(^78) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
encouraged ever-larger concentrations of manufacturing, and associated
urban growth.^19 Coal mines, which by the end of the nineteenth century
covered around 60,000 hectares of land in Britain as a whole with heaps of
waste material, caused extensive pollution to water courses, in part because
coals to be used for coking were usually washed of excess dust. Streams in
the vicinity of coalfields ran black and meadows downstream were covered
in coal dust after floods.^20 Other extractive industries produced heavy
metals, toxic to plants and animals alike; while manufacturing processes
filled the air with acids (both sulphuric and carbonic) and nitrogen oxide.
Although in the course of the eighteenth century conditions in many
urban areas improved, as city authorities and ‘improvement commissions’
provided them with better drainage and street paving, this was less true
in the great industrializing towns of the north. Here large areas of rough
ground remained unpaved, and standards of sanitation and rubbish disposal
poor, not least because many, like Manchester, had developed from rural
settlements, and thus had only rudimentary forms of local government.
Engels famously described the view from Ducie Bridge in Manchester:
At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black,
foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on the
shallower right bank. In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting,
blackish-green slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the
depths of which miasmatic gas constantly arises and gives forth a stench
unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the
stream. But besides this, the stream is checked every few paces by high
weirs, behind which slime accumulate and rot in thick masses.^21
Levels of pollution in watercourses downstream from major industrial areas
were often appalling: letters could be written with the ink-black water of
the river Calder in the West Riding of Yorkshire, while the Bradford Canal
actually caught fire on a number of occasions.^22 Even where industrial
pollution of watercourses was limited, the sheer scale of population growth
ensured unsustainable flows of effluent into water courses. Salmon had
disappeared from the Thames by the 1810s and in 1858 the smell of the
river was so great Parliament had to be adjourned. Airborne pollution also
became a major problem for not only the smoke from factories, but also that
from thousands of domestic fires, filled the air. London smog was already
a familiar feature of life by the start of the nineteenth century.^23 Sir Charles
Napier in 1839 described Manchester as ‘the chimney of the world’, and
the Manchester Guardian in 1842 described how in the centre of the city
‘flowering shrubs will not grow at all’ and trees died.^24 On the Pennines
to the east airborne pollution was contributing to the soil acidification
which led to ‘a change from bog-mosses of the genus Sphagnum to the
more acid-tolerant cotton-sedge Eriophorum... over whole stretches of
peaty moorland’.^25 The upland bogs ceased to form, instead beginning to
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