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Professor Glen O’Hara – Britain’s Water Industry and Pollution since 1945: How Did We Get Here?
23rd October 2025 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Glen O’Hara is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Oxford Brookes University. A prolific commentator on current events in the press, he is also the author of a string of books on modern public policy, most recently The Politics of Water in Post-War Britain (2017). He is currently finishing works connected to his large-scale Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, ‘In All Our Footsteps: Mapping, Tracking and Experiencing Rights of Way in Post-War Britain’, and a book on the domestic policies of Tony Blair’s New Labour governments between 1997 and 2007.
‘How Did We Get Here?’ will explore some of the very deep-seated roots of present controversies over water pollution. Britain now has a very old and dilapidated system of water supply and removal, which successive governments as well as private companies from the late 1980s onwards struggled with – often making progress, but also constantly slipping backwards in a warming world and a more storm-prone British Isles. The origins of our present crisis, O’Hara will argue, are as much about rising public expectations, better monitoring, more leisure time and the electoral battle in southern England as they are about sewage discharge.