England will get dozens of new monitored bathing sites, the government said on Monday, in the largest ever expansion of wild swimming areas.
Twenty-seven new locations, most of them on rivers, have been designated, which means summer pollution testing.
But the official designation of a bathing site doesn’t mean it is clean.
Most of the more than 400 existing swimming spots meet minimum standards but the two river sites currently on the list are both rated “Poor”.
The new bathing sites range from a beach in Dorset to Derwentwater in the Lake District and the River Nidd in North Yorkshire.
Betteridge’s law of headlines – “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
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And it’s definitely correct. Before this update, there were, I believe, three designated bathing sites, but even they were too unclean to swim in. Water companies are going to keep dumping sewage in rivers until they’re stopped.
Spoilers: presumably not
