Whitehaven’s Polluted Harbour is “Riviera of the North” NuSpeak Lives

FEB 10, 2026, Lakes Against Nuclear Dump

This months Cumbria Life has a gushing “People and Places” article “A Day Out in Whitehaven” with the strap line “Cornwall and Cannes eat your heart out- Discover a popular seaside town on the Cumbrian Coast” Words and Photos by Geneve Bartholomew – Brand.

The article makes much of the Sellafield funded Beacon Museum and Edge water sports centre along with the also Sellafield funded new gaming centre called LEVELS “a new digital and gaming hub located at the Grade 11 listed former Whittles building in the heart of the town.” The gaming hub will no doubt be a recruitment source for the next generation of AI robotics operators at Sellafield.

The heart of the town is being bought up by Sellafield with a pithy letter in the 4th February Whitehaven News from former councillor Tim Knowles saying “I was recently concerned that Whitehaven had experienced some kind of emergency. The town seemed full of people wandering around in high visibility clothing but with no apparent purpose. I was later told that this is the latest in Sellafield outfitting…..is the Hi Vis -uniform becoming a rather “in your face” badge of relative wealth around town.” The letter goes on to remark about “the number of sheds and fences painted in the famous “BNFL blue” all around West Cumbria.” (takeaways still happen)

Many £Millions of pounds of taxpayers money are being poured into Whitehaven filtered through the big brother hands of Sellafield. That is not all that is being poured into Whitehaven.

What the “Riviera of the North” article in Cumbria Life fails to mention is the outrageous state of the harbour with water that can no longer be called water in the docks. The ongoing pollution event started in 2022 and has continued ever since with the acid mine pollution from historic mines which includes the sulphur producing Anhydrite Mine at the old Marchon site (now scandalously approved for housing) . The ‘water’ only ran clear for a short time last September when Silt Buster machines were in operation in the rail tunnel which drains to the culvert in Queen’s Dock.

We recently released FOI answers to the authorities and the press. BBC online did cover this albeit not telling the whole story but with much more openness that that previously aired and certainly without the rose tinted specs of the Cumbria Life article. If this ongoing pollution event was happening in Cornwall or Cannes there would be banner headlines worldwide. But here in Whitehaven there are vested interests in keeping schtum about the impacts of deep mining because guess who wants to mine out the biggest void ever on the Lake District coast – yep our generous benefactor Sellafield.

The BBC online article can be read in full here extract below [on original] https://lakesagainstnucleardump.com/2026/02/10/whitehavens-polluted-harbour-is-riviera-of-the-north-nuspeak-lives/?page_id=1772