The blue space blueprint

My uncle Ali in Iran reacts to my Instagram story with the shocked face emoji. His message reads: “Eenja kojast?”

“The Welsh Harp (Brent Reservoir),” I type back in English. “The nature reserve.”

I’ve been talking about the place for months, but this is the first time he’s seen a picture.

A few minutes later, his own story appears, a screenshot of mine, crowned with a pink caption in Persian that says: “This is the Brent Reservoir in London, where my niece has become obsessed with organising litter-picks. It’s a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in one of the richest cities in one of the most developed countries in the world. And yet… it looks like this. Why?”

It was a good question.

The first cleanup

My relationship with the Brent Reservoir began in the 1990s, visiting with school as a teenager to play rounders. It was known for being unsafe and a dumping ground, so when I settled nearby as an adult, I carried that old prejudice with me and had no interest in exploring.

Then came the lockdowns, and my need for nature – to see the deep green of trees and an uninterrupted expanse of water, no matter how polluted – propelled me to the Brent Reservoir.

What surprised me was that, although there was fly-tipping and litter as I had expected, it was also very beautiful – like Hampstead Heath, but wilder and bluer. I found it magnificent and exciting. By summer 2020, I’d moved from passive observer to an active participant in the landscape: I organised a cleanup.

But the turning point came the following year when the Canal and River Trust – custodians of the reservoir – dropped the water level by a metre for a flood-risk assessment. What emerged was shocking: shoes, whole and broken; thousands of plastic bottles and aluminium cans; shredded plastic that takes centuries to disappear, entangles birds and causes microplastic-induced diseases in wildlife. All of it was laid thick across the mud.

The fiction of the Brent Reservoir’s protected SSSI status, that badge of environmental significance, collapsed. Local residents were heartbroken and outraged.

How litter harms us

We’re drawn to nature because it offers what psychologists call ‘soft fascination’ – a gentle, effortless form of attention that allows our overtaxed minds to rest, recharge, and reflect on unresolved thoughts while captivated by something in our immediate environment. Unsurprisingly, nature, whether that’s the flow of water or the dive of a tern, provides excellent soft fascination and is thought to lead in part to the benefits we associate with being in nature, such as stress reduction and a boost in creativity.

In contrast, ‘hard fascination’ is attention to stimuli that demand significant mental bandwidth. This includes chaotic urban environments, driving in traffic, listening to the news, screentime – and litter.

Litter in nature creates a seemingly universal sense of psychological violation and disgust. It is, after all, our discards; what we have rejected and excluded. When we see it in the wrong place, in a river instead of a bin for example, it captures our attention. It pulls us back into the very state of cognitive strain we came into nature to escape. It destroys the perceived autonomy of the natural world, pulling back the curtain and revealing a place as managed or neglected as the urban environments we left behind. The trance breaks. Awe and inspiration dissolve.

We intuitively know that nature is good for us, but the benefits of nature on our health hinge on the environment feeling and being cared for. And that means no litter.

This is especially important in cities. In the dense, grey concrete of an urban environment, a space like the Brent Reservoir isn’t a luxury, it’s vital for health.

Why do we litter?

We’re living in what some call a ‘waste age,’ defined by profit-driven production, failing waste infrastructure and a throwaway culture. Rubbish floods the environment, making litter not just an individual act, but a byproduct of a system centred on waste.

Yet, it’s worth exploring the individual act of littering, because it goes beyond simple laziness or a lack of respect for the environment. The reality is far more complex.

When a friend, a graduate of environmental science, tossed her gum into a bush in a small park next to the Brent Reservoir, she dismissed it with a shrug. Perhaps, compared to the personal difficulties she was going through at the time, it really was ‘nothing’. Or perhaps she was taking a cue from the environment, where the bins were overflowing, litter was strewn everywhere, and one of the benches was broken.

When a place looks unloved, we internalise it. We might unconsciously think: why should I care about this park if no one else does? Or: why should I care when no one cares enough about me to ensure this is a nice place for a walk?

This vicious cycle of neglect and withdrawal is explained by the ‘broken windows theory’, which posits that visible signs of crime and antisocial behaviour create environments that encourage more of the same.

There’s also a widespread belief that litter vanishes – I’ve heard countless people say, “the council will clean it,” or “it’ll decompose”. Down on your hands and knees though, discovering a bag of slimy chicken wings buried in the mud, the illusion soon shatters. You know the council won’t come – not because it doesn’t care, but because its budget has been slashed. That banana skin thrown on the verge will take two years to break down, not the few weeks the litterer might have imagined.

Another intriguing phenomenon is ‘polite littering’. This is when people litter neatly, for example by placing a coffee cup on top of an overflowing bin without considering that a gust of wind could easily send it into the bushes. One study suggests that over 60% of non-cigarette littering is unintentional.

The impact of all these conscious and unconscious behaviours is that two million pieces of litter are dropped in the UK daily, most of which eventually find their way into blue spaces such as rivers, reservoirs and the sea.

At the Brent Reservoir, the trash screens that are supposed to stop rubbish flowing into the reservoir from the rivers feeding it, are almost permanently clogged with plastic bottles, polystyrene, building materials, cans, prams, footballs, and a greasy layer of effluent and scum. Storms and heavy downpour often take the contents up, over and around the congested screens, and down towards the reservoir as well as littering the surrounding woodland.

Indeed, land-based litter contributes to 80% of marine litter, with 85% of that being plastic – detrimental to both marine life and human health.

Connection reduces littering

But there is hope, because the same psychological forces that drive littering can be harnessed in reverse. If neglect is contagious, so is care. I like to think of it as a ripple effect – where care initiates a cascade of care. The first ripple of care rarely gets to see how far the wave goes, but it can trust that the water moves. There’s deep satisfaction in it, and accounts at least in part for the huge volunteer turnout we see at litter-picking events at the Brent Reservoir.

Even sceptics can be converted when the ripple reaches them. My dad, who for a long time considered me eccentric for my interest in litter-picking, nevertheless decided to join an event out of boredom. At first, he lingered at the back, not wanting to be seen. But very quickly he got stuck in, chatting to other volunteers and making friends. The group absorbed him, and he’s since attended nearly every pick, boasting he’s the most efficient and effective volunteer.

Recently, he WhatsApped me a photo of himself in a beautiful mountain pass in Iran. He is beaming, ankle-deep in a cold stream, standing next to a younger man who is their trek leader. They’re each holding three full bags of the litter they’d pulled from the water. I cried when I saw it.

This is what happens when care becomes collective: it becomes contagious. Litter-picking stops being a solitary, stigmatised task and becomes a shared statement that a place is valued, seen and loved. In a world where we often feel powerless against vast systems, it’s a tangible victory. It restores something in us: the sense that our actions matter, that we’re not helpless, that community is a choice we make every single time we show up.

Blue space dreaming

As litter-picking volunteers bend to remove beer cans and crisp packets from the shoreline, conversations drift toward possibility. We find ourselves dreaming up different futures for the reservoir.

The water is cool against his skin on this hot July afternoon at the reservoir. He floats on his back, as dozens of swimmers around him drift like birds on a thermal. He remembers a time when he wouldn’t have come here. It feels like a lifetime ago.

Across Europe, countries have invested in maintaining water clean enough to swim in. Brent is one of the most deprived boroughs of London. What difference would a swimmable reservoir make to the people living there?

“Look! A beaver!” A mother points to the water as her little girl claps her hands. An elderly gentleman passes by quickly, binoculars dangling from his neck. He’s aching to see the ospreys that have recently made the Brent Reservoir their home.

Citizen Zoo, a rewilding organisation, supported by Barnet council, is working on the possible introduction of these species to the Brent Reservoir, pending surveys and studies. Imagine if Londoners could hop on a bus or Tube to see these creatures?

The river runs three metres wide, with water so clear you can see the pebbles beneath. Silver salmon move upstream through the city, their bodies catching light like coins.

Not far from the Brent Reservoir, in Camden, the River Tyburn once flowed. It was renowned for its excellent salmon fishing, but today it makes its way through the heart of London as part of the sewer network. What if we could restore it to its former glory?

We need exciting visions of a right relationship with nature, where our blue and green spaces are not dumping grounds but are the heart of the community. These acts of imagination are not an escape from reality, but a necessary blueprint for the reality we want to see.

Seeds for a new world

On one of our litter-picks I began obsessing over a three-by-four metre patch of dead ground. It was covered in pigeon faeces and dumped food – frozen chicken breasts, pizza, bread, spaghetti, rice, red meat, kidney beans – and it had become a magnet for rats. The spot is arguably the most-visited at the Brent Reservoir, a gateway that thousands of people pass through. What message was it sending to visitors?

A fellow volunteer, a wildlife gardener, had a brilliant idea. What if we could turn it around? What if, instead of the ‘rat garden’ as we had begun to jokingly call it, we created an actual garden?

I failed to secure the small amount of funding the project required from any established organisations, so I crowdfunded and – to my surprise – raised more money than I had asked for.

Volunteers removed rubble, aerated the compacted soil and removed the plastic mesh buried deep underneath. It was back-breaking work. We coppiced the ash trees, removing the pigeons’ perch, and piled the logs to create more habitats with leftover organic materials. We planted native flowers.

But the logs were stolen and the flowers died.

So we tried again. Still nothing grew, and people continued to dump food.

I became despondent. Not everyone believed in our project, and I started to believe that perhaps they were right. But something in me wouldn’t give up. So we tried again.

This time, we built a bee bank using donated waste material and sand from a nearby construction site. And we planted again, choosing bigger plants and adding mulch and more sand.

And it worked.

By the following summer, the area was transformed. A sloping golden bank for wild bees, log piles for beetles and wasps, native plants – knapweeds, wild carrot, field scabious, chicory, musk mallow, and weld – spread colourfully across the ground. Every time I walked by, someone was standing and admiring it. I was ecstatic.

There have been many other successes at the Brent Reservoir as a result of the actions of committed individuals and the wider community. These include funded nature walks, the reintroduction of rare plants, increased maintenance, and most recently, major wetland habitat funding.

But things are still far from perfect. The most pressing issue at the Brent Reservoir is a plan to build a costly and environmentally destructive 186‑metre bridge that would cut across the reservoir and damage its fragile wetland.

The organisations behind it are unlikely to heed an individual – but I hope they will be persuaded by the campaigners, volunteers, and thousands of local people who have over the years poured so much of their time, love and care into their local nature reserve.

Patch by patch

I never meant to become so involved with the Brent Reservoir. I didn’t study ecology or conservation. When I organised my first litter-pick I could barely identify more than an oak tree. Now I can name the horn beam tree, turkey tail mushroom, gorse plant and more, but the most important thing I've learnt is the power of collective action.

When a community shows up, it can shift the narrative of a place. It can ensure that a culture of apathy is not a life sentence – that it can be overturned, patch by patch, by the simple, defiant act of picking up what was thrown away. Together we can refuse the slow creep of neglect and reclaim the vibrant world that is our true inheritance and our profound responsibility to restore.