17/09/2026
Lymington pollution: the investigation continues
There’s an important update in this week’s Lymington Times on the ongoing pollution problems affecting the Lymington River.
When Southern Water carried out work to correct the long-standing foul-water misconnections from homes in Brunswick Place, we hoped the very high E. coli & ammonia levels we had found would fall substantially.
They haven’t. New Forest Water Watch testing found 12,900 E. coli CFU per 100 ml in June and 13,000 in July, together with elevated ammonia. The continued presence of ammonia is particularly significant because it can indicate relatively fresh sewage contamination.
The good news is that our findings are helping to drive further investigation. At a recent meeting, Lymington and Pennington Town Council voted to request new CCTV survey reports from Southern Water for parts of the sewer network, including Waterloo Road AND the hospital sewer.
This is why our community-led water quality monitoring matters. Our testing doesn’t replace the work of the Environment Agency or Southern Water, but it provides independent evidence of what is actually happening in the river & and helps keep important questions on the table when problems persist.
And Lymington is not the only place where we are finding elevated E. coli. We recently recorded 38,900 CFU per 100 ml on the Clockhouse Stream, flowing into Christchurch Harbour- enormously above the 1,000 CFU/100 ml bathing-water threshold. Walkford Brook remains high, & the Langdown in Hythe is a new problem.
We’ll keep monitoring here and wherever elevated E. coli levels show that further investigation is needed across the New Forest. 💧
With thanks to to the New Milton Advertiser & Lymington Times for covering this important development.
