Date: August 2026
The Guardian visited Brighton beach this week to talk to local swimmers about sea pollution, and the story they told will be familiar to anyone who lives here.
Jo Armstrong, 75, from Lewes, usually swims at Seaford every day. Over the past week the water there was too polluted to swim, so she came to Brighton instead. “There’s a tiny bit of rain and then the sewage comes, I just don’t understand it,” she said. “It’s extraordinary that we can’t have clean beaches.”
According to public data cited in the article, a sewage alert was issued twice at Brighton beach in August alone, with 158 alerts recorded across 2025.
Hildi Mitchell runs a programme called Pool to Pier, teaching pool swimmers to swim safely in open water. She told the Guardian that pollution is increasingly stopping people from making the move from pool to sea. Some of her regular swimmers “won’t come out in the sea in the summer because they’re worried about becoming ill.” She offers free workshops to children from low-income families – the kind of families for whom a free swim in the sea should be an obvious option, not a health risk.
Greg Veros has lived in Brighton for 22 years and swum all his life. After falling ill a few years ago from what he believes was sewage exposure, he now swims mainly in Brighton’s outdoor pool instead of the sea.
Anna Field moved to Brighton specifically to swim regularly. She checks for sewage alerts the way most people check the weather. When pollution stops her swimming, she says it’s “a bit like not being able to walk in the park because it’s raining, except with this, you feel people are to blame.”
Why this matters
This is exactly why I have decided to take a stand against Southern Water. Checking an app before you swim in your own local sea has become normal in Brighton, and it shouldn’t be. These aren’t campaigners or activists, they’re residents who moved here for the sea, or who have swum here all their lives, now having to plan around a pollution risk that a functioning water company and a functioning regulator should have addressed years ago.
If you recognise yourself in any of these stories, you’re not alone, and you don’t have to just accept it.
Read the full Guardian report.
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