How the Broads Turned Green

My father (Ted Ellis) was a Naturalist and I was brought up on a nature reserve in Norfolk. We had no running water or electricity and so I lived a childhood more reminiscent of the 19th then the 20th century, and that included sailing, punting and swimming in the local waterways.

I think the serious pollution from Whitlingham sewage works really took hold when I was about 6 or 7 years old (late 50s or 1960) and I clearly remember that where we had swum and you could see the shingle bottom, the water became muddy and murky, huge amounts of sediment built up in the broads, pools and dykes, and it was no longer safe to swim. The fish and weeds died, we had unpleasant blooms of algae floating on the top and we stopped eating eels out of the mud (further contaminated by mercury from a local fertiliser manufacture). My father had warned that household detergents together with sewage would be potentially fatal for the Broads, and he was almost proved right.

The water on the reserve is clean again now, we have fish, otters, and many healthy water birds living there. We have seen a few wild human swimmers of late, but I am not tempted to return to the water for a swim, the bottom is still thick with mud and the water is still murky. We dredge areas from time to time, but have to be very careful how this slurry is managed, due to the remaining mercury content of the mud.

Our house never flooded, but the water has come close several times in my life. My brothers remember paddling a boat right up the garden in the fifties (maybe the floods of 53. In the 1980s I interviewed Freda Starr who ran the store in Cley. She was a very old lady then, but she gave a graphic description of the dreadful effects of the flood in 1953, she and her sister standing on the shop counter up to their necks in water, and boats marooned in fields miles from the sea.)

We have spring tides that flood the pathways all over the reserve and we have to shut it to the public on those days. This year we have had more flooding than previously, but some of that was due to rainfall as well as high tides. I can ask the warden how many days we shut this springtime, I know it was for at least 12 days, (not consecutively).

I think that we need to allow water to flood land NEARER the sea rather than drive it inland up the rivers to the Broads. I don’t really understand why this isn’t the case. Areas of wetland near the coast (including low meadows used for grazing cattle) seem to be spared in future planning, rather than peoples’ houses, and the further inland the flood plain is, the worse the situation would be. Water is funnelled up the rivers and dykes creating a greater swell, whereas it would spread and lose impetus, causing less damage if allowed to soak nearer the source. This bizarre planning is most likely to do with the control of those particular coastal areas by the landowners, and the influence that they have on local politics (i.e. protecting their own interests).