Water pollution control engineering / [prepared by the Central Office of Information for the Ministry of Technology and Ministry of Housing and Local Government].

  • Great Britain. Central Office of Information.
Date:
1970
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Water pollution control engineering / [prepared by the Central Office of Information for the Ministry of Technology and Ministry of Housing and Local Government]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/148 (page 7)
    Control of Water Pollution in Britain BY A. KEY, CBE, DSc, PhD, FInstWPC The management of water resources, including effective control of pollution, is one of the major problems facing industrial nations today. In this field, as in many other industrial developments, Britain has had a much longer experience than most other countries and has been a pioneer in scientific research regarding it. As early as 1850, river pollution was one of the major topics of national debate in England, largely because the Thames, the river chiefly affected, passed through London and under the very walls of the Houses of Parliament. Moreover, the Thames was then the main water supply for a large and rapidly growing industrial com- munity and received all its crude sewage and untreated wastes— with calamitous results, revealed by the appalling incidence of disease and mortality at the time. Probably no other capital city had ever found itself faced with such a nauseating, offensive and dan- gerous pollution problem, and the violent language of parliamentary debates reflected its gravity and urgency. The remedy found, following that outcry, was essentially simple, though by no means cheap. It consisted in draining the sewage several miles lower down the river and in discharging it at a point where it received a much greater dilution, while extracting the water supply much farther upstream. Later, more and more advanced techniques of storage, filtration and sterilisation were used, with the result that, for many years now, London’s water supply has been beyond reproach. The main pollution problem then moved to the north of the country, where there was a large concentration of industry. ‘There, it was more readily tolerated, because ample supplies of pure water were available in the hills surrounding the towns and because amenity was then considered of less importance than industrial 1. Opposite: the Crossness sewage treatment works of the Greater London Council