Open data
This site is built out of other people’s open data. What it adds is the joining up — one register of every bathing water in Britain and Ireland, the regulators’ own spill returns attached to the right beaches, every recent laboratory sample in one shape. That is published here on the same terms it was given: take it, and say where it came from.
Files
- bathing-waters.csv — every bathing water this site covers, with its published sampling point and latest annual classification.
- spills-by-bathing-water.csv — storm overflow spills and hours per beach per year, England and Wales, from the EA’s annual returns. Also readable as a table on the spill record.
- bathing-water-samples.csv — the individual laboratory samples: E. coli and intestinal enterococci per 100ml with their dates, for England, Wales, Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Live endpoints
These answer JSON and are what the pages themselves read. They are rate-limited by nothing but good manners; if you are going to poll one every minute, please do not.
/swim/data— the current snapshot: a verdict and its reasons for every bathing water, plus feed health./swim/data?brief=1— the same, one line per beach, small enough to embed./swim/illness.json— the anonymous illness counts shown on the illness page./swim/alerts.xml— warnings as a feed, filterable by?country=or?beach=./swim/sites.json— the register the pages are built from.
Licences, and what they ask of you
Nothing here is this site’s to give away outright. Each file names its sources in its own first lines, and the terms come from them:
- Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales, SEPA, DAERA and the Department for Transport data is under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which asks for attribution.
- EPA Ireland and Transport for Ireland data is under CC-BY 4.0, which asks for the same.
- Place and amenity data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence, which asks for attribution and share-alike on derived databases.
- What this site added — the joins, the wording, the code — you may use freely. A link back is welcome and not required.
What is not here
Reader submissions. Condition reports and illness reports are read by a person before they are published and belong on the page of the place they describe, not in a spreadsheet that can be matched against something else. The illness counts are published as totals by place and month, which is as fine-grained as that record will ever get.
If a file is wrong
Tell me and I will fix it, or say plainly that I cannot. The address is on the about page. Mistakes in the joining are mine; mistakes in the underlying returns belong to whoever filed them, and where I know of one I say so on the page.