In this slim volume, Harriet Ritvo explores the debates and politics surrounding the effort of the city of Manchester to procure water from a small lake called Thirlmere. Like many fast-growing cities of the industrial age, Manchester by the 1840s found that its supply of fresh water constrained its prosperity. Cotton manufacturing and dying needed plenty of pure water. The city first tapped a reservoir built at the foot of the Pennines a few miles to the east. But this quickly proved insufficient, and the city fathers turned their gaze to the Lake District, a hundred miles to the north. There rainfall was high, lakes numerous, and millions of gallons of water going to no economic purpose. In the 1870s, agents of Manchester bought up what land they could around Thirlmere and sought the legal right to convert the lake into a reservoir and build a series of pipes leading to the thirsty city.

But the Lake District by the 1870s had already acquired a special status as a particularly scenic corner of England. Those prosperous enough to take holidays sometimes went there to enjoy a respite from the hustle and bustle of Victorian cities. The poet Wordsworth had lived there for forty years, and, in his 1844 sonnet “On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway,” he had strenuously objected to a proposed railway line to the Lake District: “Is then no nook of English ground secure from rash assault?” People who had never seen the Lake District regarded it as a national treasure, in part because it had meant so much to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and lesser poets, and thus so much to English letters. So its charm could not be sacrificed on the altar of progress and prosperity without a struggle.

The struggle was joined between 1874 and 1879. On one side stood the elite of Manchester, articulate apostles of progress and improvement, including the city's bishop, who thought God could not have created a more suitable source of water than Thirlmere. On the other stood a collection of local landowners, villagers, and admirers of scenic beauty, some of whom formed the Thirlmere Defence Association. The battle was fought out in newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, and above all in Parliament. The defenders of Thirlmere enjoyed the support of literary lions such as John Ruskin, who accused the Corporation of Manchester of cowardice, predatory practices, and stealing water. In those days, poets and critics weighed in on environmental matters as movie stars do today. As Ritvo puts it, the struggle featured the iconic city of industrial progress against the iconic district of natural scenery. But it was not much of a contest, and in 1879 the city fathers got the Act of Parliament they wanted, and construction soon began on a dam and a set of pipes. Thirlmere water first arrived in Manchester in 1894. The last pipe opened in 1925.

Ritvo is a wonderfully graceful writer and tells her story clearly and at times amusingly. She has scoured the Victorian press and local archives in Manchester and Cumbria, and she has used old guidebooks to good effect. Many of the proponents and detractors of the scheme published their views in detail. She writes close to the sources, with abundant quotations and a keen sense of the cultural sensibilities and political currents of mid-Victorian Britain. Scores of illustrations enliven the book further, although I could have done without the printed menu from a celebratory dinner marking the opening of the Thirlmere scheme in 1894. Ritvo is mainly interested in the political wrangling and the cultural convulsions over Thirlmere, rather than the scheme's technological aspects, social consequences, or ecological effects, although each of these comes in for brief comment.

In its day, the Thirlmere controversy was an important one, but today it is obscure. Ritvo must therefore make claims for its significance. She sees in her subject a forerunner of modern environmentalism. The defenders of Thirlmere included not merely the local landowners whose property stood to be lost or damaged—this sort of resistance dogged every major public works scheme—but also legions of admirers of nature and scenery, many of whom lived far from Thirlmere, as far as North America in some cases. Thirlmere, its defenders claimed, was in effect national patrimony, a patch of England worthy of preservation in its traditional (supposedly pristine) condition. Such arguments, Ritvo says, are the same ones used ever since in support of conservation and preservation.

Indeed they are, although today one often hears of global patrimonies rather than national ones. Ritvo notes that similar arguments to those made for and against the Thirlmere scheme were offered in the United States with respect to the Hetch Hetchy Valley (flooded to provide a reservoir for San Francisco). Concepts of national patrimony surrounded Yellowstone when it was made a national park in 1879. While parallel arguments no doubt were made earlier than the 1870s here and there, probably the frequency of such rhetoric increased sharply with the mobility that came with the railway age. Railways, which Wordsworth and Ruskin thought were desecrating the English landscape, helped people feel they had a stake in preserving remote corners of scenic beauty. Therein lies one of the many ironies of environmentalism.