Masters of the Air and The Crown actor Jim Murray has slammed Southern Water's support for a LEGO Ideas project as ‘embarrassing on all levels’.
LEGO Ideas user MOCingbird’s Sewer Heroes: Fighting the Fatberg – Overtime has attracted the attention of UK water company Southern Water, which is promoting the project on its social channels. The build is well on its way to 10,000 votes for the second time, having originally reached the third 2022 review in just 26 days before being rejected by the LEGO Ideas review board.
The project depicts a ‘fatberg’ removal team hard at work, extricating an enormous lump of fat, grease, oil and waste to prevent sewer blockage. The builder hopes any subsequent official LEGO set will help educate kids and adults about the dangers of flushing cooking oils, wet wipes and food through drains and toilets – and it’s a message Southern Water has jumped on.
The response probably hasn’t quite been what the company was hoping for, though. Replies to their tweets are full of people calling Southern Water ‘sick and twisted’, and actor Jim Murray – who is best known for roles in Apple TV’s Masters of the Air and Netflix’s The Crown, and founded anti-pollution campaign group Activist Anglers – has labelled a potential collaboration as ‘embarrassing on all levels’.
It’s not difficult to see why Southern Water is facing such criticism for supporting a LEGO Ideas project focused on removing sewage waste. In 2021, the company was at the centre of ‘the worst case brought by the Environmental Agency in its history’ after dumping millions of litres of raw sewage into protected coastal waters around the UK over a six-year period.
As recently as last month, Southern Water faced a £330,000 fine for negligence after a pump failure sent raw sewage into a stream for up to 20 hours, killing 2,000 fish. Most of the replies to the company’s tweet supporting the LEGO Ideas project reference cases such as these, with several tagging the LEGO Group and the LEGO Ideas team to question any potential partnership between the Danish company and Southern Water.
If the LEGO Ideas review board does choose to produce MOCingbird’s build, though – should it reach 10,000 votes again – it likely won’t have anything to do with Southern Water directly. According to a LEGO Ideas blog post, MOCingbird is based in Germany, and doesn’t appear to have a direct connection to Southern Water. But several news outlets have credited the water company with pitching the project to the LEGO Group, possibly as a result of quotes from an employee.
“As a lover of LEGO myself, I saw a similar LEGO model online and approached the designer and went from there,” Stephen Williams, network protection enforcement manager at Southern Water, told a local newspaper in Portsmouth. "The model, if it goes live, will be a fantastic education tool for use in schools to help children understand the importance of disposing of fat, oil, grease and other unflushable items, in the right way and for demonstrable use at meetings, conferences, and outreach workshops.”
Given the response to Southern Water’s tweets, the company’s association with the LEGO Ideas project may not be entirely beneficial for MOCingbird – although the creator did retweet one of their posts last summer. At the time of writing, the Sewer Heroes project has 8,702 supporters, with 523 days left to gather the remaining 1,298 votes.
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