Watford by Mary Forsyth

Author:Mary Forsyth [Forsyth, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750966481
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2015-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

There are no efficient sewers in the town. Down the main street on either side of the road is an open gutter … Into this a number of side gutters … and uncovered drains cross the footway, and flowing down from the side courts convey the overflow of cesspools and the offal of slaughterhouses.

Sent from London by the national Board of Health, he walked round the town centre and detailed exactly what he found.

The worthies of the town already knew the situation. Meeting in October 1848 in the parish Vestry, then the only form of local government in the town, they had appointed a committee to inspect the town and report on the various ‘nuisances’. Using the recently passed Public Health Act of 1848, and under pressure from the prevalence of cholera, they had already appealed to London for help. Other ratepayers, however, were more concerned about the cost, to them, of any improvements; a public meeting was called and a petition sent to London, bemoaning the distressed state of trade.

It was to no avail. When Clark’s report revealed the appalling state of the town they were forced to set up a Local Board of Health. Elections for it were held in October 1850 and the first meeting held later that month. The Chairman of the Board was none other than C.W. Moore, one of those who had petitioned against it.

The Local Board immediately set about its task, drawing up plans first for a sewage system. Drains were laid from the top of the town down the High Street to Bushey Arches, from where the raw sewage was pumped onto farmland in West Watford belonging to the Earl of Essex and spread on the ground as fertiliser while the fields were lying fallow. With the growth of the town and the increase in sewage as more drains were laid, more sophisticated methods were introduced and improved filtration was used before the effluent was pumped out.

The other essential was a supply of clean drinking water. The scheme finally agreed involved digging a well on a site between Watford Field and the High Street (now Local Board Road), from where the water could be pumped up and piped under pressure to a reservoir in what became Stratford Road; from here it ran by gravity down a main along the High Street, with connections to the adjacent yards. Over time the steam pump had to be replaced by more powerful machinery and the well deepened into the chalk aquifer. Later, a second and then a third well had to be dug. The site of the pumping station in Local Board Road is now the Pump House Theatre; one of the buildings bears the date 1885, the year in which a new pumping engine was installed.

The Local Board also appointed an Inspector of Nuisances, whose reports from the 1850s have survived.4 (The post continued into the twentieth century.) The Public Health Act also allowed for controls on building and a surveyor was appointed. Later, legislation on density and minimum standards led to the building regulations of today.

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