What might it mean to know your river?
Its name, its journey from source to sea, the way it moves through your landscape.
To feel its changes across the seasons. To notice the diversity of life it supports.
To sense how the health of this river is intertwined with the wellbeing of the community it flows through.
In our first knowledge share session of the year, the Living Places Network welcomed Zofia Page, Executive Director, and Monika Koncz MacKenzie, Farmer and Land Steward Engagement Lead, from Friends of the River Medway, a group that is working across the Upper Medway catchment to restore health and relationship to their River.
From the small village of Turners Hill in the South East of England, the River Medway emerges. Her streams wander far and wide through Sussex and Kent for 70 miles before joining with the River Thames and flowing into the North Sea. She is home to many inhabitants and wildlife, has provided for and shaped many civilisations, and in our time has become a channel of human apathy and waste.
In 2020, local residents, Ellen Kittredge, Ffion Thomas and Patricia Patterson-Vanegas, began organising community clean-up events along stretches of the Upper Medway. Messages were shared through local WhatsApp groups, and around sixty people showed up each time, helping to pull out discarded shopping trolleys, mattresses, bicycles and the evidence of neglect and abuse, all accumulating in the River.
There was a realisation that the River’s poor health had been caused by a deep disconnect between humans and nature. Practical action alone would not be enough to prevent further harm. And out of this realisation emerged Friends of the River Medway.
Around ten people with different backgrounds and skillsets came together - campaigners, water ceremonialists, land stewards, community organisers and a lawyer. They shared a simple starting point: a commitment to their river.
Using three interwoven streams of restorative work: practical action, legal action and sacred connection, Friends of the River Medway are teaching us how centring and caring for our landscapes, ecosystems, and natural resources can become the focal point and catalyst for place-based change.
“Rivers are the connective tissue and lifeline for all beings and the whole community - we are all related through the river. The river connects us all.” Monika Koncz MacKenzie
The state of our rivers, the state of our health: Rivers as reflective mirrors
At the start of the Living Places Network session, we were invited to widen the lens, from one river in East Sussex and Kent to water as a shared, living system. In Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg1 writer and scholar, offers a way of understanding our relationship with water as living. She traces this relationship from the water that carries us in the womb to the water that carries us to our last breath - a journey where the health of our bodies becomes inseparable from the health of our water.
In 2024, The Rivers Trust reported that no single stretch of river in England or Northern Ireland is in good overall health. Toxic chemicals, which remain in ecosystems for decades, are polluting every single stretch of English rivers. The evidence lays it out clearly: our rivers are choking. There is a pattern across our country, and across our globe, where our collective relationship to rivers is suffering.
And for the residents living along and around the Medway, the connection started to become obvious: as the health of the River was declining, so too was the health and wellbeing of their communities. Loneliness, social isolation, poor mental health; an ever-increasing list with deep and complex ties to the same pollution being pulled out of the River.
Simpson’s framing of water as the source of life, as something we belong to and are part of, something our own health is deeply intertwined with, underpins the work unfolding along the River Medway. It is about returning to the River, reconnecting to water and repairing a forgotten relationship.
Three streams, One river: A holistic approach to restoration
Friends of the River Medway hold a clear objective of “returning the River Medway to its optimum health”, which is realised through three interwoven streams.
Practical action
This is the hands-on work of conservation, clean-up and research. This includes the Ripple Effect citizen science project in partnership with the University of Sussex, which has trained 40 volunteers to test water samples from the River to monitor water health and levels of pollution.
While this project is about data gathering and scientific testing, the close regular engagement and interaction with the River has had positive influences on the wellbeing of the participating volunteers. It is a practical means of realising the reciprocal benefits that care and stewardship for our places can bring to our communities. Friends of the River Medway are also working to implement a Guardian system to restore care, gratitude and respect for their River.
Throughout this work and beyond research, there is strong emphasis on community engagement and education as being tools for building a unified movement of change.
Legal action
This stream is centred on advocating for the rights of the River Medway and holding polluters accountable for their actions. Inspired by the Rights of Nature movement, the group has worked closely with local councils to gain their support for obtaining these fundamental rights of the River as a living entity:
The right to flow
The right to perform essential functions within its ecosystems
The right to be free from pollution
The right to feed and be fed by sustainable aquifers
The right to native biodiversity
The right to regeneration and restoration
The right to maintain lateral and longitudinal connectivity
These are yet to be recognised in law.
