Introduction
This is an article about a city and a river. It is well established that attempts to manage rivers and their catchments have shaped urban development. A range of compelling case-studies tells a now familiar story of efforts to control rivers, at and indeed across a range of spatial scales. The growth of cities necessitated expansive efforts to manage water. River systems were industrialized, co-opted into economic systems that demanded the supply of water for industry, water for drinking or to manage risks from flooding to pollution and disease.Footnote 1
As such, river histories have paid particular attention to questions of spatial scale. While landmark studies have traced the transcontinental influence of rivers, and the significance of particular ‘national rivers’ in constructing national identities, urban and environmental historians have looked to rivers at smaller spatial scales ‘in the making of urban space and of cities in the restructuring of watersheds’.Footnote 2 The distinction is useful. Indeed, the term ‘urban river’ is deliberately more expansive than simply a body of water that flows through a town or city.Footnote 3 Instead, it prompts a consideration of the relationship of water to processes of urbanization, and vice versa. Visions of control were realized not simply in hard engineering but in broader social, legal and technical infrastructures of place-making with the resulting breadth of institutions, municipal authorities, and even scientific disciplines, providing space for multidisciplinary perspectives on urban rivers.Footnote 4
As part of an enlivening of urban studies, metabolic metaphors have been deployed to trace the influence of ecological processes in urban settings previously overlooked by environmental historians.Footnote 5 For Matthew Gandy, following the flow of water through cities brings to the fore the shaping role of ‘nonhuman agency’ on ‘the hydrological terrains of modernity’. The etymology of the English term landscape, Gandy notes, is in the Dutch landschap, taken up in the sixteenth century explicitly to refer to the ‘drainage and regularization of land’. The control of water was central to ideas of modernization.Footnote 6 So much so, that Erik Swyngedouw proposed the term ‘waterscape’ for the projects of early twentieth-century Spain that redefined the relationships between the political and environmental, social and hydrological.Footnote 7 In a parallel development, the uptake of the term ‘riverscape’ in scientific disciplines – meaning ‘how streams and their biota are linked to landscapes longitudinally, laterally, vertically and temporally’ – points not only to the complexity of processes occurring across spatial and temporal scales but also to the diversity of research approaches for comprehending them.Footnote 8
Ironically, perhaps, recent environmental problems have brought attention to such historical processes and interconnections. Tim Soens has traced the long history of July 2021 floods along the Vesdre, a tributary of the Meuse in eastern Belgium. The industrialization of the catchment shaped historical flood events; infrastructural legacies of water management as well as subsequent development have bequeathed ‘transgenerational injustice in the allocation of flood risk’.Footnote 9 Such case-studies demonstrate that a river is not a passive thing that people impact; river systems respond, over often unpredictable temporal and spatial scales. The management of water was not simply as a risk to be controlled or resource to be utilized, but as something whose use and governance fundamentally changed conceptions and definitions of urban boundaries.
Put more explicitly, the regulation of water brought new scales and challenges of governance into being. Such a claim would perhaps seem unremarkable for a dominant city such as Paris – where Sabine Barles traces the eighteenth-century ‘extraterritorial’ reach of Parisian administration over the Seine catchment. Similarly in London, Vanessa Taylor documents the changing regulatory authorities along the freshwater and tidal sections of the Thames, the effect of expanding London on an older administrative geography and the twentieth-century rise of new ‘delegated governance’ structures at arm’s length from more localized democratic bodies such as councils.Footnote 10 In Los Angeles, demand for water meant tapping the distant Owens Valley, where legal and technical challenges shaped later territorial expansion and reduced the Los Angeles River to a concrete box.Footnote 11 In the UK, nineteenth-century water supply works for Birmingham and Liverpool transformed the physical and imaginative geographies of rural Wales.Footnote 12
Two important points stand out from these examples. Firstly, there have been various theoretical and methodological attempts to understand the relationship between people and rivers. Secondly, researchers are directed to the relationship between the formation of boundaries of towns and cities and wider processes linked to urbanization. These processes connect those places spatially to the wider river system of which they are a part, and temporally to uncertain futures. Our focus is a much smaller urban river, the 15-mile River Leen in England’s East Midlands. The Leen rises in the historically rural Robin Hood Hills and, following interventions in the 1960s, flows south to join the Trent, England’s third-longest river, south-west of Nottingham city centre. These interventions effectively undid a diversion that had been made around 1100. At that time, the river was redirected to support the new Norman centre of control at Nottingham Castle under the authority of William Peverel, ‘feudatory lord of nearly the whole of the Leen Valley’.Footnote 13 From at least the thirteenth century, the Leen was also the western boundary of the Royal Forest of Sherwood.Footnote 14 From the second half of the eighteenth century, our focus, the Leen supported institutions and textile industries in its upstream hinterlands – and by extension the downstream transformation of Nottingham from a ‘garden town [to] an industrial slum’ (Figure 1).Footnote 15
Extract from John Chapman, ‘Nottinghamshire’, 1792. Source: University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections, Over.XX Not 1.B8.D92.
Figure 1. Long description
The map extract is centred on the River Leen. The landscape in the northern part of the map includes the estate of Newstead Abbey. The River Leen flows south from here through the settlements of Papplewick, Bulwell, Basford, Radford and Lenton before flowing east to the town of Nottingham, which is depicted as a dense cluster of red-shaded buildings. The map includes the names of local landowners such as Lord Byron and J. Musters Esq. Topographical details included shaded hills, trees. Lines of different thickness represent roads and canals. The River Trent is indicated in the south-east portion of the map.
