mar master 2010:layout 2 - university of manchester · cartography a t the beginningof 2009, we...

21www.cices.org CES March 2010

Cartography

AT THE BEGINNING of 2009, we designed a newpublic exhibition that sought to reveal some ofthe significant ways in which mapping is

ingrained into urban life. It demonstrated how mapswork and change over time in response to technology,society and economic imperatives, and highlightedvisually striking maps of the city of Manchester.

The Mapping Manchester exhibition was on display inthe historic reading room of the John Rylands Library onDeansgate, Manchester. It showcased the wealth ofcartographic material held by the University ofManchester and other institutions in the city, withgenerous loans of material from Manchester City Libraryand Archives and Chetham’s Library, including rarely seenmaps and obscure plans.

We did not want the exhibition to be just a treasuresfrom the collection or a boringly linear here’s the historyof our town or a boosterist celebration of mappingprogress from crude/artistic tosophisticated/scientific or art for art’s sake.These maps are more than just pretty pictures.They are powerful tools, instrumental in themaking of the contemporary Manchester, andcan be read as rich stories of urban life.

Over 80 different maps, plans, diagrams andphotographs of the city — published over thelast 250 years — were displayed. These rangedin date from an excerpt from the first large scale surveyof the city published by William Green in 1794, to a2008 statistical map of binge drinking hotspots acrossManchester. A wide range of formats and themes weredisplayed, from network diagrams, building plans andstrip maps, to three-dimensional bird’s-eye views anddigital animated mapping.

Stories covered in the exhibition include; the role ofmapping in foretelling developments in the road networkand public transport, Manchester as the industrialpowerhouse and shock city, the social geography ofhousing through the changing geographies of Hulme,changing moralities in the mapping of disease anddrinking and the pleasures of mapping — brought to lifeby material from one of the world’s first theme parks,Belle Vue. And, of more direct relevance to the interestsof readers of this journal, we also presented a range ofmaps and plans relating to the construction of hydraulicinfrastructure.

Much of the intellectual challenge in producing theexhibition lay in deciding what to include and what toleave out, from a long list of interesting mappingmaterial. Our rough and ready working criteria were that:

• Big ideas should be represented, telling important stories. • Items should make a visual intellectualcontribution; maps that matter. • Maps should be unusual, depicting things not seen on A-Z/Google/Ordnance Survey maps.

Mapping Manchester and its hiddenhydraulic engineering

Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins, Department of Geography, University of Manchester

Figure 1: The exhibition opening, 24 June 2009, in the stunning historic reading room of John Rylands Library. Photograph courtesy of Tinho daCruz.

Figure 2: 1910 — General overview of major interceptor sewers in the early 20th century. Courtesy of Manchester Archives and Local Studies Library.

The maps ranged in date from an excerpt from thefirst large scale survey of the city published in 1794,to a 2008 statistical map of binge drinking hotspotsacross Manchester.

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and Edwardian Manchester, that are now taken for granted, butwhich remain essential for urban life. Planning maps, engineeringplans and construction diagrams now provide a fascinating record ofthe hidden hydraulic remaking of Manchester.

In its Victorian heyday, engineering for water was strikinglyvisible. The hydraulic network and its key nodes — like impressivelylarge dams and extensive new reservoirs, pump houses and watertowers — were established as iconic symbols of Victorian engineeringprogress, celebrated and visited. But over the period 1930-1960 theymetaphorically, or literally, disappeared from view, buriedunderground, hidden as almost secret places in the urban fabric or, inthe case of sewage farms, outside the cleansed city. Meanwhilenewly visible infrastructures like urban motorway schemes and out oftown shopping centres gained cultural power. Unruly river courseshave now largely been culverted beneath the city streets. Unpleasantsmells and dirt are safely kept away from the sanitized modern city.Mapping the building of these infrastructures was critical, but todate has been almost completely unresearched, perhaps because ofthe nature of mapping as a taken for granted practical tool.

Mapping Manchester’s expanding sewage systemsIn a short book from 1979, city engineer Geoffrey Read details howsewer construction in Manchester picked up and paralleled the rapidurban expansion of the city in the period from 1830 to 1860. Lowerlevel underground construction took place and purpose-built sewersbegan to carry polluted water some distance to river outfalls, withsewers constructed under existing streets. The pressures ofdevelopment and population growth encouraged engineeringinnovation and brick construction gradually came to be supplantedby manufactured moulded clay pipes, usually ovoid or egg shaped.This encouraged a better flow, but jointing was prone to failure.

