🌊 Summer'25 News 🌊
Dearest friends, colleagues, and kin,
Today in Folkestone, the UK's first Ministry of Sewers opens—a civic space to tackle coastal pollution and fight for a clean, swimmable sea year-round. Located in the Harbour’s old Customs House, the Ministry listens, amplifies voices, documents grievances, and mobilises collective action against sewage dumping, agrochemical runoff, and coastal degradation.
The Ministry reclaims the original meaning of “sewer” as a vital ecological network. Long before privatisation turned sewers into toxic pipelines, marsh sewers fed fields and linked freshwater springs, chalk aquifers, human bodies and coastal wetlands. Collective water governance was once the norm, formalised under the 1427 Statute of Sewers, with Romney Marsh as England’s drainage model. Today, deregulation, crumbling infrastructure, and intensified storms have made raw sewage a permanent fixture along the coast. In 2023 alone, beaches across Folkestone, Hythe, and Romney Marsh endured nearly 4,000 hours (around 166 full days) of sewage releases—forcing two beaches into permanent no-swim status, while skin rashes, infections, and cancelled bookings piled up.
Communities have fought back: through the Water Bill Boycott, Surfers Against Sewage, SOS Whitstable, Sewer Rage, citizen-led seawater testing, and legal victories like the case against Manchester’s canal sewage overflow. Refusing to pay for corporate negligence, residents demand independent water testing, year-round bathing rights, and an end to scapegoating seagulls’ poo or faulty toilets for systemic failure.
Inspired by the farcical appointment of Dennis Howell as Minister for Drought in 1976 (later Minister for Floods and Snow) in response to a series of extreme weather events, the Ministry of Sewers makes room for a different kind of civic action. It forms a gathering place for wild swimmers, farmers, schoolchildren, birdwatchers, scientists, and residents to reclaim the coastal commons. Open to all, the Ministry invites people to share experiences of murky tides, health incidents, banned beach days, contaminated swims, rising water bills, and broader ecological disruption. Evidence and testimonies are collected throughout the Triennial into a growing Log of Grievances—a living archive of public nuisance and collective resistance.
→ Book your session with the Minister
Walk-in hours: Mon-Sun 11:00-17:00
→ File your sewage complaint and evidence in the online questionnaire
Sewers Ministers: Nicola Hayden, Kirsty Hogben, Gordon Jessop, Liv Pennington, Patricia Rolfe, Michele Shonfield, Joy Thomas
Cooking Sections Team: Max Cooper Clark, Rosa Whiteley, Remi Kuforiji, Alisha Raman
Creative Folkestone Project Manager: Liv Pennington
Legal: Jemima Lovatt
Folkestone installation team: Form And Matter
Fabrication: Tareg Al-Zamel
With Thanks to: Heather Bishop, Peter Blach, Mitchell Bloomfield, Susan Churchill, Fish Legal, Folkestone Sea Swimmers, Dave Harvey, Samantha Hughes (Holistic Water for Horticulture), Hythe Dippers, Sarah Kennett and Mallydams Wood rehabilitation staff, Kent Archives (Kent History and Archive Centre), Owen Leyshon, Helen Lindon, Jim Martin, Tom Reynolds, Mark Rose, Sewer Rage (Patricia Rolfe, Sarah Thompson, John Thurgood), SOS Whitstable, Surfers Against Sewage, Hugo Tagholm, and the residents of Folkestone, Hythe, and Romney Marsh for sharing their experiences, evidence and stories of living with the sewers.
Public Event — This Sunday!
Black Tent Meeting #6
21 July, Studio Voltaire, London 11:00-15:00
We’re joining the next edition of the Black Tent Meetings, hosted by Studio Voltaire. We will be in conversation with our dear colleagues and artists-in-residence Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun to reflect on self-organised research linking their work on waterscapes of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau to other regions across the world. The event will feature talks, discussions, screenings, and Q&A. Guest speakers include Kathryn Weir and Saba Khan, chaired by Dot Zhihan Jia. It will be conducted in both English and Chinese.
→ Details here
With love,
alon & daniel