The case of the Leen shows how even small-scale river management produces new forms of governance – specifically, here, we show how managing the Leen made modern Nottingham. The article proceeds chronologically in three sections. The first covers the administration of the Leen before parliamentary enclosure enabled the growth of the town centre. It foregrounds tensions between riparian interests and highlights the patchwork nature of regulatory control. We draw on estate records, notably of the dukes of Newcastle, owners of Nottingham Castle and Lords of the Manor upstream at Basford, and digests of borough records. The second focuses on the effects of urban and industrial expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century. Using records of municipal committees and an emerging cohort of professional and technical specialists, it traces the role of pollution in reshaping the imagination and geographic reach of Nottingham through borough expansion. The third section examines the impact of flooding in the twentieth century on the administration of the Leen. By considering the history of water management on the Leen over the course of three centuries, we see the structuring legacies of older forms of technical and administrative river governance influencing emerging risks and modern river management strategies. Flooding resulted in the Leen’s designation as a ‘main river’ under the control of the Trent River Board, the regional catchment authority. That maining was the necessary mechanism to institute the construction of a large-scale engineering scheme that is today’s legacy. It mattered in a symbolic way, too – ultimately, it translated the Leen’s risk into administrative status.
Maintenance, management and jurisdiction
In 1696, a waterworks company was formed to supply Nottingham. Using a hydraulic engine, it pumped water from the Leen near the castle rock up to a reservoir formed from a section of the old town ditch.Footnote 16 The castle had been converted into a ducal palace and, in 1711, with an adjacent park, inherited by Thomas Pelham-Holles (1693–1768), later first duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The waterworks were on the site of older mills, and borough records reveal tensions in maintaining a strong water supply. In May 1753, for example, the town hall permitted the Waterworks Company to bring an action against a Mrs Hunt, ‘for not keeping up the Leen Banks about the Park whereby the Water course to the Corporation Water Mill hath been diverted’.Footnote 17 In 1754, the same year as Newcastle began the first of two periods as first lord of the treasury, or prime minister, the Leen from Basford to its entrance into his ducal park was put under the jurisdiction of local commissioners of sewers.Footnote 18 Their power originated in legislation from 1532, with the ability to act over land drainage, ditches, mills and floodgates within a given area. Geographically, these powers were not necessarily contiguous with existing administrative units such as parish or county.Footnote 19
Borough records show efforts to clear the channel of woody debris. Neither commissioners nor corporation could control the river through the Park, however, whose boundaries can be seen on Figure 1.Footnote 20 This provoked tensions in May 1757. A Mr Clay had impressed on the commissioners that the duke ‘would take the same care of the Leen through His Grace’s Park – as if it had been put into the Sewors’. Yet the Waterworks Company undertakers described how ‘His Grace’s Leen Bank within Nottingham Park hath thro neglect been wash’d down and broke, and the water diverted another way’ such that ‘the river lay dry below the breach for several days [original emphasis]’.Footnote 21 The reduced current meant ‘the whole Town is distrest for want of their River’. This deprived those ‘who have in general a right to the river’, including dyers and tanners who ‘need the special use of the stream’.Footnote 22 The undertakers complained that they had been forced to repair the stream, at a cost of £7, and expected redress. They had done nothing untoward in their use of water, they said. They had not previously repaired the duke’s banks and understood from Mr Eggington that prompt repairs would not be taken by any precedent of responsibility.Footnote 23 The copy of the legal case in the Newcastle papers was annotated by Mr Eggington, who was clear to defend the estate against any accusation of impropriety. Alongside the discussion of the supposed promise to maintain the river, for example, he wrote: ‘Mr Clay meant the scouring the Channel, not repairing the banks.’Footnote 24
The dispute exposed questions of legal rights to use water and to expect maintenance of the river.Footnote 25 The result was a patchwork of parochial and private interests. Alongside ordering maintenance below the waterworks, in 1761 the council ordered the chamberlains to give notice to Robert Hall ‘not to put down any more the flood gates he now uses at his Thread Mill on the River Leen’. These impacted the waterworks by ‘Stopping the Current of the River’, so must have been upstream.Footnote 26 Hall had a thread mill at Basford – constructed ‘sometime before 1761’.Footnote 27 Well upstream of Nottingham, Basford was enclosed in 1792. Here, landowners such as the duke of Newcastle extended their influence. Textile manufacturing in Basford increased as local bleachers experimented with new processes involving chloride of lime. Robert Hall found it delivered results in days that required a month of open-air bleaching, saving money and freeing up land for development.Footnote 28 Further enclosure in 1796 at Radford and Lenton, and the later growth of industrial settlements distinct from the ‘original agricultural-based villages’, changed the relationship of the Leen to the landscape shown on Chapman’s contemporary map (Figure 1).Footnote 29 It also shaped the relationship of Nottingham to the Leen.
By the 1840s, as shown on Dearden’s map (Figure 2), the town broadly retained the footprint of Chapman’s map, with its jurisdictional boundaries constraining its capacity to influence changes upstream. Radical historian John Blackner described the Leen as ‘the common sewer of the town’.Footnote 30 More specifically, it was conveying waste from an industrializing Leen Valley into Nottingham. Prompted by the need for better-quality water, in 1827 the Waterworks Company started to draw water from springs at Scotholme, near Basford, instead of the Leen. The effects of population growth and pollution of the supply resulted in competition and the creation of two more water companies in the 1820s and 1830s.Footnote 31 One, the Trent Waterworks Company, employed the water engineer Thomas Hawksley, his contribution being to ‘bypass the polluted Leen’ for purer sources of water.Footnote 32
‘Deardens plan of the town of Nottingham from the best authorities’, 1844. Source: University of Nottingham School of Geography Map Collection.
Figure 2. Long description
A historical monochrome street map of Nottingham. At the centre is the densely packed urban core, featuring the Market Place and Parliament Street.
Moving outward by ward:
* North: St Ann’s Ward and Byron Ward are characterized by emerging street grids and open fields labeled Clay Field.
* East: St Mary’s Ward contains the East Croft and the River Leen.
