What did Victorians do with their poo? The battle over the 19th-century excrement explosion
The industrial revolution caused huge growth in the urban population – and with it, a rising tide of human waste. Find out how the leaders of Victorian cities tried to cope with the excrement explosion that came hand-in-hand with the 19th century’s boom in industry
In the 1890s, Manchester’s civic leaders faced a mounting crisis. The city’s population had exploded, its industries were booming, and with them came an ever-growing tide of human waste. By the later decades of the 19th century, Victorian Britain’s sanitation revolution was well underway, but as historian Richard Jones explains in an April 2025 article from the Environment and History journal, ‘Excremental Flows: Manchester Corporation’s ‘Dung Hill Scheme’ and the Rampton Manor Estate, Nottinghamshire, 1892’ (available to purchase or access via a subscriber login), the transition from solid waste systems to water-borne sewage was anything but smooth.
By the late Victorian era, Manchester’s “existing waste removal infrastructure – designed to deal with the much smaller volumes and narrower range of waste materials of the pre-industrial age – had begun to struggle with the prodigious quantities of polluting waste its people and factories now generated,” says Jones.
The sanitary reformer Dr Southwood Smith vividly described a scene he was greeted with upon a visit to a Manchester privy in 1860: “The floor… is completely covered, several inches deep, with ashes and night-soil, so that it is impossible to get to the seat itself without being over shoes in abominable filth. The seat itself is, in every part, besmeared, and in some parts covered several inches deep, with the same filth.”
By the mid-19th century, Manchester was already producing more than 100,000 tons of ‘night-soil’ (a euphemism for human excrement) annually. This waste was collected from thousands of ash-pits – an open pit into which all domestic waste and excrement was disposed, partially dried and deodorised by adding ashes from hearths and ovens – and privies. Then, it was often transported by rail to distant farming regions in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. But this system was expensive and increasingly unpopular.
In one step to cope with the growing burden, Manchester introduced pail-closets, which replaced open cesspits and ash-pits with sealed containers that could be regularly emptied. By the late 1870s, the city had phased out most of its older waste systems, replacing them with 28,000 pail-closets and 10,000 water-closets. But the problem was far from solved.
A deluge of waste
“The total replacement, by the early 1880s, of cess-pits, ash-pits and middens by the pail-closet system represented an impressive achievement,” says Jones. “Yet still, in 1884, around 200,000 tons of waste were annually arriving at the Corporation’s depot.”
Though unpleasant to deal with, this was valuable stuff – it was sold as night-soil or processed into a dry powder and marketed as concentrated manure that could be delivered to farmers up to 100 miles away in less than 24 hours.
With the context of current attempts to quickly transform domestic heating systems from oil and gas boilers to air source heat pumps and solar, it’s notable that the municipal authorities of Victorian Manchester were able to drive domestic infrastructure change so rapidly. According to Dr Jones, “The Manchester authorities began with a rolling programme of improving existing infrastructure rather than replacing this with new technology. Retrofitting existing properties with water closets was more problematic but was solved by requiring landlords to do this work. Building in water closets and connecting to the sewers was much easier when planned from the outset in new builds.” However, the problems kept mounting as the population kept growing.
Jones memorably describes the city authorities’ struggles to “keep their noses above the rising tide of excremental waste”. The challenge was made harder because Manchester was “water poor”, which made it difficult to implement a water-based sewer system. Plus, the 1876 Rivers Pollution Prevention Act had made it illegal to dump untreated sewage into rivers, cutting off one traditional route of disposal.
Faced with these challenges, Manchester looked for new ways to rid itself of its waste. One solution was Carrington Moss, an area with 600 acres of boggy land and c500 acres of agricultural land on the city’s outskirts, purchased by the Manchester Corporation in 1886.
Roads, drains, and a light railway were built to carry the waste there. But by the early 1890s, Carrington Moss was nearing capacity. In the five years after the purchase of the site in 1886, the population of Manchester had increased by over 150,000 people to a total of over half a million. All those people had to live somewhere – and the human waste that they produced had to go somewhere too. Water-closets were being introduced in the city, but that was a slow process, and in the meantime, Manchester was producing an extra 20,000 tons of excremental waste a year.
Residents kick up a stink
In 1892, Manchester’s Cleansing Committee hatched a bold plan: to purchase Rampton Manor, a large agricultural estate in Nottinghamshire, and transport 20,000 tons of waste there annually, by rail. The scheme promised to relieve pressure on the city’s depots and provide valuable manure to farmers – and handily, the estate was up for sale by its owner Colonel Henry Eyre, the MP for Gainsborough, Lincolnshire.
But the proposal sparked a furious backlash. Rampton is many miles from Manchester and there were concerns about transportation of waste. Local residents, tenant farmers, and neighbouring towns like Gainsborough and Retford were horrified. As Jones explains: “When the residents of Rampton, surrounding villages and the nearby towns of Retford and Gainsborough got wind of Manchester’s intentions they were quick to kick up a stink.”
At a public inquiry held by the Local Government Board, the Manchester Corporation tried to reassure the public. It was a robust affair: “Among the testimony heard were the views of local farmers, delivered in characteristically robust language and with a general disregard for the pseudo-legal niceties of the inquiry,” says Jones. “The chairman struggled to keep order.”
The inquiry revealed a clash of worldviews. Manchester saw the scheme as a practical solution to an urban problem, while rural communities viewed it as an environmental threat and an unwanted intrusion. The efforts of the Manchester authorities to demonstrate that the “problem waste removed from one place would miraculously metamorphose into beneficial manure in another” proved a very hard sell indeed.
Local concerns centred around the ability of the ground to cope with the volume of manure, the risk of water supply contamination, and the threat of disease. But also, there was the question of reciprocity and standing up for one’s own area. As the vice-chair of Nottingham County Council’s Health Committee, Mr Earp, put it, “Every town should stand on its own bottom”.
“At root, what was at stake was the right or otherwise of an urban centre to colonise distant places with its waste,” says Jones.
The Local Government Board ultimately sided with the objectors. In December 1892, it refused Manchester’s request for a £60,000 loan to purchase Rampton Manor. The city was forced to abandon the scheme.
But the waste problem remained. In the aftermath, Manchester turned back to an earlier idea: purchasing Chat Moss, another area of bogland closer to the city. Acquired in 1895, it became a major dumping ground, capable of absorbing 50,000 tons of waste annually.
The ‘sewage question’ was a topic of national conversation through the second half of the 19th century. Manchester’s ‘Dung Hill Scheme’ in Rampton was just one of the solutions.
Elsewhere, Joseph Bazalgette’s famous London’s embankment sewage system took the capital’s waste out to the tidal Thames, but the idea of water-borne sewage networks was not the only option. Rev. Henry Moule, for instance, patented his dry earth-closet scheme (not dissimilar to modern composting toilets) and that attracted a lot of interest.
Some resolution came in the form of the main drainage system in Manchester, which was designed in the late 1880s, but its operation had to wait until the construction of the Thirlmere reservoir and aqueduct, completed in 1894. This brought much needed water from the Lake District over a distance of nearly 96 miles.
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A wasteful legacy
With the threats facing today’s water supply, and growing numbers of people advocating the use of dry systems like Moule’s, the Victorian experience has long echoes into the 21st century.
“In many respects, the current sewage crisis has its origins in the decisions made by Victorian civil engineers,” notes Dr Jones.
“In particular, the decision to opt for combined sewerage systems that captured and combined both industrial and domestic liquid waste and rainwater and ground water (the model designed by Joseph Bazalgette for London), generated much larger volumes of albeit highly diluted but nevertheless tainted sewage water requiring treatment.”
“Had separate sewerage systems been adopted, which kept these different liquid streams apart, then the volume of sewage proper would have been much reduced, and stormwaters more easily and safely sent back into our rivers and streams.”
Authors
David Musgrove is content director of the HistoryExtra.com website and podcast, plus its sister print magazines BBC History Magazine and BBC History Revealed. He has a PhD in medieval landscape archaeology and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.