ABSTRACT
The distribution of liquefied sewage and effluent around local farms by pipe proved costly and greatly problematic, and the end product required careful and skillful handling: suspicions about disease were never allayed. From the 1850s, river pollution had become impossible to ignore and a series of official investigations and enquiries began to be reported. Britain's Victorian towns were among the first to embrace the modern concept of water carriage waste systems, so they were forced to attempt to tackle the new science of sewage treatment and sanitary engineering. Household waste being directed to sewers or cesspits, privy pans were placed individually under privies to collect household's excreta. Two land irrigation approaches, often grouped together as sewage farming, existed in the second half of the nineteenth century, known as Broad Irrigation and Intermittent Downwards Filtration. The use of percolating filter beds was the first of the biological treatment methods to become widely favoured in Britain: it was successfully developed around 1900.
