Chris Ranger runs his oyster business out of three shipping containers at Mylor Harbour on the river Fal in Cornwall. He looks every part the fisherman, with a long grey beard and a salt-stained cap. Seagulls nose around the harbour, and little motorboats putter along the water. But upstream where the oysters grow, all is quiet. Centuries-old byelaws mean the Fal Oyster can only be caught under sail or in a rowing boat. The oystermen float with the tide, red sails flapping in the wind, and slowly hoist their catch out of the water using hand-pulled dredges. The Fal Fishery is the last in Europe entirely powered by sail and oar.
Ranger remembers the golden age of his fifteen-year career as an oysterman. “It was 2014, 2015,” he says. Every day, dozens of sailing boats would head out onto the river Fal and return with glistening nets plump with oysters. Business was booming, and there were eight different merchants selling the Fal Oyster. “Now, there’s two of us.”
Chuck an adult oyster into a bathtub of filthy water and by the end of the day, the water will be clean
“The water privatisation, I believe, will go very well indeed,” said Margaret Thatcher to parliament in 1989, four months after she sold off England’s water sector to a group of private companies. “And perhaps we had better wait and see, so that we can pontificate in the light of the facts.” Well, these are the facts: in three decades, the private water companies have run themselves £54 billion into the red while paying out £72 billion in dividends to their shareholders – money which could have been reinvested into the failing network. Last year alone, raw sewage was pumped into English seas and rivers for over 2.4 million hours through storm overflow pipes which are only meant to be used in “exceptional circumstances”.
The sewage crisis was quietly going on for years before it entered public consciousness. “We’ve known for ten, fifteen years that it’s getting worse,” says Ranger. “But it’s no longer isolated incidents.” In one of his shipping containers, hundreds of wild oysters sit bubbling away in purification tanks pumped with clean seawater and UV light. After nearly two days in the tanks, the oysters will have cleansed themselves of bacteria and viruses and are safe to eat. But to be harvestable in the first place, the oysters must come from waters where E coli does not exceed a certain level, and when sewage is released, E coli levels can skyrocket. Local councils test the levels in oysters once a month, and if a high reading comes back, production may be temporarily closed down.
As filter feeders, oysters are a litmus test for water cleanliness. They take in whatever’s floating through the water they’re in and purify it in the process. Chuck a single adult oyster into a bathtub full of filthy water and by the end of the day, the water will be clean. This means they are brilliant ecosystem engineers, but they also bear the brunt of sewage pollution. Unlike fish, they can’t swim away.
“The closures are the biggest whammy, because you don’t really know when they’re going to happen,” says Chris. Earlier this year, eleven shellfish production zones along the Fal were shut down for a month after a test result showed E coli levels were twenty times higher than the legal limit. Yet the logic is flawed. David Jarrad, head of the Shellfish Association of Great Britain, says the current testing method is “inherently inaccurate”, as it only shows a moment in time – especially in an estuary like the Fal, “where water quality is changing within minutes, let alone hours or days.”
A week’s worth of oysters will have been purified, sold, and eaten by the time the results have returned. There’s a more expensive test that gives rapid results, but councils are already financially stretched. That leaves the obvious solution: to stop polluting the water in the first place. “All of the alarm bells in nature are ringing right now,” says Hugo Tagholm, former CEO of activist group Surfers Against Sewage. Rivers that once teemed with life are now declared ecologically dead, and there were nearly 25,000 sewage spills into shellfish waters last year. Tagholm notes that the companies who bought up English water were effectively handed private monopolies. “It’s like, you’ve got all your customers, how can you fuck it up this badly?”
There is one other remaining oyster merchant on the Fal. Martin Laity is from a family of Cornish fishermen dating back to the sixteenth century. Laity exported most of his oysters to Europe until Brexit came along and nearly crippled his business. Like Chris, he now mainly supplies local markets and London restaurants. “We just fight battles every day. A lot of very unnecessary battles,” he says. “Since Brexit we’ve realised that the current government doesn’t give two hoots.”
