Britain's Queen Victoria (1819 - 1901) loved the sea. Her "Bathing Machine," a rolling beach cabin to protect her privacy, can still be seen today on the private beach of her country estate Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.
Try taking a dip in the cool waters today though and you may find yourself swimming in raw sewage.
Cowes Beach, near Queen Victoria's former home, is the most polluted beach in the country, awash with raw sewage, according to a new analysis.
Dirty water flowed into the sea there for almost 5,000 hours last year, official data analysed by environmental campaigners Friends of the Earth shows.
This is no isolated case, as a map created by Surfers against Sewage shows spots where raw sewage has just been released into the sea. They denote places where swimming is strongly discouraged. The map shows many of them.
In England alone, more than 440,000 hours of untreated wastewater were discharged into the sea along the coast in 2023, a quarter near bathing beaches.
Protests are rife nationwide but the problem is not new. The European Environment Agency's (EEA) 2020 bathing water quality report shows Britain coming last.
Only 17.2% of British bathing sites were rated as excellent - far from German levels with 89.9%, or Greece with 97.1%
The fact that untreated wastewater occasionally finds its way into lakes, rivers and coastal waters happens in other places too, as wastewater and rainwater often flow into a single sewer system.
To prevent sewage from being pushed back into houses and onto streets during heavy rainfall and to prevent treatment plants from overflowing, sewerage systems are relieved by combined sewer overflow.
A mixture of untreated wastewater and rainwater then flows directly into nature.
But in Britain, this has almost become the norm in the UK and sometimes happens even when it hasn't rained.
However, according to infrastructure expert and Professor of Economic Policy Dieter Helm from Oxford University, the combined sewerage system is not the core of the problem.
A nationwide separate system would be impossible to finance - and not even necessary, he told dpa. The problem is that hardly any investment has been made in the existing sewage system in recent decades, despite higher demands and a growing population.
That is due to a catastrophic failure on the part of the supervisory authorities, says Helm, after water utilities privatized during the 1980s were not prevented from diligently paying dividends to their shareholders instead of investing - even with money that came from loans.
"It's like taking your own goalkeeper off the pitch in football first and then doing without a referee," says Helm, who sees insolvency-like proceedings as the only way out for the highly indebted water supplier Thames Water.
However, both major political parties in the UK have so far denied this. Instead, the supervisory authorities are negotiating investment programmes with the water suppliers, which are expected to result in price increases of up to 44% for households, horrifying many Britons.
Just in time for the start of the swimming season in the UK in mid-May, the news made headlines that even the idyllic Lake Windermere in the Lake District was contaminated with faeces.
Meanwhile, further south, dozens of people in the county of Devon fell ill with diarrhoea and nausea due to contaminated drinking water.
Helm says it will be at least 10 years before Britain's sewage problem is solved.
