Tyne after Tyne

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• Publisher: The White Horse Press
• Year: 2013
• Edition: 0
• eBook ISBN:
  9781912186020
• Topic: History
• Index: History

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 twenty-first-century efforts to expand biodiversity. Studying five centuries of Tyne conservatorship reveals 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, several organisations, tried to protect the river's environmental health from harm.This Tyne study offers a template for a future body of work on British rivers that dislodges the Thames as the river of choice in British environmental history. And it undermines traditional approaches to rivers as passive backdrops of human activities. Departing from narratives that equated change with improvement, or with loss and destruction, it moves away from morally loaded notions of better or worse, and even dead, rivers. The book fully situates the Tyne's fluvial transformations within political, economic, cultural, social and intellectual contexts. With such a long view, we can objectify ourselves through our descendants' eyes, reconnecting us not only to our past, but also to our future.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Glossary of Key Terms and Abbreviations
• THE AUTHOR
• Introduction
• ‘Hurting the River of Tine’: Protecting a Pre-Modern Estuary, 1529–1850
• ‘Tinkering’ the Tyne: Increasing Demand for Structural Change, 1655–1855
• Creating a Grand and Deep River: The Tyne Improvement Commission, 1850–1968
• Fish in the Tyne: The Tyne Salmon Conservancy, 1866–1950
• Testing the Troubled Waters: SCORP’s Tyne Sub-Committee and a Succession of Unsuccessful Reports, 1921–1945
• ‘A Medieval Street of Squalor’: The Final Demand for a Clean-Up, 1950–1975
• Damming the Tyne: The Creation and Impact of Kielder Reservoir, 1975–2015
• ‘A Big River?’ Regeneration, Tourism and the Cultural Meaning of the Tyne, 1972–2015
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index