ABSTRACT
The Industrial Revolution and subsequent manufacturing activity in the 20th century has left the UK with a significant contaminated land legacy. However, the problem of Britain’s ‘Badlands’, although recognised for many years, has only recently begun to be addressed with the introduction of the contaminated land regulatory regime in Pt IIA of the Environmental Protection Act (EPA) 1990. The delay in tackling contaminated land may be due to the low visibility of the issue. Contamination of the land is literally out of sight and out of mind. In addition, the introduction of licence-based controls over many aspects of present day industrial pollution, for example, Integrated Pollution Control (IPC), has deflected attention away from historic contamination of the land.
