What will you be protesting against?
There are lots of people here in oxford that use and swim in the river. Although we were aware of the issue of sewage pollution already, it was only recently - when a Guardian article reported statistics on sewage pollution in the UK - that we realised quite how bad it was. It revealed that there was something like 1.5 million hours last year where raw sewage was being spilt in rivers across England. So we had a look at the River’s Trust map - a visual map which shows which rivers are safe to swim in - and saw that in the Thames region last year there were 17,000 hours where there was raw sewage going into the river from the upper Thames to Reading - the equivalent to every sewage works dumping raw sewage into the river for two hours every day. We were really shocked by this, and so were others. Lots of people just didn’t know about it, but once they did, they thought it was unacceptable to treat the river in this way: as a dumping ground and a sewer.