Swansea Bay

Swansea Bay and the upper reaches of the Bristol Channel experience a large tidal range.

A pumping station inside the cliff adjacent to Knab Rock brought all of Swansea city's effluent in a raw form to this point.

This original sewer outlet was finally made inactive in around 1996 following the construction of a pipeline which ran all the way back around the Bay following the line of the former Mumbles Railway as far as Beach Street, along the sea-side of the Maritime Quarter and through Swansea Docks to a new £90 million sewage treatment plant at Crymlyn Burrows near Port Tennant.

As a consequence of the improvement these works have made, it is hoped that Swansea Bay will achieve Blue Flag Beach status.

This project was controversial, partly due to the amount of subsidy required to make the project viable and also because of the potential damage to an AONB and MCZ in Cornwall where Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay sought to re-open a disused quarry at Dean Point from which to source the rock for the lagoon.