(^180) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
house cricket (Acheta domestica) from north Africa and south-west Asia,
and various cockroaches.^102 A profusion of insects, abundant worms and
the decomposing rubbish itself attracted slow worms, the common lizard,
and various kinds of toad, frog and newt – even Natterjack toads have
been found breeding on dumps in Bedfordshire and Surrey.^103 But refuse
tips were, above all, associated with large numbers of birds.^104 Few actually
bred there, due to the high levels of disturbance and paucity of shelter, but
they regularly came to feed there. Wheatear, whinchat, skylark, tree pipit,
corn bunting and reed bunting were frequent visitors, while ravens, rooks,
jackdaws, carrion crows and hooded crows were numerous. Vast numbers
of gulls were and are attracted to tips, including the black headed, herring,
common and black-backed.^105 Indeed, the presence of tips and sewage farms,
and to a lesser extent the proliferation of the new kinds of urban parks,
seem to have radically changed the habits of gulls. Until the late nineteenth
century, most were almost exclusively maritime in their habits – in 1866 it
was said that only the black-headed gull was ever seen in London, and then
only en route elsewhere.^106 But in the first half of the twentieth century they
spent increasing amounts of their time, in winter at least, on inland sites.
Expanding urban populations also required large amounts of water,
and the numbers of reservoirs increased steadily through the second half
of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In the north-west of
England especially many were located well outside urban areas, on high
moorlands. By 1860 the chain of reservoirs in Longendale to the east of
Manchester covered in all some 346 hectares.^107 In Simmons’ words, ‘when
the neighbouring uplands had all been carved into territories by local
authorities, then the tentacular reach for resources stretched further’, so that
from 1891 Liverpool was served with water from the great lake Vyrnwy in
Montgomeryshire, while at the start of the twentieth century the village of
Thirlmere in Cumbria was destroyed when a great reservoir was constructed
to provide for distant Manchester.^108 The environmental impact of upland
reservoirs was on balance probably negative but in lowland areas, where
they tended to be located on the margins of cities, they were more beneficial.
Those constructed to serve London in the Lea and Thames valleys had, by the
1940s, ‘made London one of the best centres for the study of aquatic birds in
the whole British Isles’.^109 But, while also containing the fish, algae and other
freshwater organisms which provided the food for such wildfowl, their sides
were bare concrete, so that they lacked marginal vegetation and reedbeds,
and the birds and invertebrates that went with them. More important in this
respect, as the twentieth century proceeded, were gravel pits.
The development of concrete, and its extensive use in the inter-War years
for buildings and transport infrastructure, created a massive demand for
sand and gravel. Improvements in pumping technology, using pumps driven
by diesel, meant that the removal of aggregates from valley floors was now
feasible, leading to the creation of large areas of open water which could
not easily be reclaimed, or used for dumping refuse. Great strings of lakes
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