‘The Cocker Beck flowing through the heart of Darlington yesterday turned bright green, then black and later bright blue before finishing the day light brown,’ reported The Northern Echo.
It wasn’t the first time that the beck had hit the headlines for the wrong reasons – ‘Beck burps obnoxious green slime’, said the Echo on 17 February 1989 – and it wasn’t the last. Even though the source of the coloured contaminants was quickly traced to a printing factory, things soon got much nastier. On 7 August, the park gates were bolted in the interests of public health after floating foreign bodies were found. ‘The beck is running raw sewage,’ a resident was quoted as saying.
Investigations discovered that blocked sewers as far away as Elton Road and Milbank Road were causing sewage to run into rainwater channels that flowed into the beck. The pollution was compounded by scores of washing machines in the nearby terraces which had been wrongly plumbed in – some of them for as long as fifty years.
After an eight-month clean-up, mayor Barrie Lamb ceremonially reopened the Denes on 6 April 1990, and the beck was so clean that four months later police warned takeaway shops to be certain of their salad sources after groups of Oriental-looking women were reportedly seen collecting bagfuls of wild watercress from its banks.
(Lloyd: The History of the Denes of Darlington)