Our History

It's somewhat ironic that the goals that Keep Britain Tidy strives for today have their roots in the 1950s - the decade we were founded. 

The legacy of the Second World War was still everywhere to be seen, and people had to live sustainably to conserve the precious resources they had.

'Make do and mend' - in other words, reducing, repurposing, repairing and recycling - was simply a way of life.

But it was also this decade that a higher volume of litter-generating products and packaging made of materials like plastic started to be produced, as our domestic manufacturing industry began to recover after the Second World War.

The Women's Institute played a huge role in transforming litter policy.

A resolution in 1954 to ‘inaugurate a campaign to preserve the countryside against desecration by litter’ led to the formation of the Keep Britain Tidy group, which was chaired by Lady Elizabeth Brunner of the NFWI Board.

Later, the 1958 Litter Act was passed and attributed largely to Keep Britain Tidy. And the rest, as they say, is history…

With mounting scientific evidence of environmental degradation, there was an awakening of environmental concerns and action during the 'Slinging Sixties'. 

Keep Britain Tidy registered as a charity in 1960.

People continued to embrace the principles of reusing and recycling, giving rise to the very first form of a deposit return scheme - people bringing glass bottles back to the ‘Pop Man’ each week in return for a few pence!

Rag and bone men were a common sight on Britain's streets, taking unwanted or worn clothes, crockery, pans - amongst other items - to repair or sell on. 

But the mass production of disposable goods was continuing to create a growing mountain of waste being slung onto our streets.

The 1965 Keele conference recommended that environmental education 'ought to become an essential part of education programmes' to ensure that everyone had an understanding of the environment.

In 1969 our iconic mascot, Tidyman, was born, and started to appear on bins and packaging across the country.

Large volumes of waste were being seen across the Britain as disposable products became part of our daily lives. Littering had become widespread as there weren't many ways to deal with it at that time.

To try to tackle this, the 1971 Dangerous Litter Act set the maximum fine for dropping litter to £100.

In response to the growing issue, our national campaigns, featuring the celebs of the day - including Abba, the Bee Gees and Marc Bolan - could be seen everywhere!

And our furry friends the Wombles, originally created by author Elisabeth Beresford in 1968, became a hugely popular sight in our fight against litter too!

With all of these engaging campaigns we start to have a huge impact on people’s attitudes and behaviours when it comes to litter and littering.

For the first time in 1977 we even 'Clean for The Queen', marking Her Majesty’s Silver Jubilee. Pictured is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother enjoying the event.

Sadly, the decade did not start very well in the nation's fight against the growing epidemic of litter, with the House of Lords rejecting a 1981 Bill that would have introduced a deposit on single-use drinks bottles - now one of our most commonly littered items.

Much of the litter carelessly discarded throughout the 1980s survives to this day, and is still being discovered by our army of litter-picking Litter Heroes.

Towards the end of the decade there were growing concerns that the escalating use of landfills was causing long term environmental damage too.

But as the amount of litter and waste grew. so did the determination of many people who cared about the environment.

In 1987 the charity Waste Watch was launched, encouraging us all to reduce, reuse and recycle our waste. (Years later the two charities merged, giving us today’s Keep Britain Tidy!)

And the same year, we launched the Blue Flag Award across England celebrating the best beaches. There were 12 beaches awarded in the first year - and flags now proudly fly over more than 70 English beaches, a marina and an inland bathing water.

Closing the decade in 1989 we held a National Spring Clean Day, with two million people (and a few Wombles) taking part.

The same year we launched our People and Places initiative. It’s now evolved into our Keep Britain Tidy Network of local authorities and land managers.

The 1990s were a busy, crucial decade for Keep Britain Tidy, both in terms of new environmental legislation and the development of our accreditation programmes which continue to this day.

In 1990 itself, the introduction of the Environmental Protection Act defined acceptable standards of street cleanliness for the first time - and also set out the duties of landowners and occupiers. The act states that if a person drops, throws, deposits, or leaves anything that causes defacement in a public place, they are committing a littering offence.

