Sompting Brooks: Opening date for hidden gem between Sompting and Worthing revealed after river rerouted

A sneak preview was given on Friday, with walking tours for visitors to the EPIC River and Agecraft Exhibition at the Harriet Johnson Centre.

Linda Kerrison, volunteer and engagement officer at the Ouse and Adur Rivers Trust, guided small groups through Sompting Brooks to see how the Broadwater Brook stream has been opened up.

Most of it had not been visible since the Second World War, until the EPIC (Enhancing Places, Inspiring Communities) Project was awarded a £871,400 Heritage Lottery Fund grant to uncover a 1km section to improve the area’s natural heritage.

CLICK HERE for more pictures from the Sompting Brooks Trail

Linda said: “We lovingly call it a river but it is really a wetland system. Half the money was for the river to make it better for wildlife and the environment, half was for community-based projects.

“More than 1,000 individuals have been involved, including doing ecological surveys. We are looking to see what was there to start with and will then look at how much we have improved it.”

The project came about around 2009, when the Environment Agency looked at re-routing the river, but it was ‘far too much money to just move a little stream’. Peter King, director of the trust, then got involved.

Linda said: “We had never done anything quite on this scale, so it was quite a big learning curve.

“The source of the river is a pond behind The Gardeners Arms and a lot of the brook runs underground, an aquifer that dries up through the summer.”

Broadwater Brook, which joins up with the Teville Stream in Worthing, is about 2.5km long and the trust has ‘played with’ about 1km of it.

Linda said: “It is very flat, which caused problems at the start. It is highly polluted, as it takes road run-off, and has a lot of sedimentation. Anything that goes down the drains in the road ends up in the river.

“We didn’t want to disturb the old route, so the option was to do nothing or start a whole new route. We started with an arable field that had been used for intensive farming.”

There are 20 acres of arable farmland and part of it is a nature reserve that is not open to the public.

Linda said: “It had got all sorts of things that we don’t like in water. We really needed to clean it and make it better. We wanted to make it resilient to climate change and to reconnect it with the local area and the wildlife. We also wanted it to be a bit of a showcase for the people of Sompting.

“People will be able to walk around here, there is a picnic area and a willow hide for watching wildlife. It is a really calm place to be. Bordered by East Worthing, Lancing, the A27 and the railway line, it is a hidden gem, something you don’t expect in the area.

“There were 120 species when we first started and two years later, we can count 500 species here.

“This little stream has done something quite remarkable. It is grown vegetation, which is very unusual in the area as generally Sussex streams don’t have a lot of that. That is probably because it is not very fast flowing.

“It has these amazing plants in there and they are doing a job for us in cleaning up the river. It is as clean as we can make it thanks to nature itself.”

There are two sediment traps for road run-off, which will slow it down and be easy to clean, and willow trees have been planted to create shade to help protect the water from temperature changes. In total, the trust has planted 500 trees and 2km of hedgerows, plus plug planting.

Sompting Brooks will open to the public on Monday, September 6, and can be accessed via a permissive footpath at the bottom of Loose Lane. There are three wooden sculptures along the trail, a bench and a Knucker Hole dragon with its nest.

Peter King, director of the Ouse and Adur Rivers Trust, said the project was grateful to players of the National Lottery and other significant funders, including the Environment Agency.