‘Someone more competent’: Expertise, municipal engineers and the ‘sewage question’ in nineteenth-century Britain

Rachel Dishington

What was known by contemporaries as ‘the sewage question’ preoccupied nineteenth-century local government. Across the country, large-scale sanitation projects aimed to implement or improve sewage management systems. Despite growing consensus that sewage was a problem, technical solutions were a topic of ongoing experimentation and debate. Numerous chemical and mechanical sewage treatment processes were trialled, advertised, patented, and adopted in various locations. Some promised to turn sewage into valuable chemicals for agriculture or manufacturing, while others conceptualised sewage as a public health hazard and prioritised risk reduction.  

Navigating this complex and contested technical landscape presented a challenge for local authorities. This research examines the role of engineering experts, particularly a growing cohort of increasingly organised and confident municipal engineers, in debates over sewage management. Analysis of the ‘sewage question’ can increase understanding of the role and nature of engineering expertise at a local scale. In addition, it raises technical questions about how effective sewage management was conceptualised and evaluated, economic questions about the value attributed to sewage, and political questions about decision-making in the face of technical and scientific uncertainty.  

Ways of Knowing Ireland’s Peatlands: The Bogs Commission’s Maps between British Colonialism and the Planetary Crisis

Katja Bruisch and Lily Toomey

Peatlands challenge seemingly unambiguous distinctions between water and land, dry and wet. For hundreds of years, these ecosystems attracted the attention of scientists, engineers and state bureaucracies seeking to make them legible and reclaim them for profit and power. In the context of the climate and biodiversity emergencies, the imperative of improvement has given way to a different way of seeing these landscapes. Intact peatlands are now widely valued as carbon stores and sinks and as a habitat for endangered animals and plants. Using a unique collection of highly detailed maps of Ireland’s peatlands, this paper explores the intricate history of knowledge-making about peatland ecosystems in Ireland – between British colonialism and the planetary crisis, between the wish to get the water out of them and current endeavours to return peatlands to a state of wetness. The maps were produced by the Bogs Commission, which surveyed Ireland’s peatlands in the early 19th century on behalf of the British government and proposed ambitious drainage schemes that would allow converting what was then considered ‘wasteland’ into farmland. The paper offers three different readings of these maps, approaching them 1) as colonial documents informed by the imperative of improvement, 2) as snapshots of the historical Irish landscape providing a window into a time when rural livelihoods in Ireland revolved around intact peatlands, and 3) as repositories of information that acquires new significance as Ireland’s degraded peatlands are now considered crucial sites of climate action. In tracing the history and the legacies of the Bogs Commission’s maps, we demonstrate that recognizing the unstable and contested meanings of Ireland’s peatlands is essential for any efforts to incorporate peatlands into wider efforts to address the planetary emergency. 

Natural flood management - relearning past knowledges and experiences

Neil Macdonald

Natural Flood Management (NFM) represent a subset of approaches within a broader school of Nature based Solutions (NbS) that can be used to address societal challenges. The primary focus of NFM is to reduce the speed and volume of water within watercourses, thereby reducing flood risk.  NFM structures in their many forms slow, store, disconnect and filter waters within and through the catchment, with the principal being to ‘slow the flow’; however, there are also additional benefits to biodiversity, water quality, enhanced dry season flows, carbon storage impacting, wildlife, health, wellbeing, recreation and creating jobs. During the last two decades NFM has receive considerable attention across Europe and North America, as costs of traditional engineered flood defences have become prohibitively expensive to build and maintain in many locations. This growth in NFM has been supported by government initiatives, for example the ongoing £25M DEFRA NFM programme in the UK and changes in legislation. Whilst NFM is widely considered to be a ‘new’ approach, the principles and ideas are much older, with concepts previously deployed in a variety of environments and settings throughout history, from the classical (Roman and Greek) to industrial period. Using the recently published NFM evidence directory, which identifies four categories of management (River and Floodplain, Woodland, Run-off and Coastal and Estuary), with 17 different measures, this paper explores how past experiences and knowledges can provide valuable insights that can help shape this ‘emergent’ field. 

Separating sea from land: ways of knowing and defining ‘new’ land in early modern England and Wales

John Morgan

This paper examines how people understood the shifting shorelines of early modern England and Wales. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the coastal marshlands of England and Wales were in flux. Not only were they eroding, accreting and generally mutable stretches of coastline, they were also subject to legal disputes over their use and ownership. In these disputes, we can see competing ways of knowing, using and defining both land and sea. 

