Filthy Plymouth: An Environmental History of the Three Towns in the Nineteenth Century Dr James Gregory, University of Plymouth, April 2020 Email: [email protected] ​ Plymouth and its quays and ships, sailors and boatmen, slop-sellers and marine store-dealers, warehouses and wharfs, public-houses and eating-houses, mud and dirt – all are before us.1 Introduction I am embarking on research and teaching in environmental history at the University of Plymouth through an evolving interest in nineteenth-century cultural and social histories of pollution, contamination, dirt and the responses they triggered, including campaigns for public hygiene. This started before the COVID-19 epidemic, but has taken on new resonance as I read the Victorian press reports of response to epidemics. What does this interest in ‘filth’ look like when the angle is local? Taking the lens of the Three Towns of Plymouth, Devonport and Stonehouse in the Victorian era – and away from the resources of local record offices such as ‘The Box’ which we had hoped to be opened for researchers shortly – what relevant local cases, controversies and discourses can be found through the local press or through the evidence generated by local and central government 2 activity, accessible through the internet and digitised collections? The answer to the question of what a history focused on rooting out the ‘filthy’ aspects to life in nineteenth-century Plymouth in this period might be about, is that there are many ​ relevant local dimensions, which may not be something to be proud about! These include the local history of cholera outbreaks in 1849, the ongoing efforts in the Three Towns to effect environmental improvements that included street cleansing, and to create an efficient sewerage system or water supply. Some of this response to urban dirt was long standing. The local historian Richard North noted in his History of Plymouth (1871) of the streets, that ‘in 1634 they were so filthy that a royal ​ writ was sent to require them to be put in decent order’. But Plymouth experienced massive population growth in the nineteenth century, and a new scale of environmental challenges 1 The Land We Live in … vol.3, Scotland, Ireland and the Devonshire coast (London: Knight, ​ ​ ​ 1847), p.125. 2 For research on Plymouth in this period, see V.F.T. Pointon, ‘Mid-Victorian Plymouth: A Social Geography’ Ph.D., Polytechnic South West (1989); A. Bond, ‘Working-class housing in Plymouth 1870 – 1914’, MRes thesis, University of Plymouth (2014); C. Gill, Plymouth, a New History: 1603 to the present day, 2 vols (Newton Abbott; David & Charles, ​ 1979). B. Chalkley, D. Dunkerley, P. Gripaios, eds., Plymouth: Maritime City in Transition ​ (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1991). 1 3 consequently emerged. North, again, is worth quoting on the subject of sewerage, which at an estimated cost of £35,000, transformed Plymouth from ‘one of the unhealthiest towns in 4 England into one of the healthiest’. This short essay, a contribution to Plymouth History Month in May 2020, draws on readily ​ available published sources: ranging from contemporary nineteenth-century guides to Plymouth, Devonport and Stonehouse; local histories published in the Victorian era; pamphlets by sanitary reformers; local newspaper reports of environmental nuisances and schemes of sanitation; reports in the engineering and building periodicals and medical journals of incidents in the Three Towns. The Medical Officer of Health reports from Plymouth (1895, 1897, 1900) and Devonport (1894, 1896, 1897, 1899, digitized and freely available via the Wellcome medical 5 history library) are also informative. A more extended essay would draw on the archives of local government as they dealt with environmental issues such as water supply, public health and ‘nuisances’. The environmental history would also consider how personally clean the inhabitants could be in this period when access to clean and cheap water was difficult. The Reverend Richard Warner, in A Tour Through 6 ​ Cornwall, in the Autumn of 1808, had described Plymouth as a ‘dirty town’. Did this improve ​ notably during the century? This tour round the ‘grot spots’ of the Three Towns begins with an overview of the physical environment: some of which, of course remains with us (including the general tendency of the weather that followed from this). I then outline the most obvious moment when filth menaced the inhabitants, in the form of epidemics such as cholera and typhus. COVID-19 has made us acutely aware of zoonotic disease, and I next turn, very briefly, to the association made in official report and press coverage, between proximity to animals in the urban space, and disease-engendering filth. How a locality responded to these threats to public health in the Victorian era needs to be seen in the context of evolving national legislation on public health as well as local responses to public nuisances. So the issue of local politics