* South: The Meadows and Castle Ward are located along the bottom edge, featuring the Nottingham Canal and the River Leen.
* West: Park Ward and Sherwood Ward include large open spaces like The Park.
Key landmarks include:
* Southwest: The Castle is situated on a prominent bluff overlooking the Spa Close.
* Northwest: A large eight-pointed compass rose indicates North.
* Top Right: An ornate title block features a coat of arms and text stating Plan of the Town of Nottingham from the best Authorities, 1844.
* Bottom: A scale bar in yards and feet is provided, along with a note on mean time at Nottingham relative to Greenwich and St Paul’s.
The map is framed by longitude and latitude coordinates, with Longitude West of Greenwich 1 degree 8 minutes at the top and bottom margins.
Hawksley detailed the challenges facing Nottingham to the Royal Commission on the State of Large Towns in the 1840s. He offered two explanations, one concerning the political geography of Nottingham, the other of disease. Nottingham’s surrounding common land constrained the boundaries of the town. This was a barrier to better health. The town occupied 2,610 acres with a population in 1831 of 50,680 in 10,407 inhabited houses and 53,091 in 1841 in 10,934 houses. Of the 1,070 acres of ‘commonable land’ around the town, 888 were virtually ‘private property’.Footnote 33 There was little benefit for many of Nottingham’s working people. The 1835 Municipal Reform Act protected the rights of freemen, which they used to block enclosure.Footnote 34 Only in 1845 would a serious measure of enclosure be achieved, part of a package that increased the size of the borough by one third.Footnote 35
To turn to disease, Hawksley’s evidence reflected miasmatist understandings. He focused on the route of the river east of the old waterworks, which had been arched over and built on. On Canal Street, for example, the British and Foreign School was sinking into ‘the principal and foulest sewer of the town’. This can be seen on Dearden’s map of 1844 (Figure 2). To the east, the Beck stream was inadequately covered causing houses to be inundated in heavy rain. In ‘lower’ parts of the town, where packed court housing dominated, residents sold the contents of their cesspits to ‘muck-majors’, who carted it to canal-side wharves, spilling their loads on the way. There, ‘fevers and other contagious diseases are exceedingly prevalent’.Footnote 36
The dominant sanitary voice of the age, Edwin Chadwick, used Nottingham to illustrate how ‘jurisdiction was not coincident with the drainage area’. He told a parliamentary committee reviewing local legislation that the authority managing drainage only reached over ‘a portion of the natural and proper area’. Such divisions created ‘rival and clashing interests’.Footnote 37 The 1835 Municipal Reform Act had created an infrastructure for urban improvement. Elected town councils had a supporting bureaucratic structure of clerks, financial officers and published accounts.Footnote 38 At this time, the council lacked technical professionals to support municipal works: the first borough engineer was not appointed until 1859, and the first medical officer of health in 1872.Footnote 39 Nottingham had no local Improvement Act and the commissioners of sewers no jurisdiction within the town. Chadwick provoked the committee: ‘Will you extend the jurisdiction of the town councils over the suburbs? That would commonly be violently opposed by the suburban districts.’ Noting that town councils were dominated by ‘tenants at will or persons of short interests’, his proposal was for a body where local interests could be reflected in proportion to the drainage area.Footnote 40
A town committee appointed to enforce the removal of nuisances in 1847 reported evidence of fever in several streets and courts such as Broad Marsh and Sussex Street, shown on Figure 2, as the Leen flowed through the town. They heard medical opinion that ‘Typhus Fever is caused by impure air arising from want of drainage or from bad drainage and that although Fever prevails in the poorest Districts its origin is not poverty but impure and vitiated air.’ The committee demanded an enquiry into ‘The whole subject of the Sewerage within the Town and particularly in Broad Marsh, Narrow Marsh and the other streets near the Leen.’ They suggested enlarging the aqueduct that carried the Leen under the canal and, to the east of the town, a sewer in the Beck area connecting to the Leen.Footnote 41 It remained important to guarantee a flow (or ‘outfall’) ‘for the aggregate and rapidly increasing sewerage of the Town’.Footnote 42
Population growth and the continued development of trade threatened the Leen – so much so that Thomas Hawksley warned in 1860 that it would soon ‘become classed in foulness with the blackened Rivers of Manchester, Bradford, and Leeds’. By the time the Leen left Basford, Hawksley wrote in 1860, it had ‘a decidedly foul and obnoxious character’, but the volume of chlorine prevented sewage from ‘forming those peculiar gaseous combinations’ harmful to health. Here, ‘stagnancy’ was the greater challenge. Hawksley considered that attempts to regulate trade would prompt legal action. Echoing Chadwick’s assessment of jurisdiction, he perceptively noted that ‘Practically, though not municipally’, the interests of the town extended to watershed boundaries beyond the borough. He proposed either the discharge of sewers into the Leen or the construction of an ‘intercepting sewer’ to tackle pollution of the river below Basford.Footnote 43 Hawksley occupied an important moment of municipal transformation. Although initially employed to improve private water supply, his municipal vision points the way towards greater political rather than market control over urban infrastructure, and a more ambitious view of the possibilities of urban engineering.Footnote 44 Ultimately, ‘practically’ had to be made synonymous with ‘municipally’. It had to mean extending the borough boundaries to resolve governance problems and to facilitate large-scale projects of water engineering.
