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1. Chief Scientist’s Group report summary

This project reported on the extent of recreational use of environmental waters in England based on data from 2017 to 2024 provided by 17 organisations including government, national governing bodies and community sources. This provides a collated national overview and expands our understanding of where, when and how surface waters are used for recreation.

1.1 Background

The Environment Agency is responsible for monitoring water quality during the bathing season at designated bathing waters across England. In recent years, there have been suggestions of an increasing recreational use of water. This has been suggested by anecdotal evidence and implied by increasing numbers of proposals for new bathing sites. However, there is a lack of robust data at the national level to understand the geographical spread and the times of year this water recreation takes place, as well as how many water users take part.

1.2 Approach

We collected and combined data from organisations involved in the recreational use of water. This included data on various types of recreational infrastructure and activities which included:

• swimming (including wild, competitive and open water venue-based participation),
• multisports (including triathlons and other events involving open water swimming),
• paddling, rowing, sailing and surfing.

Each data report was combined with other co-located reports to identify a set of ‘water recreation locations’ and enabled the assessment of spatial and temporal trends and quantification of levels of participation at the national scale.

1.3 Results

The project collated 13,500 reports of water recreation from 17 data sources, which aggregated into 3,347 recreation locations in England. Three times as many freshwater sites were found than coastal locations, although water recreation reports were found in only one third of the surface waterbody catchments in England (1,558 out of 4,261 catchments). The data also allowed evaluation of the trends in location, type and size of waterbody, land cover and elevation of water recreation locations. In general, the locations indicated by the most data sources were also the locations most likely to be the site of a designated bathing water monitoring point.

Where data was available on the number of water users at individual locations, lake and coastal locations dominated, whereas lower numbers were recorded at river locations. The project assessed annual trends in recreational water usage which provided a mixed picture. Whilst the number of bathers at designated bathing waters and number of sporting events have slightly fallen, annual paddle boat registrations have risen considerably. Nonetheless, within the calendar year, activity was identified outside of the presently designated bathing season (mid-May to September). It was also observed that some freshwater events involving open water swims commenced prior to the season in the spring, whereas coastal events continued later into the autumn.

1.4 Conclusions

This work provides a new and unique national overview of the water recreation landscape in England which has been quantified and appraised in terms of spatial and temporal trends. While the collated dataset is not exhaustive and represents a snapshot of the available data at the time of collation, it does enable a holistic view of a range of recorded activities at the waterbody catchment level.

1.5 Publication details

This summary relates to information from project SC230022, reported in detail in the following outputs:

• Report: SC230022/R

• Title: Exploring recreational water use in England

• Dataset: SC230022/D

• Title: Water recreation locations, zones and catchment summaries (England). Available on data.gov:

• Project manager: Dr Martin Spurr, Chief Scientist’s Group

This project is the result of research undertaken by the Environment Agency’s Chief Scientist’s Group, which provides scientific knowledge, tools and techniques to enable us to protect and manage the environment as effectively as possible.

The authors wish to thank the following organisations for engaging with this research project and permitting use of their data; British Rowing, British Triathlon, Channel Swimming & Piloting Federation, Paddle UK, Royal Life Saving Society UK, Royal Yachting Association, Surfers Against Sewage, Surfing England, Swim England, The Rivers Trust, Time Outdoors and Water Buoy Ltd. The authors also wish to thank Will Fryer for providing excerpts of the 2000 Wild Swims book by Rob Fryer for this research.

Enquiries: research@environment-agency.gov.uk.

© Environment Agency