Use of the words poo and sewage has spiked across the media recently, as alarmingly high levels of E. coli were found in the River Thames. Several rowers in the famed Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race got sick. Lenny Jenkins, a rower in the losing Oxford boat, told the BBC that “It would be a lot nicer if there wasn’t as much poo in the water.”
Jenkins’s choice of the word “poo”, usually confined to informal domestic settings, provided newspapers with just the right degree of mild shock needed to draw attention to the nation’s “sewage crisis”. It turned out that light drizzle in London was enough to overwhelm the capital’s wastewater network. Social media was flooded with maps of storm overflows and treated sewage discharges. Modest panic struck the country’s schools, as they faced increased instances of mould, sewage leaks and vermin. The Evening Standard highlighted that Thames Water was raising its prices “despite sewage being pumped into London rivers for more than 9,773 hours in 2023”.