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ABOUT NRHG TROWSE TRIANGLE NATURAL HERITAGE GEOGRAPHY INDUSTRY PEOPLE FOR SCHOOLS NEWS 
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Prosperity , pollution, poverty As Norwich grew in prosperity and in population, so its river grew more and more polluted. The riverside trades - dyers, fell-mongers who prepared animal skins for the leather industry, abbatoirs, butcheries and tanneries - all poured the waste from their work into the Wensum. And the daily life of the townspeople who lived in the maze of alleys and courts alongside all this added its contribution of human excrement and domestic waste. And they had to drink the stuff too, with the inevitable consequences in the form of water-borne disease. By the mid-19th century cholera was a frequent visitor to Norwich, and its most vulnerable victims were the poorest, especially those who had lost their employment through the changed conditions of production brought by the machines of the Industrial Revolution - the city's hand weavers, and impoverished villagers who left the surrounding countryside for the slums of Norwich. |
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