Boundary Waters

The River Mersey is hungry. Its mouth swells, spewing into the estuary. Waves lacerate railings and pool beneath my feet. It’s a cold morning at Perch Rock, New Brighton—a former coastal defence battery and lighthouse named after a wooden perch, once rigged with a light in the 17th century. This makeshift beacon marked one of the first navigation points into the Mersey’s oesophagus and it’s here I begin my walk along the river’s length—from mouth to source, head to tail.
            I grew up near the river’s industrial banks, on a hill overlooking the shipyards. As a child I’d spend long afternoons at my bedroom window watching oil tankers slide up and down the river pulled along by diminutive tugboats. I didn’t understand why two boats were needed to navigate the water, but I did know it was possessed by dangerous forces and currents concealed deep inside its belly, so it made sense that two boats must be better than one.Back then, the Mersey was a portal into a rich, imaginative world filled with brave seafarers, wild currents and hulking vessels, and although this wonder has worn off, the river still draws me in.
            The word ‘Mersey’ is derived from the Anglo-Saxon mǣres, meaning ‘of a boundary’—yet its influence is vast. Once forming the arterial tracts of the transatlantic slave trade and British Empire, this 1,810 sq mile basin was part of an expansive system of expolitation and violence, whose deep currents continue to flow through and shape our lives today. After the Second World War, the river’s colonial waterways were repurposed for transporting crude oil, offering quick access to global shipping lanes ideal for the expanding petrochemical industry that now dominates its banks. These histories of extraction are written into the Mersey’s waves and it’s a cruel irony that this river—whose very name speaks of boundaries—now plays a central role in an expanding fossil fuel industry that is rapidly tearing through the planet’s ecological limits.

When the Mersey thrives, we thrive too.
 

Icy water stings my face. I hug the mouth of the river as I walk, the frenzy of its tide saying something I can’t quite translate. The Mersey—home to some of the fastest tidal runs in Europe—moves with urgency. If rivers have mouths, can they speak? And if they could, what would they say? About the Cairngorms,Scottish writer Nan Shepherd wrote  ‘one cannot know the rivers till one has seen them at their sources…’. I think about that line—and about what is voiced and what is not—as waves leap above the railings, pounding down and soaking my hair and coat. In this sudden outburst, I felt small again and uncomfortably close to the thing I had feared was lurking beneath the oil tankers: something elemental and buried, a primal reservoir. Maybe this is what Shepherd meant by seeing sources—that to truly know a river, you must seek out its hidden stories and be willing to confront what has long been submerged. Then again, maybe I’m just trying to psychoanalyze the Mersey—and I can’t help but smile at the thought of it sprawled out on a therapist’s couch. I turn back toward the water, its mouth speaking in rabid, fractured cadences—echoes of past and present violence, a voice I am still learning to hear.
            Formed around 8,000 years ago the River Mersey was born of ice. As glaciers slid inland from the Irish Sea, they carved deep channels into the bedrock, laying the river’s foundations. Once the glaciers retreated, populations moved in and boundaries settled. But its riverbanks remained partially wild, as told by the eponymous hero of the late 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight who journeys through the ‘wyldrenesse’ of Wirral and tells us that in this place, ‘Wonde þer bot lyte/þat auþer god oþer gome wyth goud hert louied’ (there lived but few who loved God or man with a good heart). After Gawain’s ‘wylde’ lands were cleared and the river’s seams stitched together by the steady passage of ferry boats, the stage was set for future industrialisation.
            As I approach Seacombe, I spot colossal brick warehouses along the waterfront—originally built to store goods from the transatlantic slave trade. Those next to Everton Football Club’s new stadium have been repurposed as  luxury flats (one such development encourages prospective buyers to “dream big again”). Between 1700 and 1807, ships from Liverpool carried an estimated 1.5 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. The merchants who used the region’s waters were amongst Britain’s most active and prosperous colonial traders, their success built on the back of brutality. The trade was triangular in nature: ships left the city loaded up with goods such as textiles, firearms and alcohol, which were then sold in West Africa in exchange for slaves. These captives then endured a six to eight week journey to the Americas in abysmal conditions where they were sold for commodities like sugar, coffee, cocoa, cotton, tobacco and wood. Once back in Liverpool, the goods were transported on or stored in warehouses like the ones I can see in the distance. Although monuments to slavery are most visible in the city’s statues, friezes, and street names, its waterways too hold that brutal legacy and are sites of passage, profit, and profound loss. I watch the ferry boat platform bob up and down. The water writhes and swells. 
            I lean over the rail and cup my ears. Many have tried to tune into the Mersey’s sound—most famously in the 1960s, when the Mersey Beat emerged: a fluid blend of music and poetry shaped by British and American rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, carried into Liverpool by a steady flow of transatlantic liners. A seagull above my head beats its wings and makes a low, piercing keow. The water’s rhythm forms a sloshing backing track, broken by the occasional boat horn. This river has a strong track record of birthing musicians and poets—leading Allen Ginsberg in the 1960s to proclaim that “Liverpool is at the present moment, the centre of consciousness of the human universe” (though he also said the same thing about Milwaukee and Baltimore). Ginsberg wasn’t alone in sensing a deeper consciousness at work along the Mersey. In his 1962 book Memories, Dreams, Reflections, controversial psychoanalyst Carl Jung recounts a vivid dream in which he finds himself in a dark, rain-soaked Liverpool—a city glistening with wetness, cloaked in fog and shadow. Yet at the centre of this oppressive landscape, he sees a radiant island bathed in sunlight, where a magnolia tree blossoms with ‘unearthly beauty’. This vision reveals a source of vitality, prompting him to declare Liverpool the ‘pool of life’. Standing here now, with the river churning below, I wonder how its undercurrents have shaped the unconscious of others too, and how they continue to pull at something deeper, older and unresolved.

