All rivers in this country are in dire straits, says actor Jim Murray.
Best known for his role in The Crown, Murray’s passion lies in fishing Britain’s rivers and, as an angler, he feels that more could and should be done. We meet on the Upper Itchen, a chalk stream he fly-fishes, near to his home in southern England. “As an angler, I know and I see firsthand on a day-to-day basis just how degraded our rivers are, how abused our rivers are,” he says. “And now is the time to do something about it.”
Like many of the UK’s other waterways, chalk streams are at risk from agricultural waste, sewage and over-extraction, as well as the more localised problem of septic tanks that can leach phosphates into the aquifers that feed them. Chalk streams are rare – there are only around 200 in the world, mostly located in southern England. Many are also sites of scientific interest, which further compounds the issues they face.
To help, Murray started Activist Anglers, a campaign group focused on bringing anglers together to help enact change. “We are custodians of the river, whether we like it or not,” he says. According to Murray, anglers both directly and indirectly learn about the health of a river. “You’re looking at flow, you’re looking at water temperature, you’re looking at habitat – all predominately to learn where the fish may or may not be,” he says. And if something isn’t right, he hopes that knowledge could be put to good use.
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“If we become more vocal about what we’re seeing, the destruction and the abuse we’re seeing of our waterways, if we report the pollution that we’re seeing, if we just communicate and become more responsible, a little drive and a little passion can translate into a huge amount of action,” he says. Now, Murray has added a testing kit to his arsenal for gathering information about rivers, allowing him to collect data on phosphate and nitrate levels, electrical conductivity and temperature. “We can all become citizen scientists,” he says.
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