Friends of the River Medway demonstrate that one can act as if the fundamental rights already exist in law. One can act as a Guardian of the River, with a firm belief in her legal status. They can care for the river, be it through removing rubbish or planting trees on the River banks. However small the action, the offering of respect and regeneration creates an avenue to subvert the legal barriers and lack of policy change.
Sacred impulse
The third stream, inseparable from the first two, is about helping local communities cultivate their own relationship with the River rooted in respect and reverence. Through creative expression, ceremony and festivals, connection and care develop a deeper meaning - to the River, the community and themselves.
In June 2025, Friends of the River Medway organised a 9-day pilgrimage walk from source to sea. It was an inner voyage of relational repair and an outward journey of river restoration. Unfolding throughout the pilgrimage were 16 different types of workshops, installations and gatherings, all open invitations. Forty to fifty people joined each day, and whoever you were and however you wanted to connect with the River, there was a place for everyone.
Interweaving these three streams offers a holistic approach to the River’s restoration that provides entry points for anyone to become a Guardian of the River in some shape or form. It recognises the utmost importance of practical and legal action, but flowing through this is the understanding of the relational disrepair between us and our natural world. It recognises that while we must challenge polluting profit-driven industries and their harmful practices, we must also look inwards, at the relationships we have allowed to fracture and how we can work to repair them.
Ripple Effects into Rapids
The ripple effects of this work are already emerging in the cultural and relational shifts occurring around the River.
By bringing together farmers, landowners, water companies, local residents and statutory bodies into the same room, Friends of the River Medway have created new spaces for collaboration and tackling harmful industrial practices. One participant reflected that despite the varying standpoints and perspectives, “we all want the River to thrive”. This dissolved differences and provided a collective focus on the River’s health; it was a “confluence point for everyone to work together”.
Other events like “Food on the Medway” have invited people into dialogue through conversational menus, grounded in the simple idea that if “we feed the River, the River feeds us”.
They are continuously cultivating a stewardship mindset, with cross-catchment perspectives and collaborations emerging along the River’s stretch. The River has become the “connective tissue that brings us together and creates cohesion and intention”.
During recent mass water shortages in the area, community working groups came together almost instantly. Community dialogue and action was able to mobilise so rapidly around this emergent issue because of the deep repair work that Friends of the River Medway had catalysed - the relationships that had been nurtured and the spaces of connection and learning that they had opened up.
The activities and efforts to practically care for the River have fostered feelings of responsibility, and this transfers to other areas of a person’s life, it shifts the way they see the world and the people around them. It reminds us how we can encounter our communities with care and compassion.
And while the ecological and conservation activities are a huge part of this work and they have real physical impacts on the River’s health, the core of this project is truly the cultural shift it has helped to set in motion. New relationships are being forged with the River, “rooted in respect, gratitude and care”, moving past the point of seeing the River as a resource to extract from and instead understanding her to be a living part of the community.
“It’s about changing patterns of behaviour and structures, creating places of belonging and care, being part of an ecosystem.” - Monika Koncz MacKenzie
Final reflections: A living, ongoing journey
Friends of the River Medway is not a project with a neat beginning and end. Especially in the context of the polycrisis and the changing climate, it is ongoing and adaptive and deeply responsive to the movements and changes of the place and the River.
Like the River itself, this work flows. It adapts, gathers momentum, and creates new pathways for care and connection, leaving meaning, belonging and collective responsibility in its wake.
For the communities living along the Medway, they are rediscovering the River as a living presence in their daily lives, seeing and feeling her health reflected in their own, and caring for the water that gives them life in return.
Want to be part of this conversation?
The Living Places Network is open to practitioners exploring community-led transitions in place.
We hold regular knowledge sharing calls and we are building the infrastructure to support deeper peer-to-peer learning across the UK.
Subscribe to this Substack to stay in the loop.
And if you are experimenting with similar work in your place, we would love to hear from you.
The Michi Saagigg people: The traditional homelands encompass a vast area of what is now known as southern Ontario. The Michi Saagiig are known as “the people of the big river mouths” and were also known as the “Salmon people” who occupied and fished the north shore of Lake Ontario where the various tributaries emptied into the lake. https://trcbobcaygeon.org/michi-saagiig-history/