A campaigner explains how his Catholic sensibility drives his involvement in the growing movement to regenerate the UK’s badly degraded rivers.

Monks Park, one of several given names for this slightly tatty green space in north-west London, might once have been adjacent to an abbey. No sign of that today, though: just traffic on the A406 North Circular Road that runs (or doesn’t) noisily along one boundary. Inside the park’s boundaries, I am knee-deep, literally, in its obvious other feature: the River Brent, as it flows through the clusters of trees and bushes. Those long-ago monks may once have drawn inspiration here from God’s Creation, but in this outer part of the metropolis our throwaway culture prefers to use the river as a dumping ground for shopping ­trolleys and other unseemly detritus. And no one seems to give a damn.

So why stand here, one sunny morning, with a litter-picker in one gloved hand and a rubbish sack in the other, alongside a group of volunteers cleaning the place up for the umpteenth time (and struggling to know what to do with the large old fizzy-drink bottles containing urine)? Because it is a community-minded thing to do? To ­channel a bit of St Francis of Assisi’s counter-cultural radicalism and his imperative to love nature in this, the 800th anniversary of his death? I wish I was that selfless.

No, my real reason is to meet someone who really does give a damn about what we are doing to our precious environment. Ben Morris, television director and teacher, Catholic-raised, Ampleforth-educated, the youngest of three prominent brothers – the eldest is satirist and film-maker Chris (Brass Eye) and Tom (the theatre director who brought Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse to the stage) is in the middle – is in his waders mid-stream in the Brent, wrestling with a trolley that has collected a small flotilla of rubbish around its frame.

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