By Zofia Page, River Activist at Friends of the River Medway

 

How do you change the way a council thinks?

 

In April 2026, Maidstone Borough Council did something no UK council had done before. It adopted a Rights of Nature Framework, a formal commitment that rivers, woodlands, soils and wildlife have an intrinsic right to exist and flourish, not just a price tag attached to what they provide for people. It marked a fundamental shift in the way local governance thinks.

The framework isn’t just symbolic, either. It’s now woven into the council’s Biodiversity Action Plan, its Climate Change Action Plan, and its planning processes. Nature has a seat at the table.

Most councils don’t change how they think. They change what they’re forced to do. So how did Maidstone arrive at the other kind of change?

The River Medway Pilgrimage: A conduit for change

 

Policy rarely shifts because of one event. Transformative change is the product of years of effort by councillors, officers, lawyers, campaigners and communities. Still, political progress often has turning points that speed up what once felt out of reach.

Here, the catalyst was an unexpected one: a pilgrimage along the River Medway, From Source to Sea. A single thread within a much larger story, but one that reignited and connected a movement.

In July 2025, somewhere between forty and fifty people set out to walk the Medway from its humble beginnings in the High Weald to where it meets the Thames and flows onward to the sea.

Organised by Friends of the River Medway, the journey wasn’t designed to deliver a policy document. It was designed to build a relationship.

Walkers took part in citizen science, collected litter, cooked meals using food grown within the catchment, and created art inspired by the river. Farmers and landowners were drawn into dialogue with campaigners who don’t typically sit at the same table. Water ceremonies and flower offerings rooted people into connection in a way that lasts longer than the anger of watching sewage pour into a river. Different streams of care and action, each deepening a relationship with the river and sowing seeds for long-term change.

As the journey unfolded, a single thread ran through all of it: a route to bring people into a renewed way of seeing and feeling the river, one where it isn’t just a blue line moving through the landscape, but something sacred, and alive. That understanding isn’t new. Indigenous cultures across the world have long treated rivers as living relatives rather than infrastructure, an understanding that helped secure legal personhood for New Zealand’s Whanganui River and has since rippled through Rights of Nature movements globally.

Britain had its own version of this once. Archaeologists have pulled Bronze and Iron Age offerings out of British rivers, evidence that water was once treated as something more than a route from A to B. That relationship eroded over centuries as rivers became infrastructure: things to dam, drain, extract from, manage.

So the question becomes: how do we come back into that relationship? As the walkers moved downriver, it became clear this wasn’t about learning something new so much as remembering something already there. That act of remembering that relationship built momentum, and momentum built toward the gathering that would help spark change.

 

The Confluence: A meeting that wasn’t a meeting

 

The peak of the pilgrimage came at a gathering, or “Confluence,” organised by Friends of the River Medway, where councillors from across the Medway catchment came together for the first time.

Guided by environmentalist and Friends of the River Medway co-founder Tristram Stuart, the event deliberately stepped outside the format of a traditional council meeting. There were no committee papers, no formal motions, no adversarial back-and-forth across a horseshoe table. Just space to listen, to each other, to their communities, and to the river itself.

That stripped-down format mattered. Council meetings are built for opposition: motions, amendments, votes won and lost. The Confluence wasn’t built that way. It let councillors experience something a consultation response can never convey, that public care for a river isn’t an abstraction. It was standing next to them, gleaming faces and muddy trainers.

And the Confluence wasn’t working uncharted ground. It landed on terrain already being prepared elsewhere, by councils, communities and campaigns making the case for Rights of Nature across the country. Just days before the pilgrimage set off, Friends of the River Medway inspired Rachel Millward to introduce a Rights of Rivers motion through Wealden District Council. It passed with an overwhelming majority, proving the idea could survive contact with actual local government, and building the case for other councils across the catchment. The Medway pilgrimage landed into a movement already building speed.

At the end of the Confluence, pilgrims and councillors stood together on Aylesford Bridge and made personal pledges to the river. Representatives from Maidstone Borough Council were among them. And, overlooking the water, they knew: it was time to create change.

A pledge on a bridge isn’t policy. But it’s hard to walk back from.

The power of pilgrimage

 

It would be too neat to say one pilgrimage produced one policy. It didn’t. The framework is the product of years of legal groundwork, including continued input from environmental barrister Paul Powlesland, and of campaigns like Love Our Ouse that pushed Rights of Nature into public conversation long before Maidstone signed anything.

What the pilgrimage did was two-pronged. For those who walked the full journey, days spent in the catchment created an embodied experience that’s hard to forget, mud underfoot, conversations that ran longer than any meeting allows, a relationship with the river built in the body, not just the mind. You can ignore a report. It’s harder to ignore a memory.

For the councillors who only joined for the Confluence, it offered a glimpse into something already in motion, and a different kind of room to have a conversation in, guided by people who had spent days falling in love with the river, and holding its wisdom in turn. It’s the kind of moment that opens the door to deeper, slower cultural change, the sort no single meeting can produce on its own.

People change conversations. Conversations change institutions. Institutions change policy.

Pilgrimage is usually framed as a personal transformation, a walk that changes the walker. The Medway pilgrimage suggests something bigger: that walking can also transform the place itself, not through the act of walking, but through what walking does to people, and what people then do to institutions.

With English rivers facing pollution, habitat loss, water abstraction and mounting climate pressure, communities are casting around for tools that actually work. Rights of Nature is one. Pilgrimage, it turns out, might be the thing that gets it into the room.

Friends of the River Medway plans to release a Pilgrimage Toolkit so other communities can run their own source-to-sea pilgrimages that inspire both inner and outer transformation. Because real change doesn’t start in a policy document: it starts with changed hearts and minds, people willing to walk somewhere together first.

Find out more about the River Medway Pilgrimage here.

Join this year’s River Medway Pilgrimage Confluence and see how to engage councillors on the rights of rivers in action. Tickets here.