Sewerage and borough expansion
Until 1853, Lenton’s sewage was conveyed in a culvert under the Leen and then via open ditch and a wooden trunk under the canal into a stream called the Tinkers Leen, which flowed east along a different course to the south of Nottingham and on towards the Trent. Using powers under the Nuisances Removal Act of 1855, the Lenton Board for the Repair of Highways covered the open ditches of the village. Problems were exacerbated by the creation of a sewer for New Lenton conveying sewage directly into the Leen and on into Nottingham.Footnote 45
In 1859, the Leeds-born Marriott Ogle Tarbotton was appointed as Nottingham’s first full-time borough engineer. Where earlier practice had involved contracting independent consulting engineers such as Hawksley for specific projects, Tarbotton occupied an expansive role as one of a growing cohort of new municipal engineers employed by local authorities, responsible for diverse aspects of city infrastructure including roads, public buildings, bridges, gas works, sewage and water supply.Footnote 46 In this role, Tarbotton urged the creation of a new local Board of Health (under the Board of Health Act of 1858) to tackle multiple problems: ‘there is no correct plan of the town or neighbourhood in the hands of the Corporation, no established system of levels, no complete record or plan of subterranean works or sewerage, and there are no public data whatever to aid the consideration of a subject like that of Sewerage’. Tarbotton intended to put that right, drawing up a report described as ‘exhaustive and convincing’.Footnote 47
Such exercises in knowledge creation allowed municipal engineers such as Tarbotton to strengthen their status and broaden the impact of engineering on Victorian cities, while also underpinning the status of corporations as agents of improvement. As Tarbotton explained, the new Act meant ‘the regime of the Corporation is greatly changed, its jurisdiction is more comprehensive, its duties more responsible, and its influence more complete’.Footnote 48 One obituary put it more grandly, claiming that Tarbotton’s first task as borough engineer was ‘to change the old order, and to inaugurate an entirely new system…Mr Tarbotton’s task was to evolve order from this chaos.’Footnote 49 Within this context, Tarbotton drew up ambitious proposals which encompassed the whole Leen watershed, including areas outside the jurisdiction of the corporation with the goal of making the Leen the ‘main sewer of Nottingham and district’.Footnote 50 Tarbotton’s technical vision for the engineering future of the Leen was not constrained by the administrative boundaries of contemporary governance. Achieving this vision, however, proved complicated. Although in January 1863, the old Leen channel through Nottingham, which had previously been covered over, was abandoned, replaced with a culvert and sewer connecting the area near the old waterworks with a route to the Trent, the problem of the rest of the Leen Valley remained.Footnote 51 As Nottingham’s Sanitary Committee explained to the Home Secretary Sir George Grey, in a joint deputation with Birmingham, they still lacked ‘powers to restrain the pollution of streams and cannot give that combined action over an extended area or watershed embracing several parishes which is essential for providing an effectual remedy’. Their proposal was for new drainage boards.Footnote 52 For John Beckett and Geoffrey Oldfield, ‘problems of water supply and sewage disposal proved to be the catalyst which brought town and suburbs together’.Footnote 53 Discussions developed between the town council and various upstream suburban authorities about a voluntary alliance.Footnote 54 This was against a background of uneven practice up the Leen. Basford parish had established a local Board of Health under the 1858 Public Health Act; Radford, much more cautious, did so only in 1873.
As has been argued in other contexts, mapping played an important role in securing public support for new urban infrastructure.Footnote 55 In this case, maps made the interconnectivity of local problems and the need for solutions that encompassed the whole watershed comprehensible for diverse audiences. Attendees at a meeting in Lenton in November 1865, for example, viewed ‘a large map of the valley of the river Leen’ between Basford parish and the Trent. It showed Tarbotton’s plans for a new intercepting sewer and road connecting Nottingham to Lenton along the path of the Leen south of the Newcastle Park Estate.Footnote 56 A month earlier, Tarbotton had presented plans for the inspection of Chancellor of the Exchequer William Ewart Gladstone who visited Nottingham to view them in his capacity as an executor of the estate of the late fifth duke of Newcastle. Newspapers reported the evidence presented to Gladstone of the decline of water quality over the century. One such claimed that ‘men now living, the mayor himself among the number, caught fish in their youth’ but that the river was now ‘polluted by commixture with the sewage’. Ultimately, Gladstone ‘expressed his warm approval’ of the plans and the trustees of the Park agreed to contribute to the new sewer, with finance in proportion to the length of the installation within their jurisdiction.Footnote 57
There were similar obstacles to overcome to the east of Nottingham, when landowners Earl Manvers and John Chaworth Musters objected to plans to bring the Lenton sewage through to the Trent at Sneinton. They requested that relevant authorities unite to protect the ‘noble’ Trent, threatening legal action if a solution was not forthcoming.Footnote 58 Discussions continued through 1870, taking in a legal dispute at the Court of Chancery involving the corporation, the Waterworks Company and the Great Northern Railway as owners of the canal. The town clerk, the council’s legal advisor, was clear that even were they to succeed in efforts to convey such sewage to the Trent, against the wishes of the Waterworks Company who might lose their means of power, they were only likely to give further grounds for legal complaint from the ‘Trent riparian owners’.Footnote 59 Collaboration was required.
