Vitriol in the Taff: River Pollution, Industrial Waste, and the Politics of Control in late Nineteenth-Century Rural Wales

Abstract

Abstract:Claims that rural communities and rural authorities in Wales were backwards conceal not only growing sensitivity to industrial river pollution, but also their active efforts to regulate the region's rivers. This article uses evidence from South Wales to explore rural responses to industrial river pollution and to provide the micro-contextualisation essential for understanding how environmental nuisances were tackled around sites of pollution. Efforts to limit industrial effluent at both local and regional levels highlight strategies of control, the difficulties of intervention at the boundaries of authorities, and how rural authorities were not always peripheral to an urban metropole. This lack of passivity challenges the idea that river pollution interventions merely displaced rather than confronted the problem of pollution, providing insights into how rural authorities worked, and into how those living in rural communities turned to them to clean up their environment.

‘In constant fear of some dire epidemic breaking out’: Rural responses to infectious and epidemic disease, 1870–1920

“…9 Where elsewhere I have challenged the idea that rural authorities were ignorant, lazy, or backwards, here my attention shifts from considering the nature of sanitary reform to bring to light the previously disregarded reactions of rural authorities to infectious outbreaks. 10 As such, the essay is not concerned with mapping patterns of disease in rural Wales. Nor is the focus on the supervision exercised by the Local Government Board (LGB)the central body responsible for public health administration in England and Walesor how rural public health intersected with the broader national culture of professional association, both of which as this essay suggests were distant from the work of rural authorities on the ground.…”