As a result of the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, urban rivers in the UK often contained completely unregulated discharges from metal working, chemical factories, household sewerage, mining, dye works, textiles, potteries and polluted rain water run-off.
As detailed in the following
Environmental History website, in the first half of the 18th century, London, the largest city in Europe apart from Paris, which had one million inhabitants by 1850, experienced a series of recurring epidemics of cholera and typhoid. London experienced terrible Cholera outbreaks as a result, caused by increasing amounts of sewage dumped into the Thames.
The tide started to be turned, so to speak, by public drainage works like the
Thames Embankment in response to the Great Stink of the summer of 1858. But urban rivers remained horribly polluted well into living memory, with industrial effluent often being pumped into rivers largely unchecked as recently as the 1950's.
Various
acts of parliament were passed to tackle the issue, such as the Control of Pollution Act (COPA) 1974, the Environmental Protection Act 1990, the Water Resources Act 1991 and the Environment Act 1995 and things gradually began to improve.
But the good news is that things are continuing to improve. According to a study by Cardiff University's School of Bio-Sciences,
reported on the BBC News site in June 2014, urban rivers are the cleanest they have been for 20 years.
According to DEFRA stats from 2010 UK rivers are increasingly clean of chemical and biological pollutants, showing improvements even from as recently as 1990:
These days, there are many encouraging indicators from the return of
salmon spawning to industrial rivers, the
return of otters to every county in England, and the increasing popularity of
wild swimming.
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