In May 1871, representatives of Nottingham, Basford, Lenton, Radford, Sneinton and the Park met to explore an alliance, Bulwell initially neglecting to reply to the town clerk’s invitation to participate.Footnote 60 The committee petitioned parliament for legislative approval, which was granted through the Nottingham and Leen District Sewerage Act 1872. It confirmed the board’s membership and powers. That same year, the national Public Health Act of 1872 effectively made local authorities responsible for the supply of clean water and mandated the appointment of medical officers of health. Nottingham, which had earlier overlooked discretionary powers in this field now appointed Dr Edward Seaton.Footnote 61 In both instances, political reforms reflected and reinforced professionalized responses to municipal problems.Footnote 62 In September 1872, Tarbotton began work from the Leen Valley to the Trent on ‘such plans and sections’ as were required to design the intercepting sewer and outfall works necessary ‘for the effectual drainage of the district’.Footnote 63 This focus echoed Hawksley’s watershed-scale thinking. Tarbotton exhibited his plans at a meeting of the Sewerage Committee in Bulwell in February 1873, with specific aims to keep sewage and storm water separate and so protect infrastructure assets such as the canal in the town.Footnote 64 Later, the board contacted representatives of the local boards of the neighbouring areas of Beeston, to the west, and Arnold, to the north, to see if they would join the scheme. The Arnold board was reminded to keep sewage out of the Leen. Clearly, the sewage scheme would not work if that board misused the Daybrook tributary, which entered the Leen at Basford.Footnote 65
There is no doubt that the geography of industrial activity challenged the administration of the impacts on and of the River Leen. Pettifogging and ‘territorial disputes’ limited the Sewerage Board’s work. The solution proposed by the corporation was to seek to extend the borough boundaries. The 1877 Nottingham Borough Extension Act (40 Vict.) was, explicitly, ‘for the execution of the Nottingham and District Leen Sewerage Act, 1872, by the Corporation’. The old Leen sewerage board was ‘dissolved’, its powers passing to the corporation.Footnote 66 Basford, Radford and Lenton were incorporated in a new municipal structure. So too was Bulwell, where the new corporation displaced a rather hesitant local Board of Health. It had only operated for a small number of years – mostly ‘keeping down the rates’ rather than making sanitary progress. The owners of smaller, often overcrowded, houses opposed the ‘annexation’, with an eye on costs.Footnote 67
Large sewers might be necessary for the health of the people, but they were not supporting the health of the Leen or Trent: they ‘pollute them, poison the fish, injure the Cattle, create aerial nuisance and offend the Riparian proprietors’.Footnote 68 Despite broad agreement that sewage should be removed from the Leen, there was less consensus about what to do with it at the sewer’s outfall. At the public meeting in Lenton, local man Mr John Fish expressed concern that a sewer with an outfall into the Trent would simply replicate the problem of sewage from the Leen ‘going into the Trent and poisoning the fish’.Footnote 69 Fish were an ongoing measure of river health. Seaton had suggested that sanitary inspectors inspect fish as part of their duties.Footnote 70 Tarbotton’s successor as borough engineer Arthur Brown would, in 1891, point to the presence of fish ‘beyond the last bleach works at Bulwell, near the Borough boundary’ as a sign of the ‘comparative purity of the water’.Footnote 71 Addressing the issue of what to do with sewage, at the Lenton meeting Tarbotton’s representative, Mr Bretland, was asked to suggest ‘how the sewage could be utilised so as to make it profitable’. Bretland had no answer, as the question ‘had not been decided’ – but it was prescient.Footnote 72
Consensus around the best method of treating sewage was lacking in the 1860s and 70s. Many systems were in place across the country, including ‘dry’ waste disposal systems which persisted in Nottingham and other major English cities until the twentieth century.Footnote 73 One of the first tasks completed by the Unified Sewage Board, therefore, was to visit existing sewage treatment works in towns including Ealing, Croydon, South Norwood, Barking, Romford, Tunbridge Wells, Hastings, Leicester, Rugby and Hawick.Footnote 74 Drawing on these visits and a review of literature on sewage treatment, Tarbotton proposed to remove sewage from the Leen via the intercepting sewer and use it in irrigation or sewage farming. Reflecting contemporary engineering philosophies about maximizing value and reducing waste, he recognized sewage as a source of valuable chemicals such as phosphates and ammonia.Footnote 75 Sewage pollution was not only a problem for river management, but also a waste of valuable resources. As Tarbotton argued in a lecture to the Nottingham Literary and Philosophical Society, ‘flowing in our conduits, or tumbling into our rivers, it [sewage] has no value, and is only a trouble; it must be so delivered and placed that its virtues may be abstracted’.Footnote 76 Removing that ‘trouble’ was the primary motivation. Recovering it for another use, he told the council, would derive a secondary ‘compensatory value’.Footnote 77
To engineer this vision, Tarbotton advocated a sewage farm where waste could be filtered and subsequently used for agriculture. By the 1870s, this system was becoming the preferred method of municipal sewage treatment after decades of testing and patenting of various ineffective systems and processes of converting sewage into useful products – primarily fertilizer. Sewage treatment was reconceptualized. Faced with the risk of costly failure and fear of litigation, authorities moved away from financial gain as the primary motivation in the management of sewage.Footnote 78 For Tarbotton, cost was of ‘secondary moment’ to effective sanitation. At some cost, a sewage farm was constructed by the corporation in 1878 on 638 acres leased from the earl of Carnarvon, Earl Manvers, Rev. Canon Lord Forester and William Burnside at Stoke Bardolph, nearly five miles south-east of Nottingham.Footnote 79
While spreading sewage on land was effective for managing organic waste, Tarbotton acknowledged that pollution caused by manufacturing, particularly in Nottingham’s significant textile industry, could not be treated in the same way. He argued that ‘these floods of liquids are in no sense sewage, they are simply disorganized waters, waters tinted by the various but beautiful hues which appertain to modern feminine costume, waters containing bleaching powder and soap…these liquids should not be designated sewage, they destroy the whole régime’.Footnote 80 They had long been recognized as a problem. In 1873, Medical Officer Edward Seaton cited Hawksley’s assessment of the Leen at the Scotholme water works as ‘one mass of bleach-work refuse’, which, due to percolation, polluted the spring water. As the water tasted of chlorine, Hawskley recommend its ‘disuse’.Footnote 81 Under an 1879 Improvement Act, in 1880 the corporation took control of water supplies from the private Waterworks Company and Hawksley. Tarbotton would oversee the completion of the Hawksley-designed pumping station north of Nottingham at Papplewick in 1884, which enabled the closure of the Scotholme and other older works.Footnote 82