More seagulls circle overhead. These river-dwelling birds are part of a lively ecosystem that relies on the water for survival—alongside otters, dolphins, harbour porpoises, seals, and fish. Often overlooked by humans who share this dependency, they are a reminder of our own reliance on the river, however much we choose to deny it. When the Mersey thrives, we thrive too. And when it becomes sick, so do we. I reach the river’s industrial edge. Beyond Birkenhead Priory is Tranmere Oil Terminal, the first above-ground indicator of the oily infrastructure that runs along the banks. If this river was born of ice, its teenage years have been spent on a diet of man-made petrochemicals. After the first dock opened in 1715, textile mills opened up at pace. Bleaching, dyeing and finishing trades followed, as well as expanding chemical works and paper and glass industries. The Mersey became a central repository for industrial waste like mercury; DDT; sewage from the expanding city, and many other industrial toxic pollutants. This collective dumping and absence of regulation meant that by the 1960s, when the river was pulsing through the work of musicians, poets and thinkers, it was also dying. As the natural rhythms of the Mersey seized up, lifecycles shattered. It entered into a kind of cardiac arrest and by the late 70s it was so arrhythmic, choked and lifeless that people would joke that you couldn’t drown in the river because you’d die of poisoning first. 
            It was at this point, when the river was near silent, some began to take note of its fading pulse. Following the Toxeth riots of 1981—when long-standing tensions between local police and the city’s black community boiled over—Conservative politician Michael Heseltine describes how he took some time off from Cabinet to go to Liverpool and  ‘literally walk the streets and talk, listen and investigate’. The Mersey, he said , “got to me… I saw this huge majestic river flowing through this great British city and I just felt ashamed”. Whether Heseltine felt an equal sense of shame over the city’s soaring unemployment and institutionalised racism remains to be seen, but his anguish over the river’s condition was enough to spur one of the largest clean-up operations in Europe. It took 25 years and four billion pounds to transform the Mersey from a dead river into one capable of sustaining life.
            

Before long, it becomes impossible to follow the river’s edge—my path is blocked by the Eastham oil refinery, a fenced-off storage and export facility linked to the vast Stanlow plant. Forced inland, I’m guided away from the water and around this industrial barrier. The refinery infrastructure, which in some ways resembles a playground with metal tube slides and criss-cross climbing frames, is circled by few public roads. Past Eastham I follow the river’s bend. Gas flares flicker in the distance. Stanlow is one of the largest oil refineries in Europe and marks the start of a chemical nexus that sits across the Mersey’s digestive tract, an industrial network that has long starved the river and its inhabitants of essential nutrients. Despite the four billion dollar investment to reinvigorate the river, pollution remains. The Mersey’s water now lies grey, brown, turbid and foamy in parts. It doesn’t look healthy but I know toxicity is rarely visible. Reports show that the Mersey catchment contains the third-highest concentration of PFOS—a banned toxic chemical and member of the PFAS group—anywhere in the world. These so-called ‘forever chemicals’, found in everyday items like waterproof clothing and non-stick pans, are highly resistant to breakdown and can persist in the environment for thousands of years—timescales that are difficult to comprehend. PFAS have been linked to a range of health issues, including cancer, immune system suppression, and reproductive and developmental problems.
            I first became curious about the lifespan of synthetic chemicals when my father began treatment for cancer. His chemotherapy was intensely toxic, and I wanted to understand how deeply toxicity is woven into our lives. It felt like an inescapable loop—using poisons to treat a disease that can itself be triggered by exposure to poisons—as if we are all consigned to live and die within a web of synthetic compounds. After my father died, we scattered his ashes in the middle of the Mersey. As the boat shuddered and slowed, and as he flowed into the water, I realised he was now part of a new body I knew little about. Afterwards I had so many questions: what’s actually in this river? Why is it still so polluted? Why do these chemicals get to live forever, but we don’t?

I end the day here, at this petrochemical juncture, a site that feels central to the Mersey’s past and its uncertain future.
 

The sky begins to darken and I stand at the river’s edge, now closer to Stanlow, watching gas flares light up the black breath of the earth. Planes rumble low overhead, landing at Liverpool airport opposite. I still have a long way to walk before reaching the river’s source—reportedly tucked beside a Sainsbury’s in Stockport—but I end the day here, at this petrochemical juncture, a site that feels central to the Mersey’s past and its uncertain future. I end the walk with more questions than answers, and a growing desire to understand how we might listen to the voice of the river and advocate for its rights. If this landscape was shaped by the ruthless accumulation of wealth—regardless of cost—how do we reimagine a collective future that rejects these logics of exploitation and degradation, and instead works with natural systems rather than depleting them?
            Not far from here, on the Formby foreshore, humans and animal footprints are imprinted into silt deposits dating back 9,000 years. Remarkably, at low tide, you can still follow their steps—tracing the faint marks of lives once lived lightly on the land. But 9,000 years from now, what traces will we leave behind? When the river has reclaimed Stanlow, and synthetic chemicals still swirl through its waters, will we have learned what it truly means to be Mersey—to be ‘of a boundary’?”