Introduction: waterscapes

Key terms

Waterscapes engages with a number of concepts that have long formed part of urban-environmental historical discourse. One such idea is taming the wilderness, an idea that has been associated with efforts to modify the rural landscape in the Western world. William Cronon has demonstrated these attitudes in regard to the settlement and transformation of American plains, which was framed by historians like Frederick Jackson Turner as a step towards creating an egalitarian and democratic nation. These progressive narratives of environmental change helped situate the role of society within national development as fighting against an old and obstinate enemy, one that was overcome by greater scientific and technical knowledge and skill.⁵ This is something that continued well into the twentieth century, particularly in arid regions of the United States such as Texas, where new waterworks helped to facilitate new towns.⁶ While the taming of the countryside in Britain was less emphatically celebrated, it was stressed by certain key actors like engineers and local authorities and helped to perpetuate a sense of modernity.

This is linked to Maria Kaika’s idea of the ‘Promethean project’, defined as the quest to ‘tame, control, and discipline nature’ in order to facilitate the expansion of towns and cities and, therefore, modern urban society.⁷ Like Prometheus, who stole fire from the Greek gods and, therefore, provided humanity with technology and knowledge, structures like waterworks fundamentally altered the countryside to improve urban civilisation. This is also linked to the idea of second nature, a concept that essentially refers to the ways in which humanity remakes nature. For Theodor Adorno, second nature presents itself as meaningful but illusionary.⁸ A good example of this paradigm was Frederick T. Olmstead’s Central Park, which included scenery that was meant to invoke the Catskill Mountains, from where New York derives its water supplies.⁹ This scenery looks natural, particularly in the wider context of a green space, but is entirely man-made. This is a remaking of nature for sociocultural purposes, a process that also occurred with the creation of lake-like reservoirs. Like other forms of second nature, this form of nature was illusionary: it was real but not real. This is a key concept to consider when looking at accounts of the countryside provided by journalists and guidebook writers who saw the landscape as improved by what would we term as second nature.

This leads into another key term: amenity. In short, this refers to the ways in which the appearance of the rural landscape has been altered and the attempt to preserve a more natural aesthetic. This is a term with a long and charged history, infused by Romanticism, preservation and, latterly, legislative and modernist narratives. As Katrina Navickas has noted, narratives around landscape in the post-war period became entwined with debates around ecology and wilderness; for some, the rural wilderness was not there to be tamed but to be preserved, a forerunner to more recent debates around rewilding.¹⁰ While the post-war period is when issues of amenity came to be defined in legislative terms, it had long been associated with waterworks and changes to the rural environment. The Thirlmere Defence Association, formed to stop Manchester from extracting water from Lake Thirlmere in the Lake District, essentially rooted its opposing argument in ideas around amenity: the importance of preserving the natural appearance of the Lake District.¹¹ Before then, Wordsworth had led campaigns against the coming of the railway to the Lake District, an area that he had done so much to define in his poetry.¹² Matthew Kelly has also noted the use of amenity in opposition to a waterworks project on Dartmoor to supply London, which focused on utility rather than notions of Romanticism, showing that even in the nineteenth century the term encapsulated different meanings.¹³

Amenity in the twentieth century, though, took on a more nuanced meaning. As John Sheail has noted in his analysis of the amenity clause, the term came to reflect the ultimate paradox of technology: ‘namely that the most effective way of tackling the disruption caused to the environment by technology is through further advances in technology’.¹⁴ While less obvious than examples of rural modernism like concrete dams or electric pylons, authorities had been engaging in this paradox for decades. The construction of Victorian reservoirs was an exercise in masking changes to the landscape, their earthen-embankment design helping to cover their technological nature and allowing them to blend in to appear as natural lakes, a central feature of guidebook descriptions in this period. As Chapter 3 highlights, the concept of amenity could also be malleable, used to defend changes to the landscape that were seen even by preservationists as tasteful. Waterscapes engages with this more nuanced understanding of amenity, focusing less on the outright instincts of preservationists to highlight the ways in which forestry and cultural depictions of the landscape following reservoir construction could add to understandings of amenity: understandings that were, as Navickas, Sheail and others have shown, developing after the Second World War.

The growth of water history

The ways in which historians approach the history of water supply has changed significantly over the past forty years, moving from viewing water solely as a medium for discussions on public health to considering the cultural importance of water and supply systems. Much work has concentrated on the way in which the water industry operated politically. The governance of the water industry remained remarkably stable over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at least until the 1970s. Before the 1840s, private companies provided water to urban areas, given statutory powers by Parliament to supply specific areas, the most prominent example of this being the thirteen water boards that supplied the London metropolitan area.¹⁵ Several issues came to the fore during the early to mid-nineteenth century that resulted in municipal governments becoming more involved in managing the water industry. Public health was a large issue, not just in terms of the increasingly recognised effects of polluted water but also the means of solving this problem, as espoused by Edwin Chadwick, requiring greater quantities of water. In addition to this, consumer dissatisfaction with the quality of water supply and what was deemed as profiteering by private water companies provided municipal government with the opportunity to purchase waterworks and bring them under public control.¹⁶ Sally Sheard has argued that private water companies in Liverpool failed to provide a fit and proper water supply, were driven by profit and held irresponsible attitudes towards public health.¹⁷ This ties into a broader historiography of water during the 1980s and 1990s, which focused predominantly on water as a medium for histories of public health.¹⁸

