For more than six years, asbestos has been washing up with the tide, turning one of Plymouth's handful of swimming spots into the centre of a growing environmental mystery. Mount Batten Beach has been fenced off since the summer, and access restricted to two other areas on the peninsula. It comes after tests in April and July found asbestos fibres in sand samples at levels that could pose a risk to health if inhaled, Plymouth City Council said.
Inhaling the fibres can increase the risk of serious diseases - including lung cancer - decades after exposure. The first discovery came in 2019 when 500kg (1,100lb) of material containing the toxic substance was removed from the shoreline, which sits on Plymouth Sound in one of the South West's most popular holiday destinations. In total, more than 1.5 tonnes of material containing asbestos, external, including both white and the more dangerous blue varieties, has been cleared from the beach and nearby sites.
Residents and experts believe the material may be coming from roofing and construction waste linked to the former RAF Mount Batten base, where coastal erosion is thought to be exposing the buried material. The closure has left swimmers, business owners and residents wondering when, or even if, the beach will reopen, and how it looks against the backdrop of Plymouth Sound being named the UK's first National Marine Park., external City councillor Grace Stickland, who has been bathing at Mount Batten for several years, said dozens of people regularly gathered for swims throughout the year, with festive dips attracting as many as 80 participants. "It was a really popular little beach and everybody loved it," she said.
"All the swimmers feel as though they've been evicted from their homes." Stickland said older swimmers and people with mobility issues particularly valued Mount Batten because of its accessibility, adding that the closure was "breaking up" a community that had grown around the beach. The National Marine Park in Plymouth Sound has faced a number of challenges in the past, including hundreds of old tyres being discovered on the seabed and sewage spills. Yet the asbestos contamination problem has proved difficult to solve.
When asbestos was first discovered in 2019, the council temporarily closed the beach and expected the amount of material washing ashore to decrease over time but that has not been the case. "Our beach collections have shown that the amount of material washing up on the beach hasn't shown any real decline," a council spokesperson said. Earlier testing suggested the risk was low.
Warning signs were installed and visitors were advised to avoid parts of the beach where asbestos fragments had been found. But council officials described the latest results as a "new and worrying development". Although two rounds of testing have found no evidence of airborne asbestos on the beach, the discovery of fibres in the sand was enough to trigger the closure.
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