Risks to London’s health were greater in the past when sewage was disposed of in the same river from which many of the city’s inhabitants drew their drinking water. This fostered the transmission of water-borne cholera and other diseases. Over time, risk was mitigated by the construction of separate tap water and sewer pipe networks. Concerns with river water quality in London and other settlements have persisted, however, on account of the harm that escaped sewage periodically brings to river ecosystems and leisure industries.
The topical issue of sewage and wastewater management is an overlapping area for two core A-level topics, the Water Cycle and Changing Places. Other curriculum themes in this column include the global trade flows that helped exacerbate Victorian London’s sewage challenge, and the nineteenth-century media’s negative representation of the capital city as a polluted place.
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