to salmon returning here.”

The fisheries officer is now retired from the Environment Agency, but still has a passion for a river that has become a backdrop to his life. He lives only metres from the banks of the Stour - a similar location to where his grandparents had once lived. Yet today the river is full of life.

John Brooks is an angler who has also seen the changes at first hand: “The Stour used to be so dirty that people would say that not even the rats would live in it,” he says. “When I was growing up there was very little in the river, even the banks were bare. But if you give nature a bit of help it will try to come back. The Stour is now full of fish – roach, dace, perch, chub, gudgeon, you name it.”

The helping hand came in the form of tighter environmental regulations - first from the UK and then Europe. It gave regulators the tools they needed to be tough on polluters. At the same time, companies started to embrace new clean technologies that reduced their environmental impacts. It was also inevitable that a river that has played such a key role in the industrial revolution, would start to recover as heavy industry declined in the area.

Yet it was not just industry that had caused the pollution of the Stour as Chris Tidridge of the Environment Agency explains. “With industrialisation came urbanisation and a large sewer system to cope with the growing population. By the late twentieth century it was old and out-of-date. For example, if it rained heavily there were lots of sewers that would overflow directly into the Stour. This caused ammonia levels to rise, which are toxic to fish.”

From the 1990s onwards, the Environment Agency worked closely with Severn Trent Water on its ambitious programme of modernising sewage treatment works and the sewer system in the Stour catchment. “The first step was to produce an urban pollution model for the whole of the Stour catchment area, so we could see just what needed to be upgraded or replaced,” says Tidridge. “Over a period of ten years the Environment Agency oversaw a massive multimillion pound investment programme by the water company that was paid for by their customers.”

He adds, “It was a lot of money but the watercourse has been transformed bringing many benefits to the environment and people living in the area.”

One area that has directly benefited from a cleaned up river is the centre of Kidderminster. Although the river Stour runs directly through the town, up until the millennium most residents would have been unaware of this natural resource. Andy Graham, who works for the Worcestershire Wildlife Trust, remembers just how grim the Stour used to be. “It was mainly hidden from view behind factory walls, as well as running through several channels under Kidderminster. Even where the river was open it was lined with steel sheets and there were no embankments, grassy or marshy areas and as a result very little wildlife - not even butterflies. Rubbish also used to get dumped because it was seen as an area that no one loved.”

The catalyst for change was the decline of the once world-famous carpet industry. It left behind large tracts of land in the centre of Kidderminster which were ripe for development. In the late 1990s Wyre Forest District Council approached the Environment Agency to discuss how the Stour could play a central role in the town centre regeneration scheme.

“It was a great opportunity to be involved in the early stages of such a scheme that had the environment at the heart of it. It meant that we could influence some of the key elements of the design to help turn the river into a valuable resource for the town,” says Stuart Gamble who was working as a pollution officer on the Stour at the time. He adds, “As well as establishing new wildlife habitats, it also meant that local flooding in Kidderminster was improved as part of our wider flood defence work for the Stour catchment.”

The Environment Agency and the council produced a specification for developers on how the river should feature in the regeneration scheme. The eventual development that was chosen was based round a new Tesco supermarket. “The development involved filling in part of the original river and creating a stretch of new water, which is a pretty extraordinary thing to do,” says Graham, an advisor on the scheme.

“But in fact we now have a much better river channel. We have a river that has the variety of depths, widths and flows that you would expect in a natural river. Big rocks were even put in so people could hear the noise of water. The result is lots of different types of habitats from shallow banks to gravel and marshy areas which is all good for biodiversity,” he adds.

Creating a new river course was not the only big challenge that Kidderminster presented. Much of the redevelopment land was also contaminated as a result of past industrial usage. “The challenge for us, the council and developers was to carry out the construction and earthworks without disturbing and potentially contaminating the surrounding environment,” says Gamble. “We also needed to ensure that the land was suitable for future development and did not present a health hazard.”

Since the initial redevelopment six years ago, the river has continued to feature in new regeneration schemes. In 2008 Morrisons opened a flagship supermarket on the banks of the Stour with strong green credentials from energy saving to a rain water harvesting system. Its new site is home to a wide variety of wildlife and the Environment Agency, along with a number of other organisations, advised the company on how best to develop these sensitive areas.

Wildlife initiatives included burrows and nesting boxes along the Stour to protect animals from predators and high water levels. Native shrubs and plants have also been reintroduced to the area to support the insects that birds and bats feed on.

Ken Harrison works as the regeneration manager for the local council and has seen the many benefits a rejuvenated river has brought to the town.

“Today the river is an asset – in the past it was rather hidden and forgotten. You used to see little snippets but you would never have known that the town was built on a river.” Harrison says and adds, “Changes to the water quality has been crucial to this transformation. The river is now part of people’s lives – they can pop out in their lunch break and sit by the river and that would never have happened if it was still dirty.”

As wildlife has returned to the Stour after a long absence, one rare animal has also made a comeback. “As water quality and habitats have improved, otters are now back on the Stour and we even see evidence of them in the middle of Kidderminster. Green spaces in towns are really important as they encourage biodiversity - from the smallest invertebrate to the highest predators like otters,” says Andy Graham from Worcestershire Wildlife Trust.

As someone who has spent so much of his time walking the banks of the Stour, it is perhaps not surprising that it was again Tony Willetts who was one of the first people to spot an otter six years ago. “I was near Kidderminster and I could see these bubbles coming from the water. I didn’t know what it was at first then slowly I realised it was an otter. I stood there for at least five minutestaking it all in – I just couldn’t believe it was possible. I had seen salmon and now an otter on the Stour. It was a very emotional experience and I consider myself to be very lucky.”