An Environmental History of Wildlife in England 1650-1950

(^164) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
cent of the total land area^14 This said, where large conurbations developed
houses and industry often sprawled over an extensive tracts of ground. In
Middlesex by 1950 over 80 per cent of the land area was occupied by houses,
gardens, and other ‘agriculturally unproductive land’, most of it industrial
in character (Figure 30).^15 The decline in farmland in the county since the
middle of the nineteenth century had been phenomenal.
The character of town and city centres also changed in the later nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Buildings became larger and their architecture
more ornate, and larger areas of the ground surface were paved. Moreover,
growing concern about the state of public hygiene, motivated in part by
a series of bad outbreaks of typhoid and Asiatic cholera in the 1830s and
40s, led to the passing of the Public Health Act of 1848, which placed
the supply of water, sewerage, drainage, cleansing and paving under the
control of local bodies called ‘Health Boards’ which, together with existing
municipal authorities, employed both national legislation and local bylaws
to improve living conditions.^16 In 1855, the Metropolitan Board of works
was established in London to provide a city-wide system of sewers.^17 Other
large cities soon followed suit, although it was only in the 1870s and 80s
that most major towns gained reasonable systems of sewage disposal, and
even later that they obtained systematic refuse collection services.
Those with a background in the humanities might easily assume that
the inexorable spread of bricks and mortar, concrete and asphalt, and the
increasing scale and density of building in urban centres, were inimical
to wildlife. But although existing habitats were often destroyed by urban
growth important new ones were created. Towns and cities, as we shall see,
displayed considerable variety, especially in terms of the density of houses
and buildings, but their distinctive environmental character was shaped by
three main features.^18 First, they contained many disturbed environments, the
consequence of traffic, footfall, cycles of development and redevelopment, and
the intense and regular cultivation of gardens and parks. Plants characteristic
figure 30 Changing land use in Middlesex, 1865–1955 (after Preston 2000).