Looking down from the bridge at Lewes in East Sussex, the water of the River Ouse running a few feet below me is a sickly green, resembling the colour of mushy peas.

The 35-mile-long Ouse – which rises in the High Weald, cuts through the chalk of the South Downs, and meanders down to the coast at Newhaven – is but one of several Ouses in England, their name deriving from the Celtic word for water.

“It is very polluted because of sewage, slurry from cattle, and the run off of fertiliser from the fields,” says Matthew Bird, a local and district councillor who is a leader of Love Our Ouse, one of many organisations battling to protect the river and its valley. In 2024, a single pumping station near Lewes discharged raw sewage into the river 259 times for a period of 4,824 hours, according to the Environment Agency.

Until three months ago, the struggle to save the Ouse by people living in Lewes and the Ouse valley did not significantly differ from campaigns to save other rivers in England, which are under threat. But in February, the Ouse became the first river in the country to have its status as a living entity – with its own rights comparable to those of an individual or company – recognised officially.

After much discussion, Lewes District Council agreed to back a charter declaring the rights of the Ouse to include the right “to exist in its natural state”, flow freely, be unpolluted, and have access to its water sources or aquifers. In addition, the river gained the right to have its own representatives to protect its interests “in the determination of matters that directly affect it”.

The Ouse charter of rights opens the door for the river to have a legal status as if it were a living person, a development new in England but gathering pace elsewhere. In New Zealand, the Whanganui River was granted “legal personhood” in 2017, its rights including representation by experienced and knowledgeable advocates.

Bird explains that the charter seeks to rebalance a skewed relationship between nature and human activity in favour of the Ouse, believing this is a necessity “unless you want a drain rather than a river”. He says that “it appears insane to me that a Tesco supermarket building should have more rights than the river on whose bank it is standing”. Asserting the rights of rivers as a general principle is, in his view, much like asserting the rights of women a century or more ago.

Joanna Carter, an environmental activist who was born and grew up in Lewes, agrees with Bird, saying: “I do not think that bringing the rights of the river into our legal system is anthropomorphising it, any more than if we were dealing with a corporation.”

She believes that in the past, people in the town thought more about preserving the beautiful landscape of the South Downs surrounding Lewes than they did about the state of the Ouse. She thinks a reason for this may be that keeping a river healthy is a complicated business when facing multiple threats: the slurry, the fertiliser, and “water companies not paying attention to sewage”.

She would not swim herself in the........

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