The East London river bandit

When you die in East London, whether you're a king or a beggar, you’ll almost certainly be buried in the labyrinthine City of London cemetery. And when the decay sets in, your body slowly turns to dust and that dust breaks down into its basic chemicals, they’ll flow down into the water table and out into the Aldersbrook. A necropolis river, as some locals term it, they say it’s making the land around it ecologically vibrant, as the final chemical vestiges of countless human lives fertilise plants and birth whole new ecosystems.

Aldersbrook, a branch of the River Roding in Ilford, is one of the oldest such rivers in London. First records of the waterway are from 1535; it’s borne witness as a small town on the Thames begun far inland spread out for miles in every direction, surviving great fires, and plagues and the rise of American candy stores. And unlike many of the capital’s other naturally-occurring rivers, this one hasn’t been tampered with: not forced underground, turned into drainage or artificially re-directed. 

It’s a portal to a time before London’s rivers were ruined, at least according to the angry barrister in a pollen-dusted wool suit I’m accompanying. It’s this barrister who tells me about the ‘necropolis’ rivers. Admittedly, this bit of Aldersbrook does look pretty dead, as he stirs a branch to demonstrate how flowing water has become a quagmire of mud, excrement and fly-tipped garbage.

“That’s probably three feet of just mud and shit,” Paul Powlesland declares, branch in hand. “We should be looking here at two feet of clear water at a gravelly rocky bottom with fish… but any fish that gets in here would just die.”

Powlesland has been giving the impression that he’s unlikely to be free to poke around the brook for much longer. Last month, the wiry 40 year-old hit headlines after his unauthorised guerrilla attempts to clear Aldersbrook with a digger supposedly left him facing a two year jail sentence, threatened by none other than the Environmental Agency. Thanks to the stunt he’s become, in the words of the Telegraph — a “cause célèbre”. A barrister (“left-wing!” chirps the Telegraph) fed up with incompetent bureaucracy embarking on an illegal environmental mission to restore a rubbish-strewn river? No wonder portraits of a scowling Powlesland standing knee deep in Aldersbrook have been gracing so many newspaper pages. 

What a lot of these stories miss though, is that the potential jail time wasn’t an unfortunate consequence of Powlesland’s quest to clean up Aldersbrook. He’s not an accidental activist but a longtime canny crusader with an incredible gift for grabbing press. It just so happens that Aldersbrook and the River Roding have become his life’s focus. For the past decade, Powlesland has increasingly entwined his fate with that of the River Roding and its creeks. The result has transcended a campaign; it's more like a one-man religion. Appearing in court two years ago — as a juror rather than in the dock — he even chose to be sworn in on a vial of water from the River Roding, instead of the Bible. “I explained that nature is my God,” he later told reporters. “I believe the Roding to be sacred”.