From the 1840s onwards, more towns and cities followed the example of Liverpool in bringing their water supply under municipal control. Among other reasons for municipalisation, it was felt that local government could raise necessary funds for large-scale infrastructure projects more easily than private water companies, although this was by no means easy for many smaller towns.¹⁹ Towns and cities, as well as private water companies that had the means to do so, applied to Parliament for the statutory powers, as well as funds, to construct reservoirs in rural areas. This involved gaining legal rights to land as well as arbitrating private land rights in the targeted area. While an expensive process, it was largely straightforward for many who had done their due diligence; indeed, water engineers employed by municipal governments to plan and construct reservoirs, like Frederick Bateman and Thomas Hawksley, also became extremely adept at providing expert testimony to parliamentary committees.²⁰ Thirlmere was a point of contrast to this process. Parliamentary bills often faced opposition that was then heard and arbitrated or resolved privately. The strength of feeling behind the opposition to Thirlmere, as well as its more organised nature, meant that Parliament took the unusual step of establishing a special committee to hear all arguments and judge whether the bill should progress.

With some notable exceptions, such as Bristol and Newcastle, many towns and cities had brought their water supplies under municipal control by the twentieth century. Even London, with its sprawling thirteen water boards, brought a level of centralised control with the creation of the Metropolitan Water Board in 1903. Municipalisation also demonstrates that the governance of water in this period was mirrored across the Atlantic. The history of Manchester’s water supply has been compared by Harold L. Platt to Chicago, the ‘shock cities’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has argued that the political culture of both cities was vital in shaping narratives of water supply and sanitation.²¹ The attitudes of city aldermen in Chicago, who saw their position within municipal government in a self-serving manner aided by heavy devolution of power and universal male suffrage, were indicative of their approach to the environment. They did not want investment into the city to be harmed by issues around water usage, despite warnings from progressive reformers that the city’s water supply was not inexhaustible.²² The municipal governance of Manchester, affected by limited suffrage and strong centralised government, was driven more by a sense of social and moral duty, which informed attitudes towards water supply.²³ William Kahrl has highlighted a similar approach to the environment in his study of dam construction in the Owens Valley, California. He has shown that the waterworks system built in the valley to service Los Angeles during the twentieth century was undoubtedly positive for the city, as water authorities were able to predict future demand and construct ahead of time.²⁴ This, however, came at the expense of the agriculture of the valley, which was destroyed during construction. It also affected the valley’s residents, who were left displaced and marginalised by the scheme, with many of the vital decisions that affected their future made in Los Angeles where they had no representation.²⁵

While the parliamentary process for Thirlmere was more complex, the standard water bill procedure broadly remained in place well into the twentieth century, a process that could be costly as well as drawn-out. This changed with the implementation of ministerial orders during the interwar and post-war period, which made it easier to pass uncontroversial local government legislation.²⁶ Ultimately, straightforward waterworks projects were decided by the minister for housing and local government, on the advice and evidence of civil servants, rather than a lengthy and expensive parliamentary committee. This speaks to the ways in which the water industry was reformed during the twentieth century, ostensibly to provide more power to centralised figures and bodies. However, this was not a simple process. Water was not nationalised by post-war Labour governments despite it being a part of Labour policy up until 1965.²⁷ As Christine McCulloch notes, due to the nature of water ownership, nationalisation may have antagonised both municipal and private providers.²⁸ Robert Millward has also pointed to various other stakeholders in water supply that made nationalisation unfeasible, such as landowners, industrialists and river conservancy boards to name a few.²⁹ Despite this, John Hassan has highlighted attempts by central government to improve the water industry amid increased demand, leading to the 1963 Water Resources Act, which sought to radically reorganise the water industry, implementing centralised river authorities to directly manage and sustain rivers across the country.³⁰ The establishment of the river authorities under this act, followed by the establishment of the regional water boards in 1973, saw central government play an increasingly interventionist role in the governance of water without fully nationalising the industry. As Glen O’Hara has highlighted, though, post-war governments of both colours struggled to fully manage the water industry, meaning that confusion was often the end result.³¹

Political histories and histories of public health remain vitally important, particularly for areas of the world where colonial power structures affected the development of infrastructure and health environments.³² However, they can only illuminate a part of the broader impact of water to society and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United Kingdom. As Andrea Gaynor has argued, historians of public health have failed ‘to trace the co-evolution of cultures, technologies, and environments as they relate to water over time’.³³ Embracing a cultural approach to these issues can help shed light on these wider themes, an approach that historians of water have increasingly taken to the subject.