Laity grew up “surrounded by people who respected the sea”. He describes oystermen as cautious environmental guardians, and the recent trends around preserving natural habitats and rewilding are “old news” to them. “We’ve been doing it for hundreds and hundreds of years.”
Since the nineteenth century, Britain’s native oyster population has declined by 95 per cent due to overfishing, pollution and disease. Most of the oysters we now eat in the UK are the Pacific variety brought over from Japan in the 1960s. The Fal Oyster is one of Britain’s few remaining native breeds, and oyster savants covet its mineral sweetness. Native oyster reefs sequester carbon and create vibrant ecosystems. Through small, careful acts of human intervention, Laity’s native oyster population is thriving, and he’s watched other marine life flourish too. “We’ve seen a big return of a variety of seabirds. Oystercatchers, curlews, herons – and also fish returning in abundance.”
Fishermen say that hand dredging helps oysters grow by removing excessive amounts of seaweed and sediment, like pulling up weeds from a garden. But to keep the habitat going, the oystermen need a market and a demand for oysters, and as Martin puts it, sewage is “a bomb that’s spoiling the party”. There are some areas from which he can no longer harvest, and as a result, the oyster population there has become clogged with sediment and died out. The oystermen are given no compensation for the sewage pollution, even when it costs them months of work. “The regulation that’s in place is quite frustrating. Because if anyone damages the environment in other ways, you’re behind bars,” says Laity. “We know how to provide clean product, but with the quantities that are going in the rivers it’s putting more pressure on us.”
The Fal Oyster is one of Britain’s few remaining native breeds
Not only are the oystermen sometimes prevented from harvesting but their reputation has also taken a hit. In 2022 the Independent newspaper ran a headline stating that the Fal was the most polluted river in England. The fishermen dispute the claim, arguing that while the Fal may have had the highest number of sewage releases, it flows directly into the Atlantic, and the watercourse is refreshing all the time.
According to Ranger, the tagline stuck. “The ‘worst-polluted river’ headline might be for that day. But the public think about that for months and years later.” He says the fishermen are trapped in a catch-22. The more they speak out about the sewage, the closer they edge to a solution – but it also puts people off their product. “There is just so much news. Which is good, because we need to sort it out, but in the meantime, there is no turnover. We’re just barely scratching an income.”
In an attempt to rehabilitate the native oyster population, Ranger has set up an aquaculture site up the river where he’s trying to grow juvenile natives. In one of his shipping containers, a fridge is full of beakers and test tubes, all bubbling away with micro algae in lurid shades of green – food for the larvae. Every day he goes to change their seawater, hoping they will hatch. At one point he was close to spawning fourteen billion larvae, but something entered the watercourse. “They were alive one day. I did a seawater change, and they were dead the next day.” Ranger pauses, clearly crushed by the memory. “That was hard to deal with. It’s a lot of work to invest in a non-turnover project that relies on clean seawater.”
The Fal Estuary is covered by South West Water, the company with the highest bills in the country as well as the second highest number of sewage spills. A spokesperson for the company said: “We will be carrying out a number of improvements in the Fal Estuary by 2025 to reduce spills and have committed to improve all storm overflows impacting shellfish waters by 2030.” They also cited the “wide range of influences” which affect river and sea quality, “including agricultural and urban pollution”.
David Jarrad wishes everyone could see the benefits of oysters. “We need to wake up and recognise that shellfish aquaculture is an environmentally friendly, benign, very cheap way of protein production that is nutritious to health and has huge ecosystem services,” he says. “It’s a win-win all the way round.” This summer, the government waded into the crisis. “They’ve put together a feeble sewage action plan,” says Hugo Tagholm. Water companies have until 2045 to improve all storm overflow pipes discharging into shellfish waters. Martin scoffs at this promise: “Who’s going to last ten years in business, quite frankly.”
Claudia Cockerell is a freelance journalist. She graduated this year with a masters in journalism from City University and is currently reporting for The Evening Standard