The 1840s and 1850s were the period of most rapid growth of thesystem and a gradual rise in the amount of domestic sewage, alongwith increasing industrial waste, led to a progressive decline in thequality of Manchester’s river water quality, in particular aroundoutfalls. A partial solution to this problem was enacted with theconstruction of a series of 21 deeper and much larger interceptorsewers, designed to carry effluent to two huge outfall sewers that

• The graphic design should have a visual impact. • We should include items with intricate detailsrelating to interesting places. • Some maps should look authentic (old, worn orhand annotated etc).• Some should reveal ‘hidden’ geographies.• Some should be quirky and fun.• Some should depict schemes never built.• The geographical extent of the exhibition should be defined by the M60 motorway, but alsoreflect flows into the city. For example, theManchester Ship Canal and water supply schemes. • Personal interests, obsessions and knowledge mattered.• Practical consideration like sourcing, artefact sizeand format were important (could we get it andwould it fit!).

Space for display was limited to 10 relatively smallcabinets and a few vertical printed boards along with afew multimedia screen displays. The end result then wasthat small, historical and colourful won out over large,digital and monochrome.

The cartographic imagination of thehidden hydraulic cityThe second half of the 19th century saw a burst oflarge-scale hydraulic engineering, which supplied vastlyincreased amounts of clean drinking water, controlledunruly rivers to eliminate flooding and safely removedsewage, making a vital contribution to the making ofsanitary, healthy cities. These bold civic minded urbaninterventions led to the building of extensiveinfrastructures planned and engineered during Victorian

Figure 3: 1901 — Mapping the impact of asewer explosion. The map is signed by thecity surveyor. Source: Manchester Council Proceeding, 1902,Volume 2, p. 2182. Courtesy of ManchesterArchives and Local Studies Library.

Figure 4: 1897 — Local sewers drawn onto an OS base map. Note, photographic copy of poor quality original artefact. Courtesy of the Greater Manchester County Record Office.

The hydraulic network and its key nodes — likeimpressively large dams and extensive newreservoirs, pump houses and water towers —were established as iconic symbols of Victorianengineering progress, celebrated and visited.

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led out of the city to a newly constructed sewagetreatment works at Davyhulme, lying in open countrynext to the Ship Canal (itself another massive project ofVictorian hydraulic engineering).

Davyhulme was constructed in 1894 and, withsubsequent development, became one of the largestsewage treatment plants in Europe. Some 56km of thesebrick 4.5m diameter sewers were laid, and connectionsmade between this and the local networks between1903 and 1914. A final phase, from 1911 onwards, saw asecond batch of 16 new interceptors constructed, workon which was in the main completed by the 1930s. Thesystem requires frequent maintenance and lies unnoticedbeneath Manchester’s streets, apart from occasionalexplosions from the build up of sewer gases andfortunately infrequent sewer collapses of the older partsof the network.

The majority of surviving sewer plans, now held onphotographic negatives by the Greater ManchesterCounty Record Office, are simple but high qualitymonochrome documents, usually charting the line of anindividual sewer and a sectional view, but alsosometimes recording the name of the draughtsman,surveyor and contractor, reflecting a strong degree ofprofessional pride in the quality of the drawings. Fromthese plans it is possible to identify the type of sewer, itsconstruction details, and the date of installation. Theysometimes show additional information like street orbuilding layout, or the relation of the sewer to otheradjacent underground utility information. In addition tothe individual detailed sewer plans there are overviewmaps of the local sewer network, usually overlain onto

Figure 6: 1917 — Mapping the aqueduct routes from the massive Lake District reservoirs toManchester. The sheer scale of the hydraulic engineering represented is impressive.

Courtesy of Manchester Archives and Local Studies Library.

Figure 5: 1881 — The Longdendalewater supply system envisioned in map, section andtabular form. Courtesy of Manchester Archives and Local Studies Library.


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throughout its 35 year existence, with demand for waterfrequently outstripping their unreliable supply system.Even by 1846, piping only provided sporadic clean waterto around a quarter of households.

Not until 1847 when a bill authorised local control ofthe company under public ownership did a realisticmechanism for improving the situation become possible.This saw the municipal corporation boldly reaching outwell beyond its civic boundaries into the uplandhinterland of the Peak District and enacting engineerJohn Frederic Latrobe Bateman’s ambitious schemes forreservoirs in the Longdendale valley that would beconnected to the city by an underground 18 mile longaqueduct and a series of service reservoirs. The firstPennine water reached the city in 1851 flowing undergravity. The scheme grew in steps to become aimpressive chain of seven reservoirs covering about 500acres, completed by 1871, that still supplies water,working much as it was initially designed.

