READING about the state of the rivers of the British Isles, with the destruction visited upon them by sewerage outflows, which are often officially sanctioned as illegal, it is tempting to rail against 33 years of privatisation as the source of our current woes.
I’m no apologist for the water and sewerage corporations and I am happy they are finally being held to account, at least in part, not only in the court of public opinion, but in the courts of law, which have handed out fines worth hundreds of millions. The truth is, however, that the 1989 privatisation was the last in a long line of bad ideas going back centuries. Those ideas have failed to deal with our sewage in a way that pro- tects the rivers that we love, but which our governments and water industry apparently only purport to love.
Even at what is often held up as the high point of waste management, the Joseph Bazalgette sewer-building pro- gramme in the Victorian era, we were indulging in a giant deception—namely, using our rivers and coastline as a giant dumping ground for at best inadequately treated and at worst raw sewage. It has ever been thus. The first recorded British domestic home-sewer system in the Orkneys five millennia years ago did exactly that. Henry VIII tasked Commissioners and Courts of Sewers with hurrying effluent out of the cities, regardless of its eventual destination.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة May 18, 2022 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة May 18, 2022 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Happiness in small things
Putting life into perspective and forces of nature in farming
Colour vision
In an eye-baffling arrangement of geometric shapes, a sinister-looking clown and a little girl, Test Card F is one of television’s most enduring images, says Rob Crossan
'Without fever there is no creation'
Three of the top 10 operas performed worldwide are by the emotionally volatile Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, who died a century ago. Henrietta Bredin explains how his colourful life influenced his melodramatic plot lines
The colour revolution
Toxic, dull or fast-fading pigments had long made it tricky for artists to paint verdant scenes, but the 19th century ushered in a viridescent explosion of waterlili
Bullace for you
The distinction between plums, damsons and bullaces is sweetly subtle, boiling down to flavour and aesthetics, but don’t eat the stones, warns John Wright
Lights, camera, action!
Three remarkable country houses, two of which have links to the film industry, the other the setting for a top-class croquet tournament, are anything but ordinary
I was on fire for you, where did you go?
In Iceland, a land with no monks or monkeys, our correspondent attempts to master the art of fishing light’ for Salmo salar, by stroking the creases and dimples of the Midfjardara river like the features of a loved one
Bravery bevond belief
A teenager on his gap year who saved a boy and his father from being savaged by a crocodile is one of a host of heroic acts celebrated in a book to mark the 250th anniversary of the Royal Humane Society, says its author Rupert Uloth
Let's get to the bottom of this
Discovering a well on your property can be viewed as a blessing or a curse, but all's well that ends well, says Deborah Nicholls-Lee, as she examines the benefits of a personal water supply
Sing on, sweet bird
An essential component of our emotional relationship with the landscape, the mellifluous song of a thrush shapes the very foundation of human happiness, notes Mark Cocker, as he takes a closer look at this diverse family of birds