The River Mersey has been voted the dirtiest river in the North in an online poll organised by the RSPB, WWF and the Angling Trust.

The River Thames was voted the least clean in England and Wales with the River Wye coming top in the vote organised by the Our Rivers campaign.

Thousands of people voted online since the poll was launched in August.

More than £1bn has been spent in the past 25 years cleaning the river that runs from Stockport to Liverpool.

Ken Dooley from the Liverpool Angling Association said: "People look at the Mersey and see that it's dirty, but that's down to the tidal flow and the shape of the river.

"It contains billions of gallons of water in a high tide and when the tide sucks out it rips through and causes the dirty appearance of the water, but the quality has improved.

"You don't see any sewerage on the beach at Crosby anymore."

A spokesman for Our Rivers said: "The Environment Agency needs to bring together conservationists, anglers, farmers, landowners and other interested groups at a local level so that we can work in partnership to address the pressures threatening our rivers."

Source: BBC

Get ya gloves n bleach out summer, scuba in there n get it clean

Its not perfect , but its a lot cleaner now than it was when i was growing up in Seacombe in the 80's.

The trouble is that people, especially those who answer on-line polls, don't take notice of the fact that it is an estuarial river and mud gets washed down from upstream. It's no good expecting rivers like to Mersey to look like the Tay and the Dee in Scotland, different environment. The river is pretty clean to how it used to be, don't see many Mersey Goldfish floating around like you used to.