Campaigners are calling for real-time pollution alerts at Windermere after a seven-year-old boy nearly died from an E. coli infection contracted while kayaking on the lake.
Rex Earley began to feel unwell on a late August afternoon last year after returning with his family from a 45-minute kayaking trip on the lake.
He went to bed, but later woke up with stomach cramps. His mother, Claire, grew concerned when she saw the toilet at their holiday campsite was full of blood. Rex was taken to hospital and remained there for six weeks, suffering bouts of delirium, partial renal failure, gallstones and a collapsed lung. He will be under medical supervision for the next eight years.
While it cannot be confirmed what caused his E. coli, United Utilities’ sewage treatment works discharge into the lake. Other sources of pollution include private sewage treatment works and 1,800 septic tanks.
Claire Earley noticed the water seemed murky on the morning of their kayaking trip, but was reassured when she checked the Environment Agency website and found that it had rated the water quality of bathing sites around the lake “excellent”.
Matt Staniek, the founder of the campaign group Save Windermere, told The Times that the Earley family’s experience showed that the agency’s water quality monitoring was “not fit for purpose.”
Between May and September, the Environment Agency assesses the water quality of four sites around the lake weekly. “But people don’t just swim at these sites,” Staniek said, adding that the tests were too infrequent to detect pollution incidents.
Despite being a Unesco world heritage site, England’s largest lake has become a danger to swimmers in recent years thanks not only to E. coli but to toxic blooms of blue-green algae, induced by sewage discharges.
In 2024, the latest year for which data is available, there were illegal sewage spills in or around Windermere on 140 days, the highest ever recorded. In August 2025 the Olympic marathon swimmer Hector Pardoe independently monitored water quality while swimming across the lake. Laboratory analysis found that E. coli levels were more than eight times higher than the threshold for “excellent” bathing water.
Staniek called on the Environment Agency to forecast pollution incidents at Windermere using real-time sewage spill data from United Utilities, as well as weather forecasts to predict algal blooms. The agency has already set up such early-warning systems for coastal bathing sites.
Graham Jackson, 42, also fell ill after swimming in the lake in June last year. “That night I literally got the worst fever I’ve ever had,” he told Channel 4. “My temperature was sky high.” He was treated in hospital for E. coli infection for ten days, sent home, and then admitted to hospital once again with sepsis.
Staniek said “the only long-term solution for swimmers’ health at Windermere is to stop sewage spills”.
United Utilities said its storm overflow at Brockhole, where the Earley family went kayaking, had not discharged for more than three weeks at the time of their outing, and that it did not have any assets within 3.5 miles of where Jackson went swimming.
The company has funded a large engineering study to examine how to eliminate all sewage pollution from the lake, and said it would spend £200 million over the next four years to deliver the biggest upgrade to the lake’s wastewater infrastructure in more than a century.