This coincided with 'Tidy Britain' year - a campaign to clean up the country nationally - which saw the likes of Sir Richard Branson involved.

1991 marked the first of our People and Places Awards - and we still celebrate the very best people, partnerships, organisations and places each year at our Network Awards.

And hot on the heels of the Blue Flag Awards for beaches, marinas, and inland waters, in 1992 we introduced a complementing accreditation, the Seaside Award, to celebrate England’s best beaches, with more than 130 flags awarded at present.

In 1994 we launched Eco-Schools - the biggest environmental education programme in the world - in England. Now running across 67 countries, more than 1,000 English schools proudly fly the internationally-recognised Green Flag Award.

If all of this excitement wasn't enough, we followed the success of our blue space accreditation schemes with the launch of an award for parks and green spaces in 1996. The Green Flag Awards protect and enhance our precious green spaces and parks and are now the international mark of quality for parks, with more than 2,200 English parks flying the flag to date!

As the new millennium began, the globe had become addicted to single-use plastic products — with severe environmental, social, economic and health consequences.

According to the UN Environment Programme, in the early 2000s the amount of plastic waste we generated rose more in a single decade than it had in the previous 40 years. The amount of plastic produced between 2000 and 2010 is greater than the output of the entire 100 years before the turn of the millennium.

In 2000, campaigning by Waste Watch results in a government-backed waste reduction programme.

Keep Britain Tidy continued its hard hitting campaigns - some of which proved controversial! Posters like ‘Dirty Pig’ showed how unacceptable littering is.

A campaign against car littering in 2003 was launched by the former Brookside actor Jennifer Ellison holding up a "Don't be a Tosser" sign.

And cheeky club and pub advertisements in May 2005 showed a scantily clad woman lolling across a sofa, underneath the headline: "While you're down there ... could you put that in the bin for me?"

2005 proved to be a significant year in tackling litterers as the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Acts was passed, introducing fixed penalty notices for littering.

We launched another nationwide clean up campaign in 2008 - The Big Tidy Up - which ran for several years.

By this point more and more people are awakening to the threat of plastic making its way from land to our oceans.

In 2010, the turn of the decade, scientists believes about eight million metric tons of plastic entered the ocean. There was no ignoring the depth of the issues at hand when it came to the increasing litter in our waterways, rivers and seas.

So we launched the first of our Care programmes - RiverCare and BeachCare in the East of England and BeachCare in the South West - to help people protect the environment on their doorstep.

We were still equally concerned with the state of our streets and green spaces and launched our Dog Poo Fairy campaign to tell dog owners there's 'no such thing'.

In 2011 we merged with WasteWatch to form today's Keep Britain Tidy, and as increasing numbers of dedicated volunteers joined our Care programmes we launched a further one - WatersideCare - in the West Midlands. 

As the country prepared for the Olympics in 2012, people across our nation showed the world they love where they live by cleaning up the route ahead of the Olympic torch tour.

In 2013 we launched our North West based Care programme, LoveMyBeach.

Our old friends the Wombles rejoined forces with us in 2014 for our Big Tidy Up, and our innovations team launched yet another successful anti-dog fouling campaign - We Are Watching You. Its unique glow-in-the-dark eyes reduced dog fouling by up to 90% in some areas!

In 2016 we launched our innovative Ocean Recovery Project to recover and recycle litter collected by volunteers on our beach cleans, including working with fishermen and harbours to pave the way to establishing the first fully UK based fishing net recycling scheme.

In 2016 we Clean for the Queen again, this time to celebrate her 90th birthday - and this nationwide clean up develops into our best known litter campaign to date, our flagship Great British Spring Clean campaign, galvanising communities into action to tackle litter each Spring. 

The Government launches the first litter strategy in 2017 - with special praise for our Eco-Schools programme - and later that year our rebrand sees Tidyman back at the charity’s core, although, obviously, he never left our hearts!

