Talkin' trash

Britain stands out for its litter, and its streets are notably foul. But that's nothing new - the country has long been a pigsty

Rubbish must form many people's first impression of Britain. It was certainly what first struck me on returning from a recent trip abroad - literally, in the form of a wind-blown plastic bag attaching itself to my waist like a seedy sarong the second I emerged on to the pavement outside Heathrow airport. The British may cherish their weekly refuse collection (in the face of calls to make it fortnightly) but such incidents do make you wonder: are the British, to quote from Jeremy Paxman's recent anti-litter diatribe in this newspaper, "a uniquely sordid people"? Is Britain especially dirty?

Those are, in fact, separate questions. To address the second question first, although there are too few comparable national littering studies to answer it definitively, evidence in a recent research paper from the environmental charity Encams suggests Britain as a country that probably does stand out for its trash.

There is, first, the matter of expenditure. While cities such as Frankfurt and Brussels, for example, have street cleaning budgets of €100m (£68m), a comparable city such as Manchester spends £8m. You are also unlikely to be fined for littering in Britain. The few dozen environmental enforcement officers patrolling the streets of Amsterdam issue around 7,000 penalties a year; in all of England, there are about 500 litter convictions annually. Fines in continental Europe may not be on the scale of Singapore's - £400 for a first offence - but they typically sting more than England's £50 and tend to carry a greater burden of shame.

Powerful perception

Finally, there is the perception, on the part of visitors and the British themselves, that Britain's streets are notably foul. Lonely Planet's most recent London guidebook may be less scathing about the city's environment than previous editions, but it still bemoans all the litter. In the absence of more objective indicators, the powerful perception that Britain has a litter problem can be taken as further evidence that, indeed, it has. Perception is, after all, precisely what litter offends.

But that conclusion is so often coupled, as in Paxman's lament, with another claim that Britain in the past was spic and span and has only recently been so defiled. But the truth is that Britain has long been a pigsty. What has changed, however, is the quantity and kind of rubbish.

Take London, for example. One can only wish the Keep Britain Tidy campaign good luck with Capital Standards, its new push to tidy up London in time for the Olympics, but in the long run it is bound to be frustrated. London is not only - as the writer Ian Sinclair, one of the city's most ardent recent chroniclers, described it to me - "the epicentre of British rubbish", but possibly also of the world's. The garbage-strewn vista of pre-modern London is shorthand, in art and literature, for urban dystopia.

Sinclair was astonished to discover, on a recent walk through Epping Forest, what he calls the "rubbish contour lines" of London. "Approaching a nexus of cafes and roadside fast-food places," he recalls, he came upon "Red Bull cans, lager cans, takeaway packages - a refuse line marking a trail back to the city".

But he would have found some kind of litter periphery at almost any time in the history of the great metropolis. Look into the archives and you find Londoners constantly complaining about rubbish. Britain introduced a Sanitary Act as far back as 1338 but, by the 17th century, citing its "apparent neglect ... throughout the City", one of Ken Livingstone's mayoral predecessors, Sir John Robinson, was threatening a fine of 20 shillings for any Londoner who failed to keep "ashes, dust, filth, ordure, or other noisome thing whatsoever" within their backyards until "the raker or scavenger do come to carry away the same".

The difference between modern rubbish and the rubbish of yore is that the latter was almost entirely organic. For centuries, pigs were left to roam among the human population in urban England, to snuffle up the rotting garbage on the streets. That reeking detritus must have had competition in the form of the human ordure that, as Emily Cockayne informs us in Hubