The River Chess at Rickmansworth

Nobody tests this water

This is a river gauge, not a bathing water. No one samples it for E. coli or intestinal enterococci, no one issues a pollution forecast for it, and there is no annual classification. The level above says how much water is coming down — nothing at all about what is in it.

Rivers downstream of a storm overflow can carry sewage after heavy rain, and most of England’s rivers have one somewhere upstream. If you want water somebody actually tests, the nearest bathing water is below.

Where it is

That is the gauge, which is a piece of flood monitoring equipment rather than a place to get in. It tells you about this stretch of river, not about a spot on the bank.

Along the same river

Other gauged stretches of the River Chess, nearest first.

Nearby on this site

Where this reading comes from

Environment Agency real-time flood-monitoring, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0 and updated about every fifteen minutes. The typical range is the Agency’s own figure for this gauge. Levels are measured against a local datum, so a reading here cannot be compared with a reading at another gauge — only with this one’s usual range.

England only. Scotland and Wales publish river levels separately and are not on this site yet.