What is Trentbelly? Inside the first river-focused episode of local podcast NottsPod

Looking at the Trent today, it is difficult to imagine the river of centuries past, when poets would praise the beauty of its crystal waters: ‘smug and silver’, according to Shakespeare. Something, or some things, have happened to the Trent over the years to turn it from silver to brown leading to the local ailment known as ‘Trentbelly’, which sparked my NottsPod co-host Tom Suchoruczka’s curiosity and led us to start this podcast. Looking at the possible culprits, our first thought was that it was the fault of the water companies dumping sewage: in the Trent’s case, Severn Trent plc. 

Sewage flows into our rivers when our infrastructure gets overwhelmed. Combined sewer overflows (CSOs) are only meant to occur during heavy rain, when rainwater flows into our sewers and overwhelms them, but have increasingly occurred during drier weather, because our sewage network is running closer to capacity on a day-to-day basis. Modern cities are built with separate pipes for rainwater and sewage, but in Britain we are still reliant on old combined pipes.

There has been a lot of anger at water companies failing to upgrade our infrastructure, and when we began our research we assumed we would be telling a simple story about how the Thatcher government’s decision to privatise water and sewage was the fall from grace that led to the Trent browning. Other rivers in the country have only turned brown recently, but the case of the Trent is more complicated. In Portrait of Nottingham (1974), Emrys Bryson described the Trent as ‘the worst polluted river in England’. To understand the fall of the Trent, we had to go back much further.

In the nineteenth century, increasing urban populations meant more demand for water, so rival water companies were set up, each building their own pumping stations and laying their own pipes. By the 1820s, Nottingham had four competing private water companies.

The Trent Waterworks Company hired Arnold-born engineer Thomas Hawksley to design their water system, which would pump water from the Trent to serve the town. Hawksley persevered with an idea no one had yet applied at the scale of a town: constant pressure water supply.

This is something we take for granted today: constant pressure meant you could turn on your tap at any time of day, and water would come out. Until Hawksley, intermittent pressure systems were the norm: taps would only work at certain times. In 1832, Nottingham became the first town in the country to have 24/7 running water. By the 1840s, Nottingham’s water supply was the envy of other towns, and credited with protecting its people from cholera epidemics: water from the smug and silver Trent prevented sickness.

Nineteenth century urbanisation also led to the existing sewage system being completely overwhelmed. Sewage either flowed down open sewers into rivers, or piled up until it was taken to the countryside as manure. This was not a good system if you wanted to avoid cholera outbreaks. Sewage reform was led by Edwin Chadwick, who pushed for local councils to build better sewage infrastructure.

Water supply was run by competing local private companies, sewage disposal by local authorities. It’s a long journey from this situation to today’s regional water companies such as Severn Trent.

In the 1800s, many people resented the water companies profiting from something essential for life. Advocates for council control believed the service could be run, like sewage disposal, for the public good, uninhibited by the profit motive. In most towns, including Nottingham, the council won the argument and took control.

Local councils, however, had more on their plates than just water and sewage. Once these services were up to an acceptable standard (i.e. people weren’t dying of cholera outbreaks), there was no impetus for continuous improvement. Managing a wide portfolio of other priorities, councils refrained from upgrading infrastructure. When new sewers were built for new housing estates, they were connected to old pipes, increasing their likelihood of overflowing. There was a common saying among councillors deciding where to allocate funds: ‘There are no votes in sewage.’

As the twentieth century progressed, national governments became increasingly frustrated by the country’s messy water and sewage networks. Eventually, the government decided to take water and sewage away from local councils, creating regional water authorities which would manage all things water-related across entire basins. Finally, our sewage infrastructure would get the investment it needed.

Unfortunately, the economic crises of the 1970s meant the government immediately cut the water authorities’ budgets. Having created these authorities to rectify a lack of investment, governments proceeded to starve them of funding. Governments, local and national, run a wide range of services – all competing for funding. The winners are usually those the public cares most about and which make the governing party more popular. While the state doesn’t have a profit motive, it does have a defence motive, a health motive, an education motive, and more.

And then we come to Thatcher’s privatisation, which turned the Severn Trent Water Authority into Severn Trent plc. I delved into the online archive of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation to read declassified documents from her time in office, to understand what her government believed the privatisation would achieve. To put it mildly, it did not go to plan. 

We’re now at a crisis point, with public anger mounting. Perhaps there are now votes in sewage. Perhaps the new Prime Minister will lead our rivers and our water industry into a new era, learning from the successes and failures of both past and present. Cleaning up our rivers requires vision, long-term thinking, and effort: not just from governments and water companies, but from us. We can do our part by ensuring it stays on the political agenda, and by supporting river restoration schemes through donation or volunteering. The Trent can be smug and silver again, if enough of us care and put the effort in to make it so.

To hear more from Michael and Tom, listen to the NottsPod podcast on all of your usual streaming services.

@nottspod