Home Transit
of Venus Sewer
History in Leeds Sundials in Leeds William
Gascoigne John Feild About
II. THE IMPROVEMENT OF LEEDS
Prior to the 1832 Cholera very few streets in Leeds were drained.
The few sewers which did exist had been built privately and discharged either
directly to the River Aire at Leeds Bridge or to Addle Beck the 'Ganges of Lady
Lane' and thence to the River.
Impelled by a growing movement for Improvement, the newly formed
Borough Council promoted a series of local Acts of Parliament. As far as
sewerage was concerned, the Leeds Improvement Act 1842 was epoch making.
Section 153 of the Act stated:
"It shall be lawful for the Council from time to time to
cause such common sewers, drains, vaults, culverts, watercourses, wells and
pumps as they may think necessary to be made and constructed in or under any
streets within the limits of this Act."
Various proposals were considered for using the new powers in
order to provide a comprehensive sewerage system. In particular, alternative
plans were presented to the Council during the course of 1844 45 by the Borough
Engineer (Thomas Walker), Captain Vetch,R.E., and the Leeds based engineer John
Wignall Leather.
Walker's plan was distinguished by his scant regard for all the
arguments about the condition of the River Aire. His report proposed "...
conveying the drainage along the natural hollows, direct into the river, its
natural channel". He claimed that "it is altogether impossible
to cleanse the River Aire of its impurities, and that no proof whatever can be
adduced that the present polluted state of the River Aire has been injurious to
the public health". In keeping with this outlook, Walker's plans
showed no less than seven new sewer outfalls to the Aire all close to the town
centre.
Both Vetch and Leather proposed deep main sewers parallel to the
river, picking up (or intercepting) subsidiary shallow sewers from the various
streets, and discharging to the river well downstream from the town. Vetch
envisaged a 'manure farm' close to the outfall, by means of which a revenue of
£10,000 per annum could be raised by usage of a portion of the sewage for
agricultural purposes. There were severe misgivings among others however about
the viability of his plans for sewage utilisation, given the assumed toxic
effect of some of the dyers' wastes in the sewage and the advent of cheap
Peruvian guano as an agricultural fertiliser. There was also some doubt about
the possibility of getting agreement from private landowners to some of his
proposed sewer routes.
Leather's scheme, which avoided these uncertainties and lead the
sewage untreated to the Aire, was adopted by the Council in June 1846. In his
report of February 1845 on the "Means of Providing an Effectual
Sewerage System for the Town of Leeds", Leather set out seven explicit
general principles or conditions which he felt were "essential to a
sound system of sewerage" and which he had incorporated in his scheme
(see Appendix 1).
In these conditions were embodied the principal recommendations in
Chadwick's 1842 Report namely, that sanitation should be hydraulic, arterial
and water borne. This meant that ideally water had to be piped to every house
to flush away the excrement (via a 'water closet'). This water would then carry
the sewage away in sewers of curved cross section (rather than the brick arches
which were then prevalent).
The cross sections of Leather's proposed sewers were generally egg
shaped. This was in accord with the recommendations of Chadwick's technical
advisor, John Roe, engineer to the Holborn and Finsbury Commission of Sewers.
The egg-shape was intended to give relatively high velocities at low flows and
thus improve the scouring action or self-cleansing behaviour of the pipes.
It is interesting to note that the appropriate size for the pipes
was a subject of great contention at the time. Rival sets of flow tables were
available, which gave vast differences in capacities.
Leather insisted that none of the existing sewers could be incorporated
in the scheme. The condition of the Marsh Lane sewer, described by Captain
Vetch, was thought to be typical: "2 feet wide, 3 feet high, flat at
top and bottom, the sides were built of dry stones full of large interstices,
affording an extensive harbourage for rats, and permitting the liquid filth to
soak through whatever ground was porous."
It was recommended that individual houses be connected to the
street sewers with the relatively new glazed earthenware pipes (6 to 9 inches
in diameter).
Despite the Council decision in 1846 to adopt the new sewerage
scheme, various factors combined to produce delays. Firstly, agreement was
still needed from the Aire and Calder Navigation Company, whose rights over the
River Aire and its tributaries would be affected. Secondly, a borrowing limit
of £100,000 was imposed on the Council by the 1842 Improvement Act and half of
this sum had already been used on other projects. Thirdly, agreement was needed
from the owner of the Temple Newsam estate to site the main outfall sewer on
his land.
It took 2 years to sort out these difficulties, but by then a
downturn in the economy and in company profits had increased the lobby against
the levying of a sewerage rate. Motions to proceed were lost in the Council
meetings in January and February 1849. The fresh outbreak of Cholera in October
1849 however, in which 2000 died in Leeds, may have helped to concentrate
minds: The Streets Committee authorised the first contracts for construction
work to be let in 1850. Leather's scheme was completed at a total cost of
£137,000 by 1855.
The part played by the new breed of mapmaker in enabling the
scheme was indispensible. Up to the commencement of the Nineteenth Century very
few reliable maps or plans of the Township of Leeds were available. Yet the
visionary civil engineering feats of the Industrial Revolution needed the
skills of the surveyor as never before. Accurate scale plans were essential for
the construction of new communications canals, railways and turnpike roads.
Plans were needed for the use of the new official bodies such as the Local
Boards of Health and the Poor Law Commissioners. Plans were needed too for the
public sewer and waterworks schemes.
It is thought that the first plan of Leeds drawn from an accurate
survey was that of Netlam and Giles in 1815. An 1832 record of the town's
drainage system , is superimposed on Charles Fowler's 1821 plan, which in turn
appears to have been based on Netlam and Giles' plan. Not until 1850 did the
Ordnance Survey produce plans of Leeds (60 inch to 1 mile plans, based on a
survey done in 1847 by Capt.R.E.Tucker). The earliest comprehensive public
sewer records held in Leeds were superimposed on the 1850 O.S. sheets.