In part, this has been aided by the broader cultural turn, which has shifted the focus from water as a medium of public health to the different cultural and semiotic associations that water can hold.³⁴ More recently, this has moved beyond the study of water itself to the technologies involved in the supply of water, such as pipes and reservoirs. This has attracted the attention of historians interested in the development of liberalism and power during the nineteenth century. Influenced by Michel Foucault’s idea of governmentality, the ways in which individuals self-govern through the practices of power enacted by the state and experts, they have analysed the implementation of infrastructure in the city as an example of how expertise influenced the practices of self-rule.³⁵ Surveillance was a key element in maintaining liberal governmentality, with civic institutions like newspapers helping to control and mediate urban space during the nineteenth century. Under the guise of anonymity provided by pseudonyms, writers could report instances of poor behaviour, thereby utilising the newspaper as an apparatus of surveillance and as a method of shaming.³⁶ Urban space, though, was also mediated by technology. Chris Otter has argued that the state implemented large engineering projects in order to impose a state of governability, the management of which constituted a large part of the growth of government during the nineteenth century.³⁷ While city councils began to appoint experts such as borough surveyors and medical officers of health to inform on how to govern aspects of the city, Otter has argued that it was the engineers employed by local government who built the networks that governed everyday life.³⁸ Patrick Joyce has complemented this argument by illustrating that Chadwickian public health and sanitary reform was used in order to mediate urban space by regulating the installation of infrastructure such as water pipes and water closets in the home.³⁹ Thus, it was through the implementation of technology that the idea of freedom (and, ergo, self-rule) was secured. This approach has been criticised by historians, not least because of the denial of individual agency. This is the case with Vanessa Taylor and Frank Trentmann’s work on drought in London and Sheffield in the late nineteenth century, the first drought in the United Kingdom to occur following the widespread implementation of high-pressure water supply to homes. Rather than be disciplined into self-rule, water became a consumer issue, with consumers demonstrating against water companies who were seen to be denying access to a resource that had become part of everyday life, further demonstrating the importance of taking cultural approaches to the history of water.⁴⁰

Embracing a cultural approach can also help to develop local political studies of waterworks, particularly by engaging in ideas around civic identity. The attachment to one’s town or city and their municipal achievements were an important part of urban life in the nineteenth century. The opening of key civic institutions, such as Leeds Town Hall, or the ceremonies to celebrate new waterworks became hallmarks for civic pride.⁴¹ As such, a certain pageantry was engaged with on such occasions, such as the presence of members of the royal family to bestow the event with national patronage. There was also an engagement with processional culture, with members of the procession to open a new venture ranked according to their social standing. Gunn has argued that the celebration of civic pride reached a zenith in large industrial cities in 1870, with a slow decline in participation until 1914, when national and imperial identities took precedence. In the interwar period, the prominence of events like the British Empire Exhibition and the opening of the British Empire Stadium (more commonly known as Wembley Stadium) in 1924 were believed to have turned the attention of urbanites away from civic achievements.⁴²

The predominance and privileging of national identities on the urban stage has been questioned in recent years, though. Events like pageants and civic anniversaries in the 1920s and 1930s help to demonstrate the continued importance of civic identity.⁴³ As historians like Charlotte Wildman have shown, this continued into the post-war period. Although the post-war context was different to the interwar years, as the interwar years were different to the late nineteenth century, municipal endeavours like the civic film A City Speaks (1947) continued to be used to express faith in the city’s aspirations.⁴⁴ While this may have been the province of the industrial middle classes in the nineteenth century, by the post-war period civic pride was taken up by architects and developers who saw new, dynamic cities on the horizon. As Peter Shapely has convincingly argued, the design and construction of new buildings in cities that embraced post-war consumerism, such as the Merrion Centre in Leeds, designed by Arnold Ziff, became symbols of what cities could achieve.⁴⁵ Civic pride and identity, then, adapted to time and place, becoming increasingly inclusive and participatory, a revisionist argument that Waterscapes looks to contribute to.

The interest in cultural history has also developed within environmental history, which sees water as representation as well as environmental asset.⁴⁶ Environmental historians like Richard White have long recognised human alterations to landscapes like the Colorado River as a remaking of nature.⁴⁷ Changes made to the river impacted not only its flow but also how the river was utilised by others, especially salmon that could not swim up a dammed river. Thus, in the remaking of nature to suit human needs, ecosystems were often adversely affected. Similarly, environmental historians also began to consider the effects of cities on the environment, which had previously been dismissed by established scholars like Donald Worster.⁴⁸ Cronon argued that by focusing on socio-economic modes of production at the expense of culture, towns and cities, which Worster viewed as products of culture and separate from nature, were excluded from his environmental history agenda.⁴⁹ In order to produce an inclusive environmental history, the impact of towns and cities on nature, endogenously and exogenously, had to be integrated, as Christine Meisner Rosen and Joel Arthur Tarr argued, to better understand society’s impact on the natural environment.⁵⁰

In a pioneering study that sought to highlight the benefits of incorporating cities into environmental history, Cronon examined the development of Chicago during the nineteenth century. He explored Chicago’s geographic position as a ‘gateway’ to the American West and the subsequent development of transport links with the city as a port, flows of goods such as meat, lumber and grain from surrounding states, including Michigan, Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, and further flows of capital, manufactured goods and culture.⁵¹ This illustrates that Chicago did not develop just as a city, an area with a clear boundary demarcating urban and rural, but as a city intimately connected with its hinterlands, an example of how cities were not just shaped by their physical environments but helped to shape the environments around them. Thus, urban and rural environments cannot be considered as separate; they shape and are shaped by each other. The demands of the city for resources, food and capital are drawn from rural and semi-urban hinterlands, which are themselves shaped by these demands. While Cronon does not discuss water supply, his work can help an environmental history of water. The ways in which British towns and cities like Leeds and Liverpool went to their rural hinterlands for sources of water, thereby shaping the rural environment through the construction of dams and reservoirs, and, indeed, further policies of land management, is another way in which the relationship that he describes is evident, a relationship that is explored in this book. Cities, therefore, cannot be considered as wholly expressions of culture, as Worster has argued, but as an integral element in the shaping of rural environments, gaining resources from rural areas while simultaneously remaking the natural environment.

