The indusTrial revoluTion^81the country was still rural; and most wildlife still lived in the countryside, its
fate affected more by farming than by factories.
new habitats: derelict land and waste tips
The simple view of the Industrial Revolution as necessarily and universally
inimical to wildlife also needs to be treated with caution. To some extent,
industrialization arguably added significantly to an existing suite of habitats
which were themselves, as should by now be clear, largely or entirely artificial
in character. I noted earlier the key contribution made by early extractive
industry to the environment: its creation of habitats across lowland England
which mimicked those encountered in highland areas, such as scree slopes,
bare rock or thin soils. The period from 1750 to 1860 saw a significant
expansion of these kinds of habitat, through the growth of spoil tips from
coal, copper, tin and lead mines, from open-cast extraction of ironstone
and building stone, as well as from clay pits dug throughout England, and
on a much larger scale after the arrival of the railways encouraged the
concentration of brick and tile production at particular spots. Quarries and
their waste tips will have provided few niches for wildlife while still being
worked. But once extraction and dumping had ceased their sheer rock faces
rapidly become breeding places for kestrels, stock doves and jackdaws, and
sometimes for peregrines and choughs.^37 Colonization by plants was also
rapid, to judge from recent analogies. The quarries at Wingate and Bishop
Middleton in Durham, for example, today exhibit a rich flora characteristic
of the local magnesium limestone grasslands, a habitat now rare. Abandoned
in the 1930s, their importance in this respect was already being recognized
in the early 50s.^38 More importantly, the communities which developed on
worked-out industrial sites, in the earlier stages of succession especially,
often had few local parallels, and sometimes no national ones either.
The characteristics of such communities can be reconstructed in broad
terms by considering those which have developed on more recently abandoned
sites. Box has described the flora of Stoney Hill, to the west of Telford, where
open-cast mining for stone and clay ceased in the 1960s, leaving areas of water
interspersed with dumps of acid clay, coal spoil and basic clays which have
gradually re-vegetated. Heather, wavy hair-grass (Deschampsia flexuosa), with
small populations of clubmosses (Lycopodiella spp.), lie next to communities
with fairy flax (Linum catharticum), yellow-wort (Blackstonia perfoliata),
and common spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii).^39 Typically, extraction
brought to the surface rocks otherwise deeply buried in the locality. Three
species of clubmoss were found, all usually associated with upland sites
but here at home in a landscape of shallow, recent soil and bare rock. In
addition, and again characteristically, diversity was increased by the presence
of waste dumped from a variety of local industries. Furnace slag developed
a distinctive flora characterized by squirrel-tail fescue (Vulpia bromoides),