Water Supply and Sanitation
Synopsis

As the population of London grew during the nineteenth century, overcrowding and poor sanitation contributed to numerous epidemics. The Government asked Edwin Chadwick, a member of the Society, to draw up a report on living conditions in England’s Towns and Cities. This resulted in, “The Sanitary Conditions of London’s Laboring population”, published in 1842. However, the Government only implemented its first “Public Health Act” in 1848. The lack of adequate water and sewage systems became a great concern of the Society with Chadwick and others submitting papers for discussion and various ideas for dealing with sewage or for making Thames water safe to drink.

In 1873 the Society’s Council set up a committee to investigate the availability and problems with water supply and in 1874 held the first of several national conferences. Although primarily concerned with the problem of polluted rivers, this conference considered ways of alleviating the causes, in particular by improving the way sewage was dealt with. This conference helped coerce the government into passing the River Pollution Prevention Act of 1876. Its success led to a series of five annual conferences, held between 1876 and 1890, which dealt with the wider subject of the health and sanitation of towns. In 1878, at the request of the President of the Society, HRH the Prince of Wales, a separate two day session was held to consider the problem of water supply within rural areas. These conferences helped popularize the already growing movement in favour of improving sanitation in towns.

This diagram shows a plan of a “reservoir for filtering Thames water”, submitted by John Bailey, suitable “either for private families or for public companies.” The diagram shows how “foul water” is filtered through layers of different materials of decreasing coarseness, including broken granite, course gravel, charcoal and sand.

Not only was a system needed to carry away industrial and domestic waste but sewers were also required to drain away water from the streets. This diagram shows a drain designed to prevent “the emission of noxious vapors from the grating of sewers without bursting the drains”, and to carry away the water leaving
“the grosser particles” to “remain in the tank and not choke up the sewers”.

In 1844, William Higgs wrote to the Society with his “improved method of managing the sewage of the metropolis”.