James Douet usefully notes that the decision of municipalities to take over water supply was often practically rather than ideologically motivated. They were empowered to do so because of the recognition of public benefit. To return to the question of wastewater, Tarbotton differentiated between industrial and organic waste as a proxy for private and public responsibility. The use of public waste management systems to dispose of industrial refuse was fundamentally a problem of the conceptual limitations of public provision – Tarbotton argued that it was unfair to ask ratepayers to pay for the disposal of waste generated by industry. He suggested legally compelling manufacturers to manage their refuse. Solid waste should be disposed of on the premises, and liquid waste treated to remove dyes or chemical agents.Footnote 83 The new system aimed to divert organic waste into the Leen Valley sewer and eventually to Stoke Bardolph sewage farm. In July 1880, work began to ‘dis-connect from the Leen all the sewers now discharging their contents into that River and turn the same into the Main Outfall Sewer’.Footnote 84 At the same time, borough engineer Arthur Brown was tasked with developing a scheme to keep industrial waste out of the sewers and ‘putting down such drains as may be necessary to carry into the Leen the refuse water from the bleachers’ works’.Footnote 85
Despite borough extension in 1877, the prospect of political disputes beyond its borders remained a driving force in the corporation’s decision-making. In 1885, Brown suggested sewer improvements within the borough at Whitemoor and Cinderhill. Although the scheme was costly and only affected 250 houses, by putting their own sewers in order the corporation would be in a position to ‘proceed against the authorities above us’ to prevent pollution of the Leen. Brown was particularly concerned about pollution generated by Hucknall Torkard and Bestwood Colliery to the north, and advised the corporation to threaten the Hucknall Local Board with legal action should it fail to deal adequately with their sewage.Footnote 86 Nottingham’s Medical Officer of Health Philip Boobbyer later welcomed the installation of filtration equipment there, but he regretted that for as long as the Leen ran in ‘an open channel through poor and populous neighbourhoods, so long must we expect to find it used as a convenient cloaca for refuse of various kinds’.Footnote 87
Industrial effluent was eventually acknowledged as a problem in its own right. Brown counted 24 bleach and dye works in the Leen Valley in 1891. Of these, 17 discharged wastewaters directly into the Leen, amounting to 3 million gallons of industrial wastewater per day – around one third of the total water in the Leen. The effect of chemical contaminants was to precipitate soap and solids in the Leen which then decomposed to create ‘offensive gases’.Footnote 88 In a departure from the earlier strategy, Brown wanted industrial waste and sewage to be combined and managed at Stoke Bardolph. Boobbyer registered the scheme in his annual reports, but his tone was of resignation. The Leen, Tinkers Leen and canal, he wrote in his review of 1898, were ‘worse from a sanitary point of view than at any previous period of their history’.Footnote 89 By this point, they functioned as a connected system. To facilitate the construction of a new road between Lenton and Nottingham, which opened in 1884, the Leen at Lenton had been diverted into the canal and its historic route south of the Park filled in.Footnote 90 Polluted water now flowed into the canal system, which set the corporation in a three-way dispute with the Great Northern Railway, as owners of the canal, and the duke of Newcastle’s solicitors. For its part, the corporation felt ‘it could not control the bleach works’, unless the waste was connected to the sewer. As a consequence of Brown’s recommendations, facilities were expanded at Stoke Bardolph. Expecting too much sewage to spread on the land, managers now looked to bacteriological or septic systems.Footnote 91 At the dawn of a new century, Boobbyer hoped for a ‘radical cure’ for the Leen – either by stopping pollution at source or by recognizing it as an ‘open sewer – as it actually is – and culverting it throughout’.Footnote 92
In the nineteenth century, the problems of industrialization and urbanization of the Leen presented a key driving force in reshaping urban governance in terms of the scale at which the problems were understood and the scale and ambition of the solutions envisioned for them. As the possibilities presented by the relatively new profession of municipal engineering became more apparent, the roles and opportunities of local authorities also expanded. In Nottingham, this led to the city itself being reimagined, ultimately incorporating significantly more land and people than it had at the beginning of the century.
Flooding and river maining
Our third example considers flooding. Flooding, and the associated issue of water flow, presented a persistent problem: 1875 represented the worst flood on record, with further significant floods on the Leen in 1932, 1946 and 1947. In 1940, Nottingham corporation first approached the River Trent Catchment Board, as it then was, with a request to designate the Leen as a ‘main river’. This board had been formed in 1930 following a Royal Commission in 1927, which recommended that ‘the Main River of the watershed area, and its principal tributaries, should be brought under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Catchment Board for drainage purposes’.Footnote 93 The enabling Land Drainage Act of 1930 transferred the powers of any remaining commissioners of sewers, and, importantly, provided a new mechanism for levying landowners and even local governments. The emphasis on drainage reflected national economic policy to promote agriculture, a vision that shaped river management for half a century when flood control became the dominant policy frame. Government funding was provided for drainage works to alleviate agricultural unemployment in the late 1930s.Footnote 94 In Nottingham, the corporation used river cleansing as a job creation scheme during the economic depression, spending £7,000 in 1932.Footnote 95
The corporation again approached the board in 1945, when the town clerk explained that they were reliant on limited powers from the Nottingham Corporation Act of 1892 to address flooding on the Leen. The pressure continued into 1946, prompting members of the board to tour the Leen on 10 April. They refused the application due to ‘the character of the river, the absence of flooding problems and the desirability that the River Leen through the City should remain under the jurisdiction of your Corporation’. The town clerk responded that the corporation’s powers ‘are not adequate to deal with the problems which arise’.Footnote 96 The corporation might have felt vindicated when severe flooding in spring 1947 prompted a wider review of river management in Britain.
After the waters receded, the honorary secretary of the Bulwell Flood Prevention Committee asked the Trent Catchment Board to adopt the river.Footnote 97 Following the River Boards Act of 1948, under which the old Catchment Board was renamed to reflect its wider remit for drainage, fisheries and pollution, Nottingham put its case to a conference at the Ministry of Agriculture. Notes prepared by the town clerk before the meeting on 6 May 1948 laid out the challenges that the corporation wanted to make clear: its powers under local legislation were lacking, while the powers of the 1930 Land Drainage Act were inadequate. They pointed to the conclusion of the city engineer that weirs and obstructions needed removing – according to a contemporary survey, there were 17 weirs, 2 functioning and 7 former mills, with their various wheels, races and sluicesFootnote 98 – and other sections needed straightening. Furthermore, they noted that Arnold Urban District Council was proposing a sewerage scheme that could result in increased discharges of storm water into the Daybrook, which would then be conveyed into the Leen.Footnote 99
The ambition of the Arnold scheme was to separate sewage and surface water, the former going to the corporation works and the latter into the Daybrook. The context here is post-war housing development. The scheme would drain 60 per cent of Arnold’s planning area with a maximum discharge of 500 cusecs into the Daybrook. The Trent River Board offered no objection to elements of the scheme but insisted on negotiations on aspects of the work. Arnold Urban District Council was willing to make changes, such as a culvert to relieve Valley Road, but improvements along the Daybrook were required first, because ‘the burden of flooding would be transferred to the lower reaches of the Brook’.Footnote 100 In a sense, the case is an essay in miniature of the broader themes of the article: new development prompted environmental risks and jurisdictional conflicts. Changes to the Daybrook created and transferred risk all the way down to the Leen outfall into the canal at Lenton. Plans were revised, with a maximum discharge of 160 cusecs.Footnote 101
Flooding occurred again on the Leen in 1960. What mattered, and what differentiated this flood, was its relationship to the Trent. In 1947, the Leen and Trent were both in flood. Such was the impact across the Trent Valley that various flood management schemes were enacted by the Trent River Board. These included the installation of a Nottingham Flood Protection Scheme focused on the River Trent, with new embankments upstream of Trent Bridge and a new sluice system at Holme Pierrepoint. This opened in 1956 and cost in the region of £1m – a figure equivalent to purchasing power of some £23.9m in 2017.Footnote 102 In 1960, flooding was more localized along the Leen. It affected 150 properties, including 15 factories – ‘some of which were inundated to a depth of 4ft’. Concern, and indeed modelling, about what would happen if a Leen flood of 1960 were to coincide with the Trent in flood at 1947 levels, finally forced matters.
Following a meeting at the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food in April 1961, with the corporation and the Trent River Board, plans were drawn up to ‘main’ the Leen and bring it within the board’s jurisdiction. Engineer Marshall Nixon made it clear that having authority to deliver widespread improvement work would ‘permit the proper development of the whole catchment area of the river’, particularly housing developments at Bestwood and Rise Farm and industrial expansion in the Meadows.Footnote 103 Maining officially happened under a renamed Trent River Authority in October 1964. Before this, maintenance had been divided amongst ‘200 or so riparian owners, the local authorities having no general powers to carry out works’. Not so under the technocratic authority of this wider-scale body. As catchment development and increased stormwater runoff had ‘made flooding inevitable’, a co-ordinated hard engineering scheme was developed (Figure 3).
‘River Leen Drg. No. 1’, Trent River Authority, First Statutory Annual Report Year Ended 31st March, 1966. Source: University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections, RE/DO/687.
Figure 3. Long description
A detailed black and white topographical map titled RIVER LEEN Drg. No. 1.
At the top North, a scale bar in miles (0 to 1) is positioned near the text UPSTREAM LIMIT OF MAIN RIVER. A thick dashed line delineates the River Leen Catchment Boundary, forming an irregular elongated shape that encompasses several towns and landmarks.
The River Leen is depicted as a solid dark line running North to South through the centre of the catchment. Five numbered circles (1 through 5) are placed along the river’s course, with arrows pointing to specific sections of the River Leen Improvement Scheme marked by cross-lines on the river.
* Section 5 is the furthest North, near Papplewick and Bestwood.
* Section 4 is located South of Bestwood, near Bulwell Forest.
* Section 3 is positioned West of the river near Cinderhill, with an arrow pointing to the river channel.
* Section 2 is further South near Wollaton and Lenton.
* Section 1 is at the Southernmost point where the River Leen meets the River Trent.
Key geographical locations within or bordering the boundary include Hucknall and Newstead to the North, Arnold to the East, and Beeston and Nottingham to the South. The River Trent flows along the Southern edge of the map, labelled with an arrow indicating flow direction. The background contains dense topographical details including roads, railways, wooded areas, and building footprints.
Like Tarbotton’s plans for the intercepting sewer, the design for the Leen Improvement Scheme was ambitious in scale and comprehensive in scope, encompassing the whole watershed and intervening along almost the whole length of the Leen. The scheme was delivered in five separately contracted and consecutively built sections (Figure 3). With the maining of the Leen, control of the river shifted from the local authority into the technocratic purview of the Trent River Authority. In practical terms, this shift meant that the sections of the Leen Improvement Scheme could be decided based on technical and procedural, rather than jurisdictional, criteria. The connection between the practical management of urban infrastructure and the authority of the local government that had in part been forged by Tarbotton’s generation of borough engineers was remade as the Leen became administratively linked instead with other rivers in the area and became the responsibility of a regional specialist technical organization.
