With otters recently spotted on a local stretch of the River Roding, Paul Powlesland – who founded the River Roding Trust five years ago – is looking for Wanstead residents to become guardians of the river
When I moved to the River Roding in Barking on my boat in 2017, I perhaps naively assumed there were professionals and government officials looking after the river. After all, the Roding – flowing over 40 miles from its source in Molehill Green in Essex to its confluence with the Thames in Barking – is London’s third-largest river and crucial to the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people in its catchment, as well as the nature that relies on it.
Having lived on and grown to know the river over the past seven years, I came to understand the awful truth that no one was truly acting and speaking in the river’s interests and preventing damage and destruction to the river; as a result, the lower river in particular was in serious trouble.
I therefore set up the Friends of the River Roding group on Facebook to start gathering other volunteers. This project became the River Roding Trust in 2019 and since then our volunteers have undertaken a growing range of activities to care for the river: water quality testing, continuing litter picks (removing up to 400 bags in a single weekend!), planting trees, opening riverside paths, removing invasive species, ensuring riverside developments benefit the river, restoring the Roding’s lost riverside meadows and marshes wherever possible, and many more.
Our approach as a charity has been very much a grassroots one and we continue to be run solely by volunteers. We are also very locally run, with volunteers getting to know a particular part of the river and then seeking to protect and restore it in whatever ways we can. Although we have sought to protect all of the river, much of our effort so far has been in Barking and in Ilford, where many of our volunteers live. We are now looking to set up volunteer groups further along the river, including in Wanstead and Woodford, and give them the equipment, training, knowledge, advice and social media and organisational connections they need to act as guardians on their part of the river.
The Roding is an incredible river, which along with its valley and catchment could be one of the wildest, most beautiful and ecology-rich urban rivers in the country. But its fate very much hangs in the balance, with bad news about continued ecological and water quality degradation contrasting with positive news like the recent discovery of otters living in the river in Redbridge.
Each one of us who lives in the catchment can make a big difference for our river, so if you love and care for the Roding and would like to get involved in any capacity as a guardian of the river, please do get in touch.
For more information and to get involved, email river.roding@gmail.com or visit wnstd.com/rodingfriends
