Excremental Flows: Manchester Corporation’s ‘Dung Hill Scheme’ and the Rampton Manor Estate, Nottinghamshire, 1892

With high population densities and concentrated industry, towns and cities generate vast quantities of waste. Maintaining the flow of waste, especially excremental matter, away from these centres to areas of final disposal or dispersal, is an essential priority for urban authorities. To operate effectively, waste management infrastructures and protocols must have sufficient capacity to cope with the volumes and different types of waste produced, and be able to move this on efficiently and economically. Ruptures and blockages that disrupt the flow of waste, or increasing volumes of waste that threaten to engulf older infrastructure designed for smaller flows, represent major challenges that need to be addressed urgently. Manchester faced this scenario in the 1890s. How the city’s authorities sought to resolve their difficulties is examined here. The strategy deployed is revealing of the competing conceptualisations of waste flow in Victorian England – linear versus cyclical flows; permanent disposal versus reuse – and the impact urban waste might have on distant rural communities.