If our second example represented the apparent triumph of engineering in managing sewage, this third example centred on the regulation and conveyance of water. The design aimed for the Leen to ‘discharge its maximum flood flow of 2,000 cubic feet per second with the River Trent in minor flood’ or ‘1,000 cubic feet per second against the Trent in superflood’. That was defined as 25 per cent over the Trent’s 1947 maximum. The cost was estimated at £1m, a similar figure for the Nottingham flood works on the Trent. A central government grant of £250,000 was less than hoped for, with the remainder having to be met by the corporation. This would have been hard to justify as a standalone project. It is the ‘complexity of flood protection work that governs its cost’, concluded the Trent River Authority, ‘rather than the size of the problem’. Even before the final bill of £1.8m was known, the authority concluded: ‘This situation shows the desirability of dealing with any problem of internal waters at the same time and an integral part of any main river flood protection scheme.’Footnote 104
Along the Vesdre, Soens notes, engineers and industrialists blamed successive floods on natural causes and not on their interventions – as such, they responded to flooding with calls for more dams and more control. A ‘complex river system’ was focused on the control of one variable: water quantity.Footnote 105 The Leen Improvement Scheme, of a piece with the Trent River Authority’s interventions elsewhere, reflected a primary concern with conveyance. It involved clearing redundant mill races and weirs where the Leen was no longer a source of motive power. Bed depth was examined and adjusted in areas such as Bulwell where mining subsidence had lowered the river channel and caused sedimentation – and thus increased flood risk. In its lower reaches, the Leen was straightened and its banks strengthened behind steel piling. Near Lenton – where it had been turned eastwards centuries earlier and where, in the 1880s, it had been turned into the Nottingham Canal – the Leen was diverted, its water removed from the canal network and thus from the city centre. Engineers concluded that it was not possible to upgrade to an appropriate extent the drainage of areas such as the Meadows. Instead, the river was moved into a repurposed north–south canal branch (Figure 4), moved through a syphon under the still-used west–east canal and conveyed in a new channel directly to the Trent. The threat to the town centre of Leen flood waters was thus ameliorated.
Fixing of steel reinforcement to the Twin Box culvert connecting the River Leen with the diversion channel downstream of Derby Road, Nottingham, 1967. Source: University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections, RE/DOP/H20/33.
Figure 4. Long description
The photograph shows the construction of a twin box culvert. A construction worker in a coat and flat cap stands in the centre of a metal construction frame. This consists of vertical and horizontal rods that form two tunnel-like structures. To the right, a worker squats near a ladder and metal sheet pilings. Along the right side of the photograph is a line of brick buildings. In the background, earth embankments are visible either side of a water channel.
Conclusions
The Leen was remade by industrial and urban development, from a vital river that sustained life and industry to a problem sewer to be covered over, and finally as a source of flood risk. It would be wrong to conclude that the legislation and policies we have examined delivered immediate or co-ordinated action. As various other studies have shown, decisions in one place or policy arena intersect with river use and management in others over often unexpected spatial and temporal scales. In 1937, John Inglis Spicer, chief pollution and fisheries officer for the Trent Fishery Board, pointed to the absence of the river’s health and water quality in policy-making: ‘The root cause of the deterioration of the water-courses of the country had been that it had never been laid down in gubernatorial policy that water-courses maintained in a condition to sustain fish life would be thereby guaranteed as to general suitability for industrial, agricultural, and even domestic purposes.’Footnote 106 In the case of the Leen, regulatory bodies were repeatedly constrained in their efforts to determine and manage the risks from competing demands on the river. The resulting disputes reveal how urban governance was reshaped by environmental problems that crossed or exceeded political boundaries, but also by changing awareness of and knowledge about emerging risks.
The closure of industries that used water along the Leen did not fundamentally change an already altered river system.Footnote 107 Tim Soens and others use terms like the ‘industrialization’ of river systems to describe the wide reach of urban processes across river catchments.Footnote 108 The Trent River Authority blamed flooding on urbanization: the ‘existing system of sluices and weirs, which are a legacy of the old mills, are now quite inadequate to carry the increased flow’. Urbanization created a negative feedback loop, whereby the Leen ‘has been prevented from self-adjustment to meet the higher run-offs’.Footnote 109 Even though the Improvement Scheme planned for the removal of redundant infrastructure in the channel, it was certainly no wider act of deindustrialization. The response reflected the wider dominance of technocratic engineering improvements seen in the optimism of engineer Marshall Nixon’s phrase ‘proper development’.Footnote 110 Attempts to alleviate flood risk, even ones that worked well, can nevertheless be part of geographical as well as ‘generational’ transfers of risk.Footnote 111 On the Leen, the planned removal of redundant infrastructure was not enough to alleviate contemporary flood risk. A new route was therefore set for the river, its water moved physically away from the town centre after some 860 years. That physical distancing was part of attempts to protect the centre of Nottingham against flooding, which it achieved, in the process enabling further development to the north. The imaginative effect has been to disconnect the river from a much older relationship to the centre of Nottingham and its region. This is as much a part of the legacy of 1960s river governance as the hard engineering that now constrains the river channel.
In August 2025, the Environment Agency organized a video drone flyover along the main river section of the Leen. Available to view online, it shows a river channel for the most part contained and controlled, threading between suburban and student housing, past supermarkets with large car parks, industrial sites, a university campus and a hospital. The Environment Agency is developing a new vision for the Leen, beyond the essential obligation to manage flood risk: ‘When we take care of the river, it also helps the plants, animals, and people who live nearby’, reads their website, much like Inglis Spicer’s commentary 90 years earlier.Footnote 112 The video captures the way the Leen connected many of Nottingham’s communities, yet it also points to the way the hydro-social vision of the River Leen Improvement Scheme distanced people from the river itself. The visible legacy of that scheme illustrates the scale of the challenge to rethink and redesign urban river infrastructure to improve river health and anticipate emerging risks from climate change.
Acknowledgments
This article draws on research for an exhibition, The Leen: Nottingham’s River, displayed at Lakeside Arts. We would like to thank our co-curator Sarah Colborne and colleagues at Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham. Matthew Johnson and Emily O’Donnell shared their knowledge of the Leen and Steve Dugdale and Charles Watkins kindly read earlier drafts.
Data access statement
Archival sources can be consulted at Inspire Nottinghamshire Archives and Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham. Figures from the Trent River Authority archive are included with permission of Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham. Further reproduction is not permitted without permission.
Funding statement
Preliminary research was funded by NERC Cross-disciplinary research for discovery science grant NE/X018083/1.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
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