"It feels right to treat the river as a living thing" ~ David Bramwell

Right to Thrive explores local people's connections to the River Don through a collection of generative interviews. In this series we encourage people to question extractive, human-centred views of nature in favour of recognising and celebrating its right to thrive.

The Doncastrian writer, podcaster and musician explores his connection to the River Don in our new generative interview series looking at nature's right to thrive in South Yorkshire.

David Bramwell is a writer, podcaster, musician and performer who grew up in Doncaster. David’s Cult of Water project began as an experimental BBC radio programme about the River Don, combining magic realism with interviews with folklorists, river experts and witches. Over time it evolved into a touring stage show featuring a mixture of animation, archive material, interviews with former steel workers and the voice of comic book author Alan Moore.

You’re not around in South Yorkshire anymore, are you?

I live in Brighton. I was born in Scunthorpe, but we moved to Doncaster when I was six. So 12 very formative years were spent in Doncaster and my family never moved away from there. So Doncaster is a place that I continue to return to, have done for the last 30 years, and my parents introduced me and my sister to walking [and an] appreciation of nature.

Never the River Don. Never the River Don, because in the late 70s and early 80s, the River Don was not somewhere that you would go and walk. We would go to Derbyshire, we'd walk there. We would go to the coast, we'd walk there. We'd go into North Yorkshire. But it would never have occurred to them to take us to the Don. Even Sprotbrough, I think, back then wouldn't have been a particularly attractive place. The river would not have smelt good.

And so that was one of the reasons why I felt this strong need to reconnect with the Don. It began about 15 years ago and it continues to this day.

To grow up in a town which took its name from a river, and yet the way the river had been exploited, the way the river had been polluted, the way the river had been shifted around – moved out of the town centre to the fringes of the town. None of my friends, none of my peers, nobody I ever met had any relationship with that river, or anything good to say about the river. It was just talked about as being dirty, polluted and not a place that you'd want to go.

One of the stories I heard, which you might have heard, was a young Jarvis Cocker took to the Don, close to Wicker, where he grew up, and just thought…

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