From the 1570s, the English crown claimed all land arising from the sea owing to the rights it claimed in the foreshore. In the early seventeenth century this asserted right came to be seen as a potential revenue stream. The crown appointed commissioners to search for ‘concealed lands’ held or occupied by defective title, including lands that had arisen from the sea by processes of natural accretion or deliberate reclamation, forcing occupiers to compound with the crown as landlord. These commissions produced inquiries, interrogatories and depositions which offer a window onto contrasting ways of knowing, conceptualising and controlling water and land along early modern Britain’s mutable coastline.  

Using the documentary record produced by these commissions, this paper explores disputes over coastal marshes in early modern England and Wales. At its heart are tensions between the flux and mutability of watery environments, the local customs, practices and cultures of water and land-use that developed around them, and dissonant narratives of local environmental change offered by state actors and local saltmarsh users in legal disputes about their ownership. In these disputes, we find competing ways of knowing and defining water and land, wet and dry, that derive from very different understandings of the place and role of water in the landscape. Such disputes speak to the changing place of water in the economies and cultures of early modern Britain, and provide an example of the politics inherent in the application of what Nicholas Blomley has termed ‘nomothetic’ visions of ordered landscapes, to ‘idiographic’, often irreducibly specific, environments.

Living with water shocks: Vernacular water knowledges and community action in Early Modern England

Hannah Worthen and Briony McDonagh

This paper interrogates ways of knowing and managing flooding and flood risk in coastal, estuarine and wetland zones of England in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It does so in two registers using related sets of primary source material as they narrate both to day-to-day experiences of managing and mitigating coastal and fluvial flood risk, and response and recovery in the wake of flood incidents. Firstly, we examine what administrative and legal materials reveal about vernacular knowledges of water and flood circulating in early modern England, including water management at the catchment-scale. Secondly, we use flood petitions to interrogate how these ‘flood knowledges’ were – on occasion – coopted into the creation of shared communities of solidarity and action at a variety of scales. In the early modern period, the act of collective petitioning was a means for people to shape opinions and memory as well as a means to lobby the relevant authorities – be that the Crown, local magistrate or urban corporation – to intervene on a matter in dispute. The narratives contained within flood petitions reveal to us the ways in which communities who lived with flood risks and water shocks developed collective knowledges of water and its management, and about how these knowledges were transmitted and shared beyond the immediate locality. Finally, we reflect briefly on how early modern histories of water and flood can be bought to bear in fostering and enhancing communities of water and climate action in the twenty-first-century present.

Working with and against water infrastructures in eighteenth-century England

Carry Van Lieshout 

Eighteenth-century England was a place of emerging and expanding water infrastructures. Industrialisation went alongside the remaking of various water courses for purposes of power supply or transport, while cities started to develop or expand networks of piped water supply. Research on the management of such large water infrastructures often takes a top-down approach, based on the records of those who designed, constructed, financed or managed the infrastructure. This paper examines everyday interactions with emerging water structures in two key sites of eighteenth-century England: industrialising Derbyshire and London. Through the lens of two water-related conflicts, one over mine drainage and one over supply, the paper examines how people used water infrastructures to scientifically prove their points, worked together to survey and measure flow, and found subversive and obstructive ways to challenge the power of institutions. As such, it will engage with questions of knowledge sharing and community building around new water structures.

‘Souls of Sedge’: Seventeenth-Century Fenland Drainage, Bodily Metaphor, and Internal Colonisation

Aneurin Merrill-Glover

Bodily metaphors were used to understand, explain, and justify social and environmental change and improvement on the Fens in early modern England. These bodily metaphors, and the underlying epistemology which they exemplify, connect Fenland drainage schemes with colonial projects in Ireland and the Americas. Recent social histories of Fenland drainage have highlighted the need for further elucidation of the characteristically early modern cultural and geohumoral mechanisms by which anthropogenic landscape change was understood. Eric Ash has engaged with bodily analogies in the pamphlet literature around drainage, and Elly Robson highlighted the ‘vexed’ historical relationships between land, labour, climate, and character. This paper is able to move beyond Robson and Ash by applying theoretical insights in the cultural history of the body garnered from Gail Kern Paster, Hilary Eklund, and Mary Floyd-Wilson. 

