Groundwater is an important source of drinking water in London and elsewhere, but the legacy of the UK’s industrial revolution includes contamination at an extreme and increasingly widely-realised scale.

Drawing on research in the English Midlands, the lecture will explore how mining, metal-based manufacturing, and the oil industry have produced an environmental conundrum that is very complex to solve. How can sites that are part of our industrial heritage be prevented from polluting rivers, and poisoning local residents? Who is responsible, and how can the ‘clean-up’ be tackled?