The Mancunian Way: ‘Manky, disgusting, just brown’

Sion Street in Radcliffe is barely 500m in length. It’s home to a handful of houses and a few industrial units.

It’s pretty unremarkable, except for one thing. Running next to it is a stretch of the Irwell that is the ‘worst river in England for sewage dumps’.

Huge volumes of sewage are being dumped into the river at this spot on a daily basis. According to the ‘Top of the Poops’ website in 2023 there were 2,188 hours of spills into the river from a nearby overflow.

That’s the equivalent of almost three months of continual dumps. There are only 8,760 hours in a year.

Sion Street resident Sam Hallam is not surprised by the location’s unhappy position atop the sewage charts. “It’s manky, you only have to look at the colour of it, don’t you?” she said.

“When the levels rise it’s just…brown. As we’ve seen a few times when it’s been really bad.”

As well as being close to people’s homes, the Irwell at Sion Street runs next to Outwood Country Park, on the opposite side of the river. Outwood, on the site of a former colliery and railway line, is made up of around 60 hectares of new and ancient clough woodland and, according to its website, is ‘one of the most beautiful parks in Manchester that comes with some added history’.

“It’s absolutely disgusting,” a dog walker, who asked not to be named, said when asked for her thoughts on the state of the river. “This is a country park, a Facebook group has been set up to try to improve the area and it’s counterproductive to that work to just be dumping sewage in the river all the time.

“I wouldn’t let my dogs go in there. You don’t know what’s in it.”

United Utilities - along with other water companies across the country - have come under increased pressure recently over sewage