The rubbishscapes of Essex: why our buried trash is back to haunt us

Landfill sites have swallowed many a beauty spot along the Thames estuary in the past 50 years. Now, as those dumps start to disgorge tonnes of mouldering detritus into the river, it truly feels like the Age of ConsequencesIn 1971, the Angling Times sent reporter Dave Nash to document a disaster in Ockendon, Essex. The resulting article described the extinction of a local beauty spot, hundreds of hectares of open space where former gravel pits had become popular fishing lakes. "In less than a decade, what was one of the best fisheries in Essex has been savagely raped and despoiled. Seven hundred tons of household garbage is deposited into the pits every day, along with a similar undisclosed amount of industrial refuse." The article was accompanied by a striking picture, taken by Nash, showing two men attempting to catch a pike between the scrap cars that lined the bank of Arisdale lake. "If it's not the water level dropping," said Jerry Hulbert, the vice-president of the Moor Hall and Belhus Angling Society, "then it's the rubbish encroaching a few feet every day."I came across this story via my father-in-law, Cliff Hatton, who had sent me the newspaper cutting in the post. He would often tell me how the gravel pits, clay pits and sand pits of South Ockendon - initially dug out by the Ham River Grit company to feed the post-second world war hunger for concrete in south-east England - became, in his own excited words, "a nirvana" once they had naturally filled with water. "You dig a hole in Thurrock, leave it a few years and there are fish in it." Continue reading...