This approach has been developed by historical geographers interested in structures like reservoirs as sites of socionature, the nexus of social and natural forces that work in tandem to create an assemblage that is neither social nor natural but a hybrid of both.⁵² Kaika has examined the dialectic of nature and the city that has influenced urban planners through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both nature and the city have been coded as ‘good’ – as places untouched by the horrors of urban industrialism and as the pinnacle of civilised society – and ‘bad’ – as a foreboding wilderness that requires control and as harbouring the evils of modern society. This has impacted on how planners have approached the design of urban public spaces: for example, F. L. Olmsted’s aforementioned incorporation of wild nature into the design of New York City’s Central Park in the 1850s.⁵³ This dialectic was expressed in the construction of the Marathon Dam, Athens, in the 1920s, as evidence of the ability of humans to tame nature while reconceptualising the city as a modern, constructed space removed from the influence of nature.⁵⁴ Gaynor has built upon Kaika’s work in exploring the need for water to maintain residential lawns in Perth, Western Australia, during the early twentieth century. While water was always at a premium due to the heat experienced in Australian summers, residents continued to water lawns, which provided Perth with a picturesque suburban image that could be compared with other cities within the British Empire.⁵⁵ Thus, water as a socionatural product held important social and cultural values; indeed, some residents used their domestic supply in order to maintain their lawn.⁵⁶ This can be further seen in Taylor and Trentmann’s analysis of constant water supply and the fitting of fixed baths and water closets in Sheffield, which increased the material value of water in the home as water became a part of everyday life.⁵⁷ Analysing sites of socionature like the Marathon Dam or New York can illustrate the power dynamics between the city and nature, and the centrality of water to those relationships.

Indeed, across the Atlantic, the study of water has moved beyond groundbreaking work on municipalisation and public health by historians like Martin Melosi to study the more holistic impact of water to areas like Texas, where towns were created by the construction of reservoirs in more than one sense.⁵⁸ Waterworks in this region also helped to facilitate spaces for leisure, becoming synonymous with days that celebrated water-based activities.⁵⁹ This speaks to the ways in which studies of waterworks are becoming increasingly entwined into histories of leisure and tourism. Australian environmental historians have also sought to use cultural approaches to water management, highlighting how historic floods and droughts have shaped urban living in a country that, at times, struggles for potable water supplies. Additionally, they highlight the importance of indigenous beliefs around water and how those beliefs can inform water management in the present.⁶⁰ The focus on areas of the world that struggle for potable water supplies, like Texas and Australia, speaks to the increasing interest of water historians in parts of the world that will be affected by anthropogenic climate change more quickly than others; arguably, some of these areas already are.

While some have concentrated on drought, others have focused on flooding. Historians in Australia have explored flooding in relation to drought, particularly in urban areas that have suffered from periodic flooding due to their proximity to major rivers. They take flooding to be a symptom of the wider hydrological cycle that has been adversely affected by climate change. There are also cultural associations with flooding that are being increasingly focused on. Lotte Jensen’s work on the cultural history of water in the Netherlands demonstrates the paradoxical attitudes that the Dutch hold towards water in a country that has been ravaged by floods for centuries: water is linked to traumatic events that illustrate the country’s geographical vulnerabilities, while simultaneously being a reminder that through technical innovations they have overcome such vulnerabilities. This sense of fear and national pride is at the heart of the country’s relationship with water, a duality that will once again come to the fore in a time of climate crisis.⁶¹ Recent works, then, have focused on the role of water, both its abundance and its absence, in a time of crisis inspired by the current context. In focusing on a more temperate climate, Waterscapes looks to contribute to these cultural histories of water by analysing the different – sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting – relationships society had with rural water taken for urban needs, as we deal with questions around water supply in the present.

Rethinking waterscapes

The ways in which historians think about changes to rural places by urban authorities has been influenced by a number of ideas. One such idea is socionature, developed by cultural geographers like Erik Swyngedouw. Socionature is a way of conceptualising changes to the environment by social forces, the results of which are neither fully social nor natural but a socionatural hybrid.⁶² Reservoirs are a good example of socionatural hybridity, constructed by urban authorities, built by human labour, but within the contours of the rural landscape.⁶³ Waterworks can be viewed as urban/rural hybrids, rather than within an urban/rural binary relationship.

Another useful theoretical underpinning is the idea of rural modernity. Landscape historians have, in the past, tended to neglect the impact that waterscapes have made on the landscape. Tom Williamson, a landscape archaeologist, has argued that landscape history ‘is concerned with the historical interpretation of the physical structures and spaces which make up the environment’, yet this has often concentrated on fields, agriculture, gardens and woodlands rather than waterscapes that have been reconfigured by urban needs.⁶⁴ Furthermore, Williamson has also suggested that landscape history has not fitted well with ecological or natural histories owing to their respective focus on social or natural historical processes.⁶⁵ This, perhaps, speaks to the lack of impact of environmental history in Britain in some disciplinary circles. It also highlights the importance of taking a socionatural approach to studying waterscapes in order to view these social and natural historical processes simultaneously. This is especially the case in the North of England and Wales, where, as this monograph demonstrates, waterscapes like reservoirs were adapted not just for the purpose of water supply but for leisure and tourism.

Conceptualising these waterscapes as sites of rural modernity can help to shift this lens, taking in the wider social, cultural, environmental and political issues they impacted upon. Traditionally, landscape in England has been seen within a specific framework, crystallised by W. G. Hoskins who sought to show the depth of history of the English landscape – the countryside of the 1950s was not just a product of the Victorian or Georgian period but had been formed over centuries. As such, the countryside that Hoskins venerated was one of hedgerows, streams and small stone churches; he had little time for the activities of post-war planners or changes to the countryside at large since 1914. (He was, though, quite complimentary about the aesthetic qualities of reservoirs in the North and Midlands.)⁶⁶ While the term rural modernism has been associated with the time in which Hoskins was writing, given the influence of modernist architecture in the countryside through pylons and transmission stations, Navickas has argued that nineteenth-century waterworks structures, as well as canals, are also examples of this process.⁶⁷ Furthermore, an engagement with ideas around rural modernism can, as Navickas has done, highlight the historic tensions with utilising land that was deemed to be not outstanding. Historiographically and contemporaneously, certain landscapes have been privileged over others due to their apparent aesthetic value, a trait pushed by poets and writers and then, in the twentieth century enshrined in legislation, the creation of national parks, and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. There is much to be gained by focusing on what Navickas refers to as areas of non-outstanding natural beauty, as she has done in her examination of debates around amenity and preservation of the industrial Pennines.⁶⁸ Similarly, many of the case studies examined here focus on areas not typically associated with Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty or what would become national parks: Washburn Valley is a little-known area of North Yorkshire between Harrogate and Leeds; Lake Vyrnwy and the Elan Valley were conceptualised by what they could provide to English cities rather than for their aesthetic value. How ideas of aesthetics, amenity and interaction from both local and urban people combined in these areas is of central interest here.

Taking influence from ideas like socionature and rural modernity means that, by its very nature, Waterscapes is an interdisciplinary endeavour. Indeed, an engagement with the idea of waterscapes is inherently interdisciplinary, given that waterscapes are hybrid spaces that encompass intersecting social, cultural, political, economic and environmental factors. As such, this monograph examines a number of different themes such as social and cultural histories of the environment, politics and leisure among others. To do so, it takes in a broad range of sources, from traditional historical sources such as archival records and historical newspapers, to novels, photographs and film. Incorporating a diverse set of sources allows for a more holistic and nuanced analysis of the impact of waterworks projects across England and Wales, providing scope to assess this impact from a number of different angles and themes. In so doing, this monograph engages with ideas related to the environmental humanities, a growing field that recognises the need to incorporate a greater variety of sources and analytical frameworks in order to fully comprehend historical attitudes to the environment.

Chapter outlines

This monograph thus contributes to historical debates in two novel ways: first, by emphasising that the hinterland relationship was reciprocal, seen in the activities of writers and city dwellers in remaking and experiencing urban waterscapes; second, by showing that municipal water provision continued to be associated with civic identity well into the post-war period, tied to a wide variety of everyday activities.

Water was a necessity for towns and cities to survive and grow, but the process of procuring water was rarely straightforward. The first chapter highlights a number of case studies, in particular water schemes undertaken by Leeds, Liverpool and Birmingham, to demonstrate what, at times, could be a tumultuous process. It took time for water authorities to find suitable locations to construct reservoirs, only to be faced by the opposition of local landowners and other interested parties. Once parliamentary permission had been secured, the difficulties of engineering the landscape came to the fore. A series of incidents occurred during the construction of Leeds’s Washburn Valley scheme that led to one reservoir, Thruscross, being postponed for nearly one hundred years. The construction of Liverpool’s Vyrnwy waterworks was beset with conflict between the waterworks committee and the consultant water engineer Thomas Hawksley. In the twentieth century, the opposition of the landed gentry was increasingly replaced with that of ecology and, in the case of Wales, nationalism. While engaging in detail with the various waterworks projects that feature throughout this book, what runs through all the chapters is the strong sense of civic pride that was attached to these projects. It was expressed differently in 1866 than in 1966, but it was present nonetheless and consistently so across time.

In Chapter 2, the consequences of the long, drawn-out processes of construction are examined from an environmental perspective. Some of these consequences became apparent during construction, some shortly after. Having to address landslips and cracks in the earth brought into question the expert knowledge of the engineers and their ability to tame the wilderness. This ability was brought into further focus when environmental incidents occurred after construction had been completed. Dam collapses at Bilberry, Holmfirth and Dale Dyke, Sheffield were well chronicled in the nineteenth century and certainly played into fears around potential environmental disaster as more reservoirs were built. Changes in engineering practice and design did develop as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries progressed and ever more water was required. Although the appearance of reservoirs had changed over the hundred years covered here, attitudes to the environment by water authorities and engineers had not. The belief in the engineer’s ability to tame the wilderness was as strong in 1966 as it was in 1866, despite the incidents in between covered in Chapter 2.

Chapter 3 explores the importance of trees and forestry to managing waterscapes. It was not enough to build reservoirs on rivers that had good quality water: that quality had to be maintained. This was a hard task in rural areas as farming effluent often found its way into the water and farmers washed their sheep in the river. Municipal government, then, had to be more interventionist to protect the purity of the water supply. Historians have paid little attention to afforestation in England and Wales before the First World War, but notable schemes at Lake Vyrnwy and in Washburn Valley were undertaken, with varying degrees of success. In the case of the latter, unemployed men with little training were used, which resulted in the politics of water management becoming intertwined with the politics of unemployment. After the First World War, although forestry policy became more centralised with the creation of the Forestry Commission, municipal government remained vital to successful tree-planting efforts, with Liverpool in particular at the forefront of afforestation. Successful afforestation thus became tied to ideas of civic identity. It seemed to provide evidence of the positive role the city could play in developing timber stocks and protecting water supply, intertwining the urban and rural closely.

The fourth chapter examines the impact of reservoirs on the cultural landscape. The rural areas targeted by water authorities were not just altered in a physical sense, but in a cultural sense too. Many nineteenth-century reservoirs were built into the landscape, effectively giving them the appearance of natural lakes. To some, this was perceived as heightening the beauty of the rural idyll. Despite narratives of urban encroachment or negative portrayals of the city more generally, these rural areas had been improved by urban engineering. The influence of Romanticism was strong in depictions of these rural areas, as was the cultural legacy of the Lake District. Indeed, the Washburn Valley scheme was dubbed by local newspapers and guidebooks as the ‘Leeds Lake District’, with all of the cultural associations of that label. What is explored here is how the cultural landscapes of rural areas affected by reservoir construction were remade, once more highlighting the link between positively altering the appearance of the countryside and civic pride.

The construction of reservoirs did not just alter how the landscape was consumed from afar but also how it was used for leisure, the focus of Chapter 5. Newly developed lakes provided opportunities for angling and, in some cases, boating, while the rich descriptions analysed in the previous chapters brought ramblers, first from the middle class and then from the 1920s onwards from the working class, to these areas. As with construction, afforestation and cultural depictions, leisure also became tied to ideas of civic identity. Fishing in municipal reservoirs could be seen to contribute to the good health of the city’s water supply; by helping to stop reservoirs becoming overstocked with fish, anglers were fulfilling their civic duty. The engagement of urbanites with rural areas that had been altered by urban engineering, essentially becoming a part of the city in the countryside, again was a way to participate in civic pride. On the surface, this seems to have reflected ideas of inclusion and citizenship; however, class continued to be a factor in who could and could not properly participate in the achievements of the city. The forms of angling that developed in reservoirs, typically fly fishing, was associated with middle-class leisure, while the growth of working-class rambling led in some quarters to unease about unruly elements in the countryside. In an age where civic identity was becoming more democratic and participatory, examining leisure in waterscapes can help us to assess how democratic this identity actually was. Rights of way around waterscapes are part of this untold story.

The predominant focus of the preceding chapters is on the impact of waterworks to the rural environment, how the urban affects the rural for resource extraction. When chapters focus on the reciprocal nature of this relationship, as in Chapters 4 and 5, they nevertheless centre on the experiences of urban residents. The penultimate chapter switches focus to those most affected by the construction of reservoirs in rural areas: local communities. Some villages on the edges of reservoir development, such as St John’s in the Vale in the Lake District, were largely depopulated when construction began. Others were literally washed away, submerged by dammed river water only to be seen again in times of severe drought. A number of people, though, lived alongside reservoirs as water management continued to impinge on their lives. Chapter 6 will explore how the lives of residents in the valleys explored here were affected by the management of water. The first half focuses on Washburn Valley, looking at the ebbs and flows of community life as residents acclimatised to their new role as tenants of Leeds Corporation. The second half looks at the flooding of villages, a common aspect of many reservoir projects. Here, two in particular will be highlighted: Leeds’s Thruscross reservoir, which flooded the village of West End, and the more famous Llyn Celyn reservoir, controversially flooded by Liverpool in spite of an outpouring of Welsh nationalist sentiment.

The concluding chapter brings together the themes of the book, while placing the findings within the wider context of urban waterworks in England and Wales during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Similarities and differences are highlighted between the main case studies, showing the importance of taking a local, urban angle when considering the national importance of reservoir provision. There was no consensus on design, implementation or management of reservoirs; however, there were commonalities as authorities sought to supply the best source of water they could to towns and cities. The overall conclusion thus incorporates the myriad forms of identity we will encounter in the chapters, in terms of civic, class and gender, and how they intersect with the provision and management of water, pointing to the importance of incorporating cultural and urban-environmental history. Other themes such as the role of citizenship and environment will also be highlighted to demonstrate the novel findings of the book. Finally, the importance of this research to the contemporary politics of water will be discussed, stressing the need for policymakers to consider a more holistic interpretation of urban waterscapes.

Notes

1. 1.  ‘Driest July in England since 1935’, Met Office, 1 August 2022, https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weather-and-climate/2022/driest-july-in-england-since-1935.

2. 2.  Ofwat, Strategic Regional Water Resource Solutions: Standard Gate Two Final Decision for Fens Reservoir, 28 June 2023, 8–9, 12, https://www.ofwat.gov.uk/consultation/strategic-regional-water-resource-solutions-standard-gate-two-draft-decision-for-fenland-reservoir/; Ofwat, Strategic Regional Water Resource Solutions: Standard Gate Two Final Decision for South Lincolnshire Reservoir, 28 June 2023, 8, https://www.ofwat.gov.uk/consultation/strategic-regional-water-resource-solutions-standard-gate-two-draft-decision-for-south-lincolnshire-reservoir/.

3. 3.  Ofwat, Strategic Regional Water Resource Solutions: Standard Gate Two Final Decision for South East Strategic Reservoir Option, 28 June 2023, 7–26, https://www.ofwat.gov.uk/consultation/strategic-regional-water-resource-solutions-standard-gate-two-draft-decision-for-south-east-strategic-reservoir-option/.

4. 4.  Denis Cosgrove, Barbara Roscoe and Simon Rycroft, ‘Landscape and Identity at Ladybower Reservoir and Rutland Water’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 21, no. 3 (1996): 534–51, https://doi.org/10.2307/622595.

5. 5.  William Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative’, Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992): 1352, https://doi.org/10.2307/2079346.

6. 6.  Andrew M. Busch, ‘Dams and the Age of Abundance: Hydraulic Boosterism, Regional Growth, and the Reemergence of Water Scarcity in Central Texas’, Journal of Urban History 49 no. 2 (2023): 309–34, https://doi.org/10.1177/00961442211008865.

7. 7.  Maria Kaika, ‘Dams as Symbols of Modernization: The Urbanization of Nature Between Geographical Imagination and Materiality’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96, no. 2 (2006): 276, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2006.00478.x.

8. 8.  Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Idea of Natural History’, Telos 1984, no. 60 (1984): 123–4, https://doi.org/10.3817/0684060111.

9. 9.  Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (MIT Press, 2003), 93.

10. 10.  Katrina Navickas, ‘Building Amenity in Areas of Non-Outstanding Natural Beauty in the Southern Pennines’, in New Lives, New Landscapes Revisited: Rural Modernity in Britain, ed. Linda M. Ross et al. (British Academy, Oxford University Press, 2023), 96.

11. 11.  Harriet Ritvo, The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

12. 12.  Keith Hanley, ‘The Imaginative Visitor: Wordsworth and the Romantic Construction of Literary Tourism in the Lake District’, in The Making of a Cultural Landscape: The English Lake District as Tourist Destination, 1750–2010, ed. John K. Walton and Jason Wood (Ashgate, 2013), 113–32.

13. 13.  Matthew Kelly, Quartz and Feldspar: Dartmoor – A British Landscape in Modern Times (Vintage, 2016), 99.

14. 14.  John Sheail, ‘The “Amenity” Clause: An Insight into Half a Century of Environmental Protection in the United Kingdom’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 17, no. 2 (1992): 163, https://doi.org/10.2307/622543.

15. 15.  Joseph Hillier, ‘Implementation Without Control: The Role of the Private Water Companies in Establishing Constant Water in Nineteenth-Century London’, Urban History 41, no. 2 (2014): 228–46, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926813000278.

16. 16.  Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800–1854 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 13–14; Sally Sheard, ‘Water and Health: The Formation and Exploitation of the Relationship in Liverpool, 1847–1900’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 143 (1994): 151, https://www.hslc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/143-8-Sheard.pdf; John Hassan and Peter Taylor, ‘The Politics of Water in Early and Mid-Victorian Britain: The Experience of Bolton’, Transactions of the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 148 (1998): 133.

17. 17.  Sheard, ‘Water and Health’, 151.

18. 18.  Bill Luckin, Pollution and Control: A Social History of the Thames in the Nineteenth Century (Adam Hilger, 1986); Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice; Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (J. M. Dent and Sons, 1983); Christopher Hamlin, ‘Muddling in Bumbledom: On the Enormity of Large Sanitary Improvements in Four British Towns, 1855–1885’, Victorian Studies, 32, no. 1 (1988): 55–83, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3828289.

19. 19.  Robert Millward and Sally Sheard, ‘The Urban Fiscal Problem, 1870–1914: Government Expenditure and Finance in England and Wales’, The Economic History Review 48, no. 3 (1995): 526, https://doi.org/10.2307/2598179.

20. 20.  G. M. Binnie, Early Victorian Water Engineers (Thomas Telford, 1981), 136.

21. 21.  Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 406.

22. 22.  Platt, Shock Cities.

23. 23.  Platt, Shock Cities, 406–7.

24. 24.  William L. Kahrl, Water and Power: The Conflict over Los Angeles’ Water Supply in the Owens Valley (University of California Press, 1982), 438.

25. 25.  Kahrl, Water and Power, 443.

26. 26.  John Sheail, ‘Local Legislation: Its Scope and Context’, Archives 30, no. 113 (2005): 48, https://doi.org/10.3828/archives.2005.3.

27. 27.  Christine S. McCulloch, ‘The Water Resources Board: England and Wales’ Venture into National Water Resources Planning, 1964–1973’, Water Alternatives 2, no. 3 (2009): 462, https://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/alldoc/articles/vol2/v2issue3/59-a2-3-10.

28. 28.  McCulloch, ‘Water Resources Board’.

29. 29.  Robert Millward, ‘The Political Economy of Urban Utilities’, in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840–1950, ed. Martin Daunton (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 348.

