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Search the Public Notice PortalTHE Science Museum Group is teaming up with the Friends of Bradford Beck for an event exploring the history of the city’s waterways - and the pollution of them.
DR MAX LONG, Research Fellow, Congruence Engine Project at the Science Museum Group, tells us more:
What do Bradford’s hidden watercourses tell us about our local history? How did they become so polluted, and what can we do today to reverse this?
An event organised jointly by Friends of Bradford’s Becks and a research project at London’s Science Museum will invite visitors to Bradford Industrial Museum to learn more about the connections between industrial and environmental heritage.
The event will take place on Saturday, May 25 from 11am to 2pm, and will include a series of fun, family-friendly activities focussed on Bradford’s watercourses and their history.
Activities will include arts and crafts, interactive storytelling, a display of historical maps, and opportunities to share personal memories of the becks.
Friends of Bradford’s Becks have spent many years campaigning to raise awareness about river pollution in Bradford Beck and its tributaries.
The beck still runs through the centre of Bradford today, albeit underground in a series of tunnels and culverts. Once a clear, clean and healthy watercourse, the beck became heavily polluted during the city’s expansion in the 19th century, with textile mills, dyers and bleachers spilling waste directly into the waters.
Soon the beck was tunnelled under the city, hiding the river and its polluted waters from sight, but not addressing the underlying problems.
In recent months, researchers from London’s Science Museum have been collaborating with Friends of Bradford’s Becks to learn more about the history of river pollution in the city, using historic maps to chart the watercourses and millponds in the local area.
Using government reports from the late 19th century, they have identified dozens of individual mills and the pollution caused by each - from the spilling of workers’ excrements to the use of alkalis and bleach.
Getz and Company, a stuff manufacturer located on Thornton Road, wrote in 1871 that the beck ‘stinks continually...and is in fact perfectly black’.
This work has taken place under the umbrella of the Congruence Engine, a project at the Science Museum which seeks to create new links between industrial heritage collections in museums and archives around the country. They are organising a series of community events in Bradford in May.
* For more information go to sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/projects/the-congruence-engine
Visit bradford-beck.org
