RIVER TAME

The River Tame lies in the English Midlands. It is a tributary of the Trent.

A journey down the river

The Tame is a short river, about 50 kilometres (30 miles) long, that rises on the southern flanks of Cannock Chase in the West Midlands near Walsall in Staffordshire. It flows east, cutting through Birmingham to Tamworth and then to the Trent.

The sandstones of Cannock are slightly harder than the nearby red clay rocks, and so the valleys tend to be narrower and the rivers cut down deeper here. They widen out when they come to the red clays.

The towns and villages of the Tame have tended to be built on the sandstone ridges that dot the area. So although the river flows through a densely populated area, its floodplain is still, to a large extent, open land, often used for recreation and country parks.

How people use the river

Overcoming pollution problems

The River Tame is a good example of how water engineers have to cope with the problems of water supply and effluent disposal from a large conurbation. The River Tame drains part of the Black Country and much of Birmingham. Industry and domestic users put about 8 cubic metres (25 cubic feet) of effluent into the river each second. But, as the Tame is a small river whose flow is only about 14 cubic metres (40 cubic feet) a second normally, you can see that the chances are that the river can be one third sewage. At times of low flow the river naturally produces less than 8 cubic metres (25 cubic feet) of water a second, so there can be times when the river is more than half sewage!

In this former metal-working area even the natural runoff from streets during rainfall has been poisonous, bringing heavy metals into the river. Historically the quality of the river was so low that the water quality of the River Trent downstream from its junction was also heavily affected.

In the past the situation was even worse, especially after heavy rain, for then the rainfall pipes could not cope with the water reaching them, so they spilled into the sewers, overloaded them too, and flushed raw sewage directly into the river.

The key stages to cleaning up the river have thus been to try to keep the runoff after storms under control. This has been done by using gravel pits dug in the floodplain of the Tame at Lea Marston. The water is allowed to pond up here where air and natural microbes can get to the water and help in its natural purification. Although the first holding lake still contains possible sewage, the other lakes can be used as a country water park, so turning a problem into a benefit.

Subsequently the river has been improved out of all recognition compared with the 1960s, for example. This is, in part, because there are now fewer metal-working industries in the area, and those factories still working have to operate much stricter controls on processing their own waste. New sewage schemes have also helped to contain the problem.

As a result, fish are now found in the Tame, where during the 1960s, the river was completely lifeless.

Places on the Tame

Birmingham

Birmingham lies in the valley of the Tame on a dry sandy ridge away from the more marshy valley floodplains. Birmingham is unusual in so far as it is not built on any major river. However, originally, much of Birmingham's water supply was derived from the Tame, and the Tame remains Birmingham's river, even if it is rather inconspicuous.

In fact, the Tame is such a small river as it passes Birmingham that, as the city expanded during the Industrial Revolution, it quickly used all of the resources of the River Tame and the River Rea and had to look to the Severn and even the Elan Valley on the Wye for its water supplies, the latter being 130 kilometres (80 miles) away! It cost the staggering sum of £60 million in 1875 and was one of the civil engineering works of the age.

The other consequence of the growth of Birmingham at the heart of England but without a navigable river was that Birmingham quickly acquired a whole network of canals at an early stage in the 18th century during the Canal Age. Indeed, you could almost confuse Birmingham's canals for its rivers, so numerous and substantial are they.

Tamworth

Tamworth's history goes back to Saxon times when it was a stronghold of the rulers of Mercia, the Midland's kingdom. The fort was built at the junction of the rivers Tame and Anker in 913 by Ethelfleda, the lady of the Mercians whose army had just recovered the district from the Danes. It was a good defensive site and so it was adopted by the Normans and the castle rebuilt in stone. The existing castle is a 17th century building, built over the remains of the Norman castle.