No wonder Britain feels like a dump, it’s being treated as one

Huge piles of garbage line the streets near Brick Lane
Huge piles of garbage line the streets near Brick Lane

When the comic writer Nina Stibbe returned to North London after living in Cornwall for twenty years, there was one key change she noted in her beady-eyed diary Went to London, Took the Dog: “The streets are strewn with rubbish that spreads from the molested bin bags piled at every street corner.”

Later in the books she laments the vast number of fast-food wrappers, old coffee cups and discarded vapes that litter every byway; a more pernicious and pervasive jetsam than the junk of old. The charity Keep Britain Tidy have just announced that more than two million bits of litter are discarded in the UK every day, which feels like a gross under-estimate of all the sweet wrappers, crisp packets, plastic bottles, fag ends and cans thrown to the zephyrs by most of the public, most of the time. And that’s before you even begin to factor in fly tippers.

The cause of Grubby Britain’s mounting filth is clear: the stigma that was attached to “littering” throughout my youth has been slowly and effectively dismantled, to the point many feel it’s someone else’s duty to pick up their detritus.

When I was a child, you were lectured from dawn-to-dusk by parents, teachers, Brown Owl and the local vicar about how deeply shameful it was to drop a tiny sweet wrapper on the ground. Then, when you got home for tea, you switched on The Wombles, furry environmentalists who spent their days tirelessly “looking for litter to trundle away.” I even had a poster of brainiac Wellington Womble on my wall, my very first pin-up.

In fact, everywhere you turned circa 1977 there were public information videos spreading the message, including a pop version featuring The New Seekers with lyrics that now feel tragically prophetic and unheeded: “We’ve got to do it now, we can’t go on forever / Fouling up the streams, the rivers and the sea”. The accompanying track went to no. 33 in the pop charts and still feels like the kind of music that would work well with a litterpicker and a tambourine.

In fact, scattering rubbish was considered so downright evil in the 70s that the very worst crime I could devise, in order to cement my membership of Toys Hills’ Terrible Two Witches’ Club (I could tell you about it, but then I’d have to bury you alive under a beech tree) was to post Wagon Wheel wrappers through the Royal Mail letterbox at Kent’s Ide Hill Post Office. The guilt still leaves a raw welt on my soul.

But it wasn’t all shame and castigation. There were plenty of energetic role-models, generally female (the Keep Britain Tidy movement sprung out of the WI) spurring you into good citizenship. My mother always took a bag out walking to pick up plastic, tissues and more unspeakable stuff like old copies of Health and Efficiency. It took us a good ten years to work out the purpose of the weird black vibrating rubber tool, shaped like a bike pump we found in a pile of leaves.

All walks involved a zig-zagging odyssey as we retrieved empty Quavers packets and KitKat foil from hedges. On one infamous occasion mum made us wear her old clothes from the 1960s and go foraging for garbage down the alleyway beside Sevenoaks cinema.

Since three of the five Pelling siblings went to school in Sevenoaks, this actually did involve a dose of shame and humiliation. “Our friends will see us and laugh,” we wailed. It was an excellent way of learning that this isn’t anywhere close to the worst possible outcome – although my little brother’s probably glad Instagram didn’t exist to immortalise his outing in mum’s tunic dress.

The habits our mother installed have never left me. I see similar litter-itis in other women my age. Last weekend I was staying with a friend in Cornwall and we walked slowly, eyes on the shore, as she seized on motley plastics and great lengths of discarded fishline.

We middle-aged female Wombles are also great at ticking-off litter louts; there’s nothing like harnessing menopausal rage in the service of a better environment. But it would be even more effective if everyone got involved in the public shaming. Most people wouldn’t hesitate to intervene if they saw someone strike a small child or woman. Dropped litter hurts the environment and society: we should react with the same level of outrage.