Over the last five centuries, North-East England's River Tyne went
largely with the flow as it rode with us on a rollercoaster from
technologically limited early modern oligarchy, to large-scale
Victorian 'improvement', to twentieth-century deoxygenation and to
twenty-first-century efforts to expand the river's biodiversity. By
studying five centuries of Tyne conservatorship, we can see that
1855 to 1972 was a blip on the graph of environmental concern,
preceded and followed by more sustainable engagement and a fairer
negotiation with the river's forces and expressions as a whole and
natural system, albeit driven by different motivations. Even during
this blip, however, many people expressed environmental concern.
Several organisations, including the Tyne Salmon Conservancy
(1866-1950), local governors, the Tyne's anglers and the Standing
Committee on River Pollution's Tyne Sub-Committee (1921-1939),
tried to protect the river's environmental health from harm, as
they perceived it. This Tyne study offers a template for a future
body of work on British rivers that shakes off the straitjacket of
the Thames as the river of choice in British environmental history.
And it undermines traditional socio-cultural approaches which
reduce rivers to passive backdrops of human activities. Departing
from progressive narratives that equated change with improvement,
and declensionist narratives that equated change with loss and
destruction, it moves away from morally loaded notions of better or
worse, and even dead, rivers. This book refocuses on the production
of new and different rivers and fully situates the Tyne's fluvial
transformations within their political, economic, cultural, social
and intellectual contexts. Let us sit with the Tyne itself, some of
its salmon, a seventeenth-century Tyne River Court Juror, some
nineteenth-century Tyne Improvement Commissioners, a 1920s
biologist, a twentieth-century Tyne angler, shipbuilder and council
planner and some twenty-first-century Tyne Rivers Trust volunteers.
What would they disagree about? Would they agree on anything? How
would they explain their conceptualisation of what the river is for
and how it should be used and regulated? This book takes you to the
heart of such virtual debates to revive, reconnect and reinvigorate
the severed bonds and flows linking riparian places, issues and
people across five centuries. By analysing the Tyne's past
conservatorships, we can objectify ourselves through our
descendants' eyes, reconnecting us not only to our past, but also
to our future.
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