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Hello, my name is Oliver Bullough. I am the author of Sewage Slooths, the men who revealed the slow, dirty death of Welsh and English rivers, which was published in 2022.

I grew up just outside the town of Hay-O-M-omai on the border between Wales and England, so

swimming in the River Y was a really big part of my childhood, and anyone who has read the

news in the last few years will probably be aware that the River Y is not the pristine

river that it used to be and is instead very badly polluted with mainly manure from intensive

paltural units, but it also has issues, as do many other rivers with a human sewage. And that has

made it much more hostile for wildlife, but it's also a less attractive

place to swim. I was keen to write an article laying out how this happened, how it was that

this beautiful, clean river that I grew up swimming in had become somewhere that was almost now

synonymous with our national pollution crisis. And actually, that was quite a hard story to write

because it isn't a story with a protagonist. It's a bit like this just happened. But while I was

researching this story, which was over many months,

people kept mentioning the names of Stephen Hammond and Ashley Smith as people who just knew a lot

about the issue of pollution in rivers, particularly sewage pollution in rivers.

And Stephen is a professor, but he's a retired professor who was doing this work

because he was appalled by the state of the river that ran right next to his house, that he wanted

to fish in and which was now too badly polluted. And so their story became the story I wanted to

tell. So basically, for me, it was an example of how you can start with a really vague

idea of an article. And if you just keep banging away at it for absolutely ages, you will

eventually find a fun way of telling it. Because it's a depressing story. You know, this is a story

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