This is a documentary about the River Don, South Yorkshire’s great industrial waterway, once the filthiest river in Europe, but now at the heart of one of Britain’s most remarkable environmental success stories.

For hundreds of years, the Don was the engine that drove the steel industry of northern England, its water powering the mills and forges that made Sheffield the tool and cutlery capital of the world.

But that success had a heavy environmental cost. The Don became a polluted industrial sewer, almost entirely devoid of life.

That is now changing. Man killed the river. Now man has taken responsibility for cleaning it up, and the Don is experiencing an astonishing regeneration. 

Life is returning to the water. Fish are coming back, with otters, herons and other wildlife. Passes have been built on the weirs to help migratory fish swim upstream. Soon there will be salmon in the centre of Sheffield for the first time in two hundred years. 

Award-winning Sheffield writer, Paul Adam, travels the length of the Don, from its source high on the bleak moors of the Pennines to its mouth at Goole. In a journey rich with insight into the history and landscape of the region, he explores the key landmarks along the river, talking to the people who make it special.

People like 91-year-old Stan Shaw, probably the oldest working knife maker in the world; Stephen Waddington, whose family once operated a hundred barges on the Don Navigation but now have none and Dwaine Ball, the skipper of the last commercial vessel on the waterway, who has watched a whole industry die around him.

Adam visits a forgotten riverside cemetery where 30,000 people lie buried, many victims of the Great Sheffield Flood; he hunts for elusive wooden mice in a country church and recounts the origins of jelly babies and liquorice allsorts outside the Bassett’s sweet factory on the banks of the Don. 

But most importantly, he interviews the people who have brought the river back from the dead: the environmentalists, ecologists, volunteers, social enterprises and many others who have been working together to clean it up. The task is daunting and may take many years to complete, but the river has been reborn and is now fast on the way to becoming one of the cleanest in Europe.