A playground in Chalfont St Giles that was closed to the public in the spring after being turned into an ‘open sewer’ has reopened – stoking hopes that the village is finally back on the right tracks.

The playground, along with a duck pond and river walk, was shut at the beginning of the year after Thames Water admitted to a category one sewage incident at its River Misbourne depot on Amersham Road.

At its worst, clouding the picturesque village with foul smells and sullying its chances of winning a Best Kept Village title, the flooding also cut parts of Chalfont St Giles off from public access – effectively turning it into an “open sewer” – and altogether spelling a difficult start to the year for residents and the parish council.

However, vice-chair Robert Gill is now firmly of the belief that things are looking up – with mainstream media coverage prompting Thames Water to speed up their remedial action and the village well “past the worst” of the waste contamination.

A definitive sign of this turning of the corner was the reopening of the village’s playground on Tuesday, August 6, with the familiar sight of “lots of little ones” racing around an indication that normality is within reach – a feeling that is only strengthen by a reopening of the pond area also on the cards for the next fortnight.

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Cllr Gill said Thames Water is still proving a little slow in clearing accumulated fungus from local waterways, but in a sign of hindrance being met with heartening community spirit, the council organised a clean-up campaign at the weekend to help “get the water flowing” again.

Speaking to the Free Press in July, he also shared plans to hold a defiant, if downscaled, version of Chalfont St Giles’s annual village show in September – with street party-style stalls and activities hopefully ushering in, with the autumn, the hope of “things getting better”.

Not bad for a community-centric village which “prides itself on its event calendar” and for which the pollution issue has been “so disruptive”.

In the council’s three-point plan – first, stop the deluge, second work out the extent of damage and third, remediation – they are well into the final stage. With a clean bill of health for the once-sewage-strewn parts of the village clearly on the horizon, the nickname of ‘Britain’s smelliest village’ will soon be a thing of the distant past.