In 2018, for the first time ever,  a national charity (ourselves) formally joined with a UK city, to make the country’s first ‘Tidy City’ - launching our ‘Keep Manchester Tidy’ partnership with Manchester City Council.

We also took on the management of the Green Key eco-label accreditation for hotels in England.

We enjoyed two back to back record breaking years in 2018 and 2019 as over 374,000 people - then 500,000 - took part in our Great British Spring Clean!

But the efforts of our army of volunteers had never been needed more to tackle the effects litter and pollution, as figures showed a record we did not want to see: 2020 concluded the earth's warmest 10-year period on record.

As the new decade began, the Environment Bill was re-introduced to Parliament following a general election on 30 January 2020.

The Environment Bill aims to help deliver commitments in the 2017 Litter Strategy to promote proportionate and effective enforcement against littering and provide powers to issue legal guidance to litter authorities and extending government’s existing powers to impose conditions to be met by those authorised to carry out enforcement activity.

Crucially the bill set out to modernise the government’s existing powers to set producer responsibility obligations to reduce plastic pollution, extending them to the prevention of waste and redistribution of surplus products and materials, as well as powers to establish deposit return schemes that further incentivise consumers to reduce litter and recycle more.

It received assent in 2021 and became the Environment Act.

Tragically the Covid pandemic struck in 2020, halting many of our activities - and those of our volunteers. But undeterred, we launched the #LoveWhereYouLive initiative, showing people how even in lockdown they could do simple things that are good for them and the planet, from keeping the area immediately outside their own front door tidy to making sure they don’t waste food, or upcycling something.

In 2021 we started to voice our views around upcoming legislation about the need for a Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) - matters we are continuing to campaign about at present. 

The same year we saw the Chewing Gum Task Force established by Defra, administered by us, with funding provided by gum producers to help local authorities clean gum off pavements and put in measures to stop it being dropped in the first place, helping clamp down on anti-social littering.

Summer 2022 was an exceptionally busy period for us!

As the country prepared to celebrate the late Queen's Platinum Jubilee, Keep Britain Tidy encouraged people to go ‘Green for the Queen’ by adopting a few eco-friendly tips to keep their celebrations environmentally friendly.

Just a month later, Keep Britain Tidy and the Mayor of the West Midlands worked in partnership to deliver the West Midlands Great Clean Up - a litter-picking campaign to spruce up the West Midlands region ahead of the 2022 Commonwealth Games.

In Autumn 2022, as part of our committment to inclusivity, we became the first environmental charity to launch AI technology provider Futr's automated chatbot to answer a range of visitor queries on our website - which we christened Tidybot. (The bot lives in the bottom right of your screen!)

We also launched #HallowClean - a fun festive campaign to encourage our nation of #LitterHeroes to tackle the horrors of litter and waste at Halloween.

Meanwhile, Liverpool City Council joined forces with us to form Keep Liverpool Tidy as part of a unique education, engagement and enforcement programme to tackle litter in the city.

And we were chosen to administer a new fund for councils to tackle chewing gum stains on our high streets.

We started 2023 by launching our first Buy Nothing New Month - a campaign to reduce waste by encouraging people to reuse and repair the things they already have, find new homes for things they no longer need, and buy preloved.

The same month we introduced a new registration scheme to support our #LitterHeroes environmental programme which empowers individuals and groups to keep their communities litter-free.

In February and November we ran our new month-long carbon-cutting challenge Cut Your Carbon with schools,  challenging young people and their families to complete simple actions to reduce their carbon footprint.

In July 2023 we were appointed by the Government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to review and update the Code of Practice on Litter and Refuse - important guidance for land managers about the way litter and refuse should be managed in England.

And as we approached the end of the year we launched our new manifesto calling for a deposit return scheme, quality green space for all and an extended producer responsibility (EPR) scheme to make polluters pay.

We also make public our five year strategy with our aims to support communities to reduce resource use, waste, litter and live more sustainably, as well as improve the quality of public spaces.

In 2024 to 2025 we celebrated our 70th anniversary year.

That brings us to the present day, when we need your help now more than ever to continue to protect our environment.