Nobody knows you when you're down and out

The Industrial Revolution and its 'dark Satanic mills' gave rise to quite considerable contamination from industrial waste products. With the recent dramatic decline in traditional heavy industries there are significant areas of so-called "brownfield" now available for re-development in many cities.

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The Environmental Protection Act of 1990

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The Environmental Protection Act of 1990 had as one of it's aims the setting up of registers of land "put to potential contaminative use". These registers, under Section 143 of the Act, would have encompassed around 40 different classes of contamination. However due to the fear of "land blight", combined with one of the deepest recessions in recent times, the planned registers were shelved amid some controversy.

The classes of land that are now deemed to be necessary of investigation have been somewhat reduced, down to around a quarter of the original list.

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Who is this Website for

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The aim of this Website is to provide information and pointers to information (metadata), which can then be used to help make these decisions as informed as possible. The approach is much like going to a family doctor, who will tell you that you have got kidney stones, and then advise you where to go to get specialist treatment.

The focus of this Website is, as it's name suggests, contaminated land. As is often the case, professionals involved in the sector can blind with science the very people who need to understand whether they should continue to expose themselves to the dangers (perceived and real) inherent in actually living in an area where there has been a legacy of industrial activity, that may have given rise to contaminated land.

Contaminated land is a widespread phenomena throughout the industrialised world, government response varies, being influenced by local pressures and the perceived ability of the parties responsible, to pay for the clean-up process.

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Your own copy

We used to sell full copies of the site, based on the premise that if the download took you more than ten minutes you might as well give the money to us, rather than British Telecom.

Naive fools that we were!, we experimented with a variety of prices (initially £ 14, then £10, and finally £42) suprise suprise - the best price for selling turned out to be £10! But unfortunately the time spent in formatting the disks was just not cost effective.

Over the last 18 months (November 1998 to March 2000) we sold a total of 3 copies - at the price of £42 each. You don't need to have a degree in 'Brain Surgery' to figure out that this is not a sustainable development.

Our answer to this conundrum is a 'sawn-off' version called 'Bolux', which neatly sums up most surfers response when they are asked to pay for something, which on the face of it, is available for free on the Internet.

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Feedback

Much like any specialist publication, this web site reflects the background, experience and interests of the webmaster. Should you find this at times offensive, bizzare or somewhat strange, we apologise in advance, however rather than simply jumping site, fill out the Feedback Form and tell us what we should be doing !

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Website Set-aside

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The success of the concept of "set-aside, (where under the European Economic Community's Common Agricultural Policy, farmers are being paid to leave around 15% of their land lying fallow) together with the desire to channel development away from "green-field" country side, to "brown-field" inner city areas, means that the EEC may soon institute a similar "wheeze" for their Cyberspace Accessability Policy (CAP).

Preliminary indications are that no new "website development permits" will be issued by the planning authorities in Brussels. Instead old obsolete websites will be decommissioned, decontaminated and deconstructed, and owners will be paid out of central EEC funds to set-aside a significant acreage of web real-estate.

As we at www.ContaminatedLand.co.uk are good citizens, we have already set aside 15% of this website to lie fallow, thus preventing a glut of produce appearing on the market.

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Fugu fish and BSE

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Apropro BSE, it of course takes nearly a decade to manifest itself (as the scientists tell us, and who are we now to doubt their veracity).

This gives an insight into the phlegmatic British character, not for us the buzz of eating a Fugu fish (where the internal organs contain enough toxin to wipe out a couple of Celtic Rugby Nations) and then afterwards hoping that the Chef prepared it correctly so that you feel slightly numb but alive! (that's as long as you don't accidentally O.D., by nicking you neighbours left-over portion)

No sir we Brits get our kicks from eating Beef that might have CJD prions (or maybe even lifeforms that hitched a ride on a meteorite from Mars) and then we get a long-term buzz from the uncertainty of knowing if we will make it through the next 10 years. Or as Rick (or even Groucho) might have said ...One Night in Casablanca...

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I'm only the piano player

'Eat it again Sam'