It is difficult to recapture now what it must have been like to witness the rapid changes to the environment that occurred during the latter half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th as a consequence of industrialisation. Small settlements, such as Manchester and Birmingham, were transformed into large towns and cities. Only 27.5% of the population lived in urban settlements in 1800; by 1851 this had risen to 43.5%, and by 1900 it reached 77% (today it is around 89%).
Not only was the infrastructure lacking for the supply of clean water and the disposal of waste to cope with this change, but there were no institutions to take responsibility. Many rapidly growing towns were still governed like the small parishes that they had been until recently. Local government officials were faced with financial and technical challenges beyond their experience or their ability to cope, and the laissez-faire economics of the day militated against the levels of public investment required. In his role as Home Secretary in 1828, the future Prime Minister Robert Peel expressed a view popular among the establishment classes of the day: that water should be supplied to British towns ‘through the application of private capital and enterprise’.
Infectious ideas
Change came about slowly, and in response to a cholera epidemic that reached Britain in 1831. This was a worldwide phenomenon that caused more deaths in the 19th century than any other epidemic disease. Many theories were put forward to explain the outbreak, from ‘divine intervention’ to ‘miasma’ – the erroneous idea that foul air was responsible. Only in 1848, when another outbreak occurred in Lambeth, did scientists finally recognise that water contaminated by sewage was the real cause. The influential physician Arthur Hassall put it graphically in his 1850 report Microscopic examination of water supplied to the inhabitants of London (skip the rest of this paragraph if you are eating your breakfast): ‘the inhabitants of the metropolis are made to consume, in some form or another, a portion of their own excrement, and moreover, to pay for the privilege’.
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