Brent Catchment Partnership

The River Brent catchment

From its headwaters on the Harrow Weald and High Barnet, to the lowland reaches of Hounslow and the Grand Union Canal, meandering through the boroughs of Brent and Ealing, the River Brent captures and transports rainfall and surface waters from around 70 square miles (175 km2) along more than 50 miles of main river and many further miles of minor waterways, some of which have become lost rivers where tributaries have been buried underground.

Altogether, the river Brent catchment extends across five adjacent boroughs in North West London before its combined waters join the tidal River Thames at Brentford.

The River Brent Catchment Partnership

The River Brent Catchment Partnership or BCP represents a group of organisations working together to make the rivers and streams, lakes and canals of the River Brent catchment cleaner, more accessible and more attractive, to benefit both local communities and wildlife.

Taking a Catchment Based Approach our overall ambition is for catchment-wide thinking with local action as we work towards our vision to:

Promote awareness and understanding of the potential of the River Brent corridor to contribute to the social, environmental, and economic wellbeing of local people.

Click here to see the Brent catchment plan

How we work together

The BCP network provides a forum where members can share information and build knowledge about sustainable water and river management and identify opportunities to improve local river sites across the whole Brent catchment.

The BCP steering group meets regularly throughout the year to work together proactively, bringing together ideas and energy guided by a strategic agreement.

Smaller action groups also meet to focus on key themes of the Brent Catchment Action Plan including water quality, biodiversity and habitat improvements.


Current projects

Projects being delivered by partner organisations within the catchment include:

  • Restoring Brent Rivers and Communities (led by Thames21 with funding from Greggs Foundation)
  • Silk Stream Flood Resilience and Innovation Project (led by Barnet and Harrow councils with funding from the government’s Flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation initiative)
  • Thames Catchment Community Eels Project (led by the Thames Rivers Trust, in partnership with Thames21, South East Rivers Trust, Action for the River Kennet, Thames Estuary Partnership and ZSL, with funding from the government’s Green Recovery Challenge Fund)
    • Through this project and the help of our amazing citizen scientists, we were able to map the barriers to the upstream migration of the European eel in the Brent and Ravensbourne Catchments, which produced Fish Migration Roadmaps for both catchments and allowed the strategic prioritisation of barriers for future eel migration improvement projects.

Find out about more of our projects on the Brent Catchment Action Plan.

The Brent Catchment Partnership network

.Some of the key catchment partners are:

Contact us

If you would like to get involved with the river Brent, have questions or project ideas we’d love to hear from you. Contact the partnership host at hannah.reid@thames21.org.uk