We’re thrilled to announce that Surge Cooperative has been awarded £6,561.42 from Thames21’s EMPOWER Rivers Community Grant 2026 — and we can’t wait to get started.
The funding will support a programme of ecological restoration and river health monitoring along the Channelsea River and Long Wall Path corridor in Stratford. This year, our focus will be on tackling Floating Pennywort, the fast-spreading invasive aquatic plant that blankets the water’s surface and chokes out light and oxygen for everything living beneath it. We’ll also be carrying out a terrestrial survey of the land we steward and producing a management plan for tackling Himalayan Balsam — work that will set us up for a major push on that species from next year.
Alongside the restoration work, we’ll be running a regular programme of water quality testing — measuring parameters like ammonia, chlorine, copper, nitrate, phosphate, silica, conductivity, and more — on tide-dependent days throughout the season. All of this will happen on our monthly Eco Gathering days, which are free, open to everyone, and a genuinely lovely way to spend time by the river. You can sign up here: Monthly Ecology Gathering on Eventbrite.
The grant also covers equipment that will make our monitoring more robust and our presence on site more sustainable — including QR-coded signage along the path so passers-by can follow our remedial work and our water quality data in real time, and soil testing at three sites to build a baseline picture of any legacy contamination affecting the river.
We’re enormously grateful to Thames21 for this award — and for so much more than the funding. Their support in helping us establish ourselves as a River Action Group, and their ongoing guidance on invasive species management and river health, has been invaluable to everything we do on the Channelsea.
If you’d like to get your hands in the river with us this year, come along to an Eco Gathering — all welcome, no experience needed.