As the reservoirs in Longdendale were being plannedand built, so demand for domestic water increased. Morehomes were connected to a piped supply and it wasbecoming clear that sources in the Peak District wouldsoon be inadequate. Thirlmere in the Lake District wasproposed as a second and even longer distance addition,in the face of considerable opposition from a nascentconservation movement. The act authorising the schemewas passed in 1879, and the project to dam the lake,raise its level and construct an ambitious 96 mileaqueduct to the city was completed by 1894.Subsequent schemes in the Lake District sawHaweswater dammed, raising its water levelssignificantly, and the construction of a separateaqueduct south to the city. Subsequently, connections toother sources in Cumbria have augmented this supply.

Mapping was also critical for these projects. Thelaying of water pipes across the city involved lessexcavation than sewer construction, and detailed planrecords of the historical installation of this network donot seem to have survived. Coloured overview maps at a

an existing Ordnance Survey base (Figure 4). Smaller scale sewermaps also exist. For example, charting the location and interrelationsof the larger main drainage system instigated in the programme ofinterceptor sewer construction in the early twentieth century andproduced as a promotional display to persuade the local authority toinvest in the scheme.

Delivering drinking waterThe second focus for hydraulic engineering in the city lay with thedrinking water supply. In the early years of industrial expansion therewas only a limited engineering intervention to provide clean water tothe city. Until the middle of the 19th century, Manchester reliedupon local sources, from wells, rainwater collection systems or thenearest stream. However, dramatic environmental degeneration inthe 19th century rapidly increased the amount of domestic effluentand industrial pollution in this runoff and consequently the quality ofriver water declined to such an extent that by the 1830s deToqueville commented on “Manchester’s fetid muddy waters, stainedwith a thousand colours” and likened the whole city to a cesspool. Inthe first half of the 19th century, the private Manchester and SalfordWaterworks Company conspicuously failed to improve this situation

Figure 8: Mapping the addition of a major ring main around the city todistribute water from Lake District.Courtesy of Manchester Archives and Local Studies Library.

Figure 7: Changing Thirlmere from a lake to a controlled reservoir. Source: Insert map included in Harwood, JJ 1895 The History and Description of the Thirlmere WaterScheme. Courtesy of John Rylands University Library.



Further reading Copies of the following books relevant to this article are available inlocal studies in Manchester Central Library.

Ashworth G, 1987, Lost Rivers of Manchester, Willow Publishing:AltrinchamBateman JF, 1884, History and Description of the Manchester Waterworks,TJ Day: ManchesterCity of Manchester Waterworks Committee, 1974, Water for the Millions:Manchester Corporation Waterworks 1847-1974Manchester City Council: ManchesterHarwood JJ, 1895, The History and Description of the Thirlmere WaterScheme, Blacklock: ManchesterHoyle N and Sankey K, 1994, Thirlmere Water: A Hundred Miles, AHundred Years, Centwrite: BuryJohn S and Guest P, 1986, ‘Mapping Manchester’s Sewers: TheEngineering Archives Project’, Manchester Region Local History Review2(2): 33-37Platt HL, 2005, Shock Cities: the Environmental Transformation andReform of Manchester and Chicago. University of Chicago Press: ChicagoQuayle T, 2006, Manchester’s Water: The Reservoirs in the Hill, TempusPublishing: StroudRead GF, 1979, Manchester’s Main Drainage System Past and Present, Cityof Manchester Highways Committee: ManchesterRead GF and Vickeridge I, 1997, Sewers: Rehabilitation and NewConstruction, Arnold: London.Ritvo H, 2009, The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere and ModernEnvironmentalism, University of Chicago Press: Chicago

smaller scale chart the changing distribution of water across the cityand map the re-scaling of supply from Longdendale and the variousLake District schemes.

Numerous parliamentary proposals also chart the detail of theseschemes in proposal form, focusing in particular on the effects onroad routes, details of land ownership and needs for compulsorypurchase. The format of these proposal plans, in large folios, onheavy paper, with a very particular aesthetic of graphics and copiousamounts of white space speaks to the need for a clear display, butalso suggests how serious and significant were the schemes beingproposed for parliamentary approval.

Ongoing researchYou can find out more about the exhibition (it closes 28 March 2010)and our ongoing research at www.mappingmanchester.org

We are continuing beyond the temporary exhibition, seeking outmore maps and plans with the aim of producing a comprehensive,large-format book. And we’d welcome your comments andsuggestions. If you have any interesting maps and plans relating tothe design and construction of civil infrastructures in Manchester –especially if they are iconic engineering projects and are visuallyintriguing, please do get in contact. We are sure there are manymore maps of Manchester that need to be unearthed.

Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins, Department of Geography,University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 [email protected] [email protected]

Figure 9: Original parliamentary plan detailing the extent of the proposed Torside reservoir.Courtesy of United Utilities, Longdendale Bottoms office. Photographic capture by Ben Lycett.

By the 1830s, de Toqueville commented on “Manchester’s fetid muddy waters,stained with a thousand colours” and likened the whole city to a cesspool.

Cartography


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