30. 30.  John Hassan, A History of Water in Modern England and Wales (Manchester University Press, 1998), 86; Glen O’Hara, The Politics of Water in Post-War Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 89.

31. 31.  O’Hara, Politics of Water.

32. 32.  Aditya Ramesh, ‘Indian Rivers, “Productive Works”, and the Emergence of Large Dams in Nineteenth-Century Madras’, The Historical Journal 64, no. 2 (2021): 281–309, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X20000163.

33. 33.  Andrea Gaynor, ‘Lawnscaping Perth: Water Supply, Gardens, and Scarcity, 1890–1925’, Journal of Urban History 46, no. 1 (2020): 65, https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144217692991.

34. 34.  Jean-Pierre Goubert, The Conquest of Water: The Advent of Health in the Industrial Age, trans. Andrew Wilson (Polity Press, 1989); Veronica Strang, ‘Fluidscapes: Water, Identity, and the Senses’, Worldviews 10, no. 2 (2006): 147–54, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43809682.

35. 35.  Shane Ewen, What Is Urban History? (Polity, 2016), 70.

36. 36.  Andy Croll, Civilising the Urban: Popular Culture and Public Space in Merthyr, c.1870–1914 (University of Wales Press, 2000), 89–90.

37. 37.  Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 14.

38. 38.  Otter, Victorian Eye, 15.

39. 39.  Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (Verso, 2003), 70.

40. 40.  Vanessa Taylor and Frank Trentmann, ‘Liquid Politics: Water and the Politics of Everyday Life in the Modern City’, Past & Present 211, no. 1 (2011): 199–241, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtq068.

41. 41.  Owen G. Roberts, ‘Waterworks and Commemoration: Purity, Rurality, and Civic Identity in Britain, 1880–1921’, Continuity and Change 22, no. 2 (2007): 305–25, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0268416007006352.

42. 42.  Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority in the English Industrial City 1840–1914 (Manchester University Press, 2000), 163–82.

43. 43.  Tom Hulme, After the Shock City: Urban Culture and the Making of Modern Citizenship (Boydell Press, 2019); Charlotte Wildman, Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918–1939 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

44. 44.  Paul Rotha, dir. A City Speaks, Manchester Corporation, 1947, https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-city-speaks-1947-online

45. 45.  Peter Shapely, ‘Civic Pride and Redevelopment in the Post-War British City’, Urban History 39, no. 2 (2012): 310–28, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926812000077.

46. 46.  Stephen Mosley, ‘Common Ground: Integrating Social and Environmental History’, Journal of Social History 39, no. 3 (2006): 915–33, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2006.0007.

47. 47.  Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (Hill and Wang, 1995), 59.

48. 48.  Donald Worster, ‘Appendix: Doing Environmental History’, in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Worster (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 292; Matthew Evenden, ‘Beyond the Organic Machine? New Approaches to River Historiography’, Environmental History 23, no. 4 (2018): 698–720, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emy054.

49. 49.  William Cronon, ‘Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History’, Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (1990): 1122–31, https://doi.org/10.2307/2936590.

50. 50.  Christine Meisner Rosen and Joel Arthur Tarr, ‘The Importance of an Urban Perspective in Environmental History’, Journal of Urban History 20, no. 3 (1994): 307, https://doi.org/10.1177/009614429402000301.

51. 51.  William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (Norton, 1991).

52. 52.  Erik Swyngedouw, ‘Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape, 1890–1930’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89, no. 3 (1999): 445, https://doi.org/10.1111/0004-5608.00157.

53. 53.  Maria Kaika, City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City (Routledge, 2005), 14; Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 93.

54. 54.  Kaika, City of Flows, 107.

55. 55.  Gaynor, ‘Lawnscaping Perth’, 63–78.

56. 56.  Gaynor, ‘Lawnscaping Perth’, 63–78.

57. 57.  Taylor and Trentmann, ‘Liquid Politics’, 214.

58. 58.  Busch, ‘Dams and the Age of Abundance’, 309–34.

59. 59.  Busch, ‘Dams and the Age of Abundance’, 309–34.

60. 60.  Margaret Cook, Lionel Frost, Andrea Gaynor, Jenny Gregory, Ruth A. Morgan, Martin Shanahan, and Peter Spearritt, Cities in a Sunburnt Country: Water and the Making of Modern Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108917698.

61. 61.  Lotte Jensen, Water: A Dutch Cultural History (Radboud University Press, 2024), 12–14, https://doi.org/10.54195/ASQH4249.

62. 62.  Swyngedouw, ‘Modernity and Hybridity’.

63. 63.  Swyngedouw, Erik. ‘ “Not a Drop of Water …”: State, Modernity, and the Production of Nature in Spain, 1898–2010’, Environment and History 20, no. 1 (2014): 67–92, https://doi.org/10.3197/096734014X13851121443445.

64. 64.  Tom Williamson, ‘Landscape: The Configured Space’, in History Beyond the Text: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, ed. Sarah Barber and Corinna M. Peniston-Bird (Routledge, 2009), 137.

65. 65.  Williamson, ‘Landscape’, 140.

66. 66.  William George Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (Hodder and Stoughton, 1955), 298–303.

67. 67.  Navickas, ‘Building Amenity’, 112.

68. 68.  Navickas, ‘Building Amenity’, 99–100.