The supporters and the detractors of Fenland drainage framed their arguments via an ongoing correspondence between the environment of the Fens, and the bodies and social selves of the Fen-men. The wild ungovernability of the undrained Fen necessarily mirroring the ‘rude’ and ‘uncivill’ Fen-men, who were a ‘kinde of people according to the nature of the place where they dwell’. The supporters of drainage represented Fen-men as racial ‘others’, using discursive practices which echo the environmentally-inflected construction of colonial ‘others’ in Ireland and beyond. Energising the Fenland source base with the cultural history of the body renders visible connections between imperial projects abroad, and the ‘internal colonisation’ of England. Finally, this paper also hopes to demonstrate how these discourses buttressed, and perhaps even prompted, the material displacement of the Fen-men

The St Mary’s Loch Scheme: locating reservoirs for Edinburgh in the 1870s

Lawrence Dritsas 

This paper examines the role of knowledge about water, and water infrastructure, in a controversy over where to locate new reservoirs to quench the thirst of the Scottish capital’s growing population. In 1868, it was clear that the city was running out of water for its residents and needed new sources. Memoirs of the period recall the water-supply issue as a “dark, dismal, threatening cloud” that dominated city politics. Engineers commissioned by the city council suggested taking water from St Mary’s Loch, a natural loch located 50km (30 miles) south of the city. Unexpectedly, this plan became a politically fraught question, with animated debates happening across the city, region, and both houses of the UK Parliament. Propaganda opposing the scheme gave many reasons for why the loch’s water was unhealthful, including stoking fears about microscopic ‘water fleas’. Those in support of the scheme deployed arguments based on domestic hygiene, commerce and improving the lives of the working classes. Meanwhile, politicians commissioned chemists to analyse water sources and interrogated engineers about plans (and costs) for capturing springs and building reservoirs. Maps of competing schemes were scrutinised. Tracing this history and its epistemic geographies illuminates how expert and vernacular knowledge about the ‘city and district’ informed, supported, and misled public opinions and political decision-making about where to find the city’s next water supply; decisions whose results shape the infrastructure and landscapes we see in the Lothians today.

Contested Waters: Measuring and mapping water supplies during Britain’s canal mania

Simon Naylor

During the 1790s much of Britain was gripped by ‘canal mania’ – the rush to both build and  invest in canals. These canals were built to allow the movement of basic resources like coal or lime and manufactured good like textiles to and from industrialising towns and ports. This mania was particularly intense across northern England. Canal building, along with the construction of factories and mills, port and harbours, bridges and land drainage, was a crucial component of the work of civil engineers and surveyors, an increasingly prominent cadre of actors who were actively re-shaping the British landscape, society and economy. This paper focuses on the development of one canal project in the 1790s – the Rochdale Canal – and work by a number of civil engineers and surveyors, most notably the Scottish engineer, John Rennie. The Rochdale Canal was proposed to link up Liverpool and the Lancashire manufacturing towns with Leeds and Hull. The project was soon mired in controversy, when prominent millowners and landowners complained that the proposed canal would consume and drain the surrounding water courses and deny their water wheels a power source. Applications for Acts of Parliament were denied twice before being finally granted in 1793. The paper analyses the ways in with Rennie and other resident engineers and surveyors, some acting on behalf of the millowners, went about mapping and measuring water courses and availability; developing new environmental knowledge about precipitation and hydrology; applying those knowledges to calculate the impacts the projected canal would have on supply to mills; and so ultimately adjudicate both for or against the canal’s progress.

Exploring the impact and legacy of British mills to the environment through 18-19th century maps and their makers

Tara Jonell

The cyclic rise and demise of mills mirror major sociotechnological and environmental milestones in human history. Expansion and intensification of water-powered milling into the Common Era induced profound hydrogeomorphic change to rivers and landscapes, altered sediment transport and storage in rivers, and fundamentally disrupted riverine ecosystems: all of which have served as diagnostic evidence marking anthropogenic transformations across Britain, Europe and North America. Moreover, early industrial watermills were among the first to adopt the coal-fuelled steam engine, another machine interlinked with multi-scalar processes inferred to be characteristic of the Anthropocene and more recent ‘Great Acceleration’. Tracking the evolution of these industrious machines through space and time can therefore help elucidate key social incentives and physical drivers in context to the environment and energy use during a key interval in history.  

Our recent work compiling milling evidence from 18th-20th century maps and plans (n = 31,246 records; 19,725 sites) now permits a more critical review of the British milling industry, its impacts and legacy. Our work first focuses on the actors who initially surveyed and recorded milling infrastructure in the environment: the private and military cartographers operating under mixed motivations without centralised-government funding, and whose (often unintentional) efforts collectively documented the emerging physical impact of thousands of milldams and weirs across British waterways for the first time. We further reflect and discuss how this broad collection of maps and plans act as an important source of knowledge about resource management. Lastly, we review to what extent British mill data from maps reflects the contemporary state of milling and its growing resource and energy requirements, which informs modern-day views on anthropogenic energy use and the nature of ‘energy transitions’.