and vested interests is next outlined. When we think of Victorian disease and its scientific responses, we might well think about the ‘Great Stink’ of the Thames in 1858, and the response through Joseph Bazalgette’s engineering solution. So I next consider the pressure of human concentration (a serious factor in infection), and convey briefly a sense (olfactory and otherwise) of the state of the Three Towns’ sewage system through the nineteenth century. Water supply, pollution from industry, air quality, and, perhaps a surprising category, ‘moral pollution’ are then considered in their turn. I end the survey on the environment by very briefly noting one clean technology for energy, which had long been used in Plymouth. i. The context in Plymouth’s physical environment The neighbourhood of Plymouth provided a wealth of building material for quarrying, from granite, slate, limestone. Some of this material might be used for the paving that was intended to make the streets cleaner: the public narrative of the towns in the nineteenth-century was one of nd 3 R. N. North, The History of Plymouth from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (2 ​ edn, ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Plymouth: Brendon, 1873), p.139. 4 North, The History of Plymouth, p.270. ​ ​ 5 1895; F.M. Williams, Health of Plymouth during the Year 1897, see ​ ​ https://wellcomecollection.org/works/gx4gffus 6 R. Warner, A Tour Through Cornwall, in the Autumn of 1808 (Bath: Cruttwell, 1809), p.50. ​ ​ See also, J.H. Manners, Journal of a tour round the southern coasts of England (London: ​ ​ Triphook, 1805), p.215. 2 civic growth and improvement, from the irregular and haphazard building of old Plymouth to one where ‘elegant and commodious’ streets and street widening transformed the town, and 7 Plymouth Dock was transformed by Foulston into Devonport. Despite the elegance of its early nineteenth-century public architecture the topography of the Three Towns created problems for Victorian inhabitants, crammed into the land between Hamoaze, Cattewater and Sutton Pool, so that one guide to Devonport and Plymouth described the streets of the town of Plymouth as ‘ill constructed, narrow, irregular, and some of them steep,’ Many of the bystreets are particularly filthy, especially those through which the water of the town is permitted to flow from a mistaken notion of its contributing to the cleanliness of them, but the effects produced by it are diametrically opposite, for the lower order of inhabitants, trusting to this stream of water removing all annoyances, are in the habit of throwing into, the street every 8 description of offensive matter. Although one early-Victorian writer, Joshua Truscott, could see the positive side of Plymouth’s hilly nature for ensuring clean environment: In this respect few towns possess greater advantages than our own for the speedy removal of the deposit in its sewers; for in consequence of the undulating surface of the ground on which the town is built whenever a smart shower of rain falls every nook and corner is so completely washed, that within half an hour afterwards it may be traced flowing into and through our harbour, on its way to nature’s great laboratory for purification – the ocean; yet with all those natural advantages (for we believe that art has had little share in our arrangements for draining the town and rendering it wholesome), we are not entirely free from noxious effluvia in some of our streets, especially when the wind changes to S.W. this probably arises from the want of hydraulic traps at the mouths of the branch drains leading into the main sewers. But it is not only of this occasional nuisance of stench in our streets and allays, [sic] that we have to complain; the smell sometimes finds its way into our kitchens and wash-houses, and thence spreads itself throughout our dwellings, in consequence of the excavations and apertures 9 made by rats. It should be noted that Plymouth, while several of its streets were infamous for the dirt and vice 10 they collected (Castle Lane most notoriously, and one street was named Dirty Alley ), was not the only place with a reputation for dirty and narrow streets in the county. The dirtiness of 7 ‘Plymouth’, J. Thomson, Universal Gazetteer and Geographical Dictionary (revised edition; ​ ​ London: H.G. Bohn, 1845), p.775. 8 The Tourist’s Companion; Being a Guide to the Towns of Devonport, Plymouth, Stonehouse, Stoke, Morice-Town, and Their Vicinities: the Breakwater, Naval Arsenal, and Other Remarkable Objects: With a Directory (Devonport: Congdon, 1827), pp.3-4. ​ 9 J. Truscott, Prize Essay on the advantages of an abundant and cheap supply of fresh Water to large ​ towns, more especially with reference to Devonport (Devonport: Byers, 1847), p.23-24. ​ ​ ​ 10 W.H.K. Wright, ‘Historic Streets of Plymouth: The Names and Associations’, The ​ Antiquary, 14 (August 1886), pp.41-49 [p.47] which also refers to Mud Lane, and Dung ​ Quay.