This is the ERA of horse transport I remember learning about in history :- The horse at its peak in victorian times. Considered a evil necesity.
I still dont like crap on the roads and think if you do take your house for a walk theres measures you can take to keep things a little nicer for the rest of the population. Not to do so is selfish and unthoughtfull. As much as you may like sh!t all over the roads I think getting rid of it from the streets was one of the better ideas society has had. Horse polution was as big an issue in its prime as car polution is today.
Gambatte what decade were your grandparents talking about if they owned a garage the chances are that the days of horse drawn transport being defacto were long over...
Horse excrement might be biodegradeable, so are burgerking wrappings, I dont appreciate either being left in the streets by people who are too selfish and lazy to do anything better about it. Same mentality to littering, personally Id rather ride around burger king wrappers than horse droppings. Both are the passing tokens of the inconsiderate in my opinion.
http://www.amrep.org/articles/3_1a/civility.html
STENCH Public and private spaces alike stank during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the streets of central London, drains were often blocked by garbage and horse droppings. Rubbish cascaded out of windows onto the heads of unlucky pedestrians below. Domestic fires polluted the air and blackened the sky with a noxious smog. As Patrick Süskind writes at the beginning of his novel,
Perfume, "In [the eighteenth century] there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine
In 1898, delegates from across the globe gathered in New York
City for the world's first international urban planning conference. One topic
dominated the discussion. It was not housing, land use, economic development, or
infrastructure. The delegates were driven to desperation by horse
manure.
The horse was no newcomer on the urban scene. But by the late
1800s, the problem of horse pollution had reached unprecedented heights. The
growth in the horse population was outstripping even the rapid rise in the
number of human city dwellers. American cities were drowning in horse manure and
well as other unpleasant biproducts of the era's predominant mode of
transportation: urine, flies, congestion, carcasses, and traffic accidents.
Widespread cruelty to horses was a form of environmental degradation as well.
The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of
London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet
deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded
that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan's third-story
windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable
dimensions loomed.
And no possible solution could be devised. After all,
the horse had been the dominant mode of transportation for thousands of
years. Horses were absolutely essential for the functioning of the 19th
century city - for personal transportation, freight haulage and even mechanical
power. Without horses, cities would quite literally starve.
All efforts to mitigate the problem were proving woefully
inadequate. Stumped by the crisis, the urban planning conference declared
its work fruitless and broke up in three days instead of the scheduled
ten.
It is easy to imagine that a hundred years ago, when cars were first appearing on our roads, they replaced previously peaceful, gentle and safe forms of travel. In fact, motor vehicles were welcomed as the answer to a desperate state of affairs. In 1900 it was calculated that in England and Wales there were around 100,000 horse drawn public passenger vehicles, half a million trade vehicles and about half a million private carriages. Towns in England had to cope with over 100 million tons of horse droppings a year (much of it was dumped at night in the slums) and countless gallons of urine. Men wore spats and women favoured outdoor ankle-length coats not out of a sense of fashion but because of the splash of liquified manure; and it was so noisy that straw had to be put down outside hospitals to muffle the clatter of horses’ hooves. Worst of all, with horses and carriages locked in immovable traffic jams, transport was grinding to a halt in London and other cities.
Moreover, horse-drawn transport was not safe. Road traffic deaths from horse-drawn vehicles in England and Wales between 1901 and 1905 were about 2,500 a year. This works out as about 70 road traffic deaths per million population per year which is close to the annual rate of 80 to 100 deaths per million for road traffic accidents in the 1980s and 1990s, although we must not forget that many people who died from injuries sustained in road accidents in 1900 would probably have survived today thanks to our A&E departments. Motor vehicles were welcomed because they were faster, safer, unlikely to swerve or bolt, better able brake in an emergency, and took up less room: a single large lorry could pull a load that would take several teams of horses and wagons – and do so without producing any dung. By World War One industry had become dependent on lorries, traffic cruised freely down Oxford Street and Piccadilly, specialists parked their expensive cars ouside their houses in Harley and Wimpole Street, and the lives of general practitioners were transformed. By using even the cheapest of cars doctors no longer had to wake the stable lad and harness the horse to attend a night call. Instead it was ‘one pull of the handle and they were off’. Further, general practitioners could visit nearly twice as many patients in a day than they could in the days of the horse and trap. (1) 1. Loudon I ‘Doctors and their transport 1750-1914’, Medical History: 2001; 45185-206 Irvine Loudon, Medical Historian
im sure the archaelogical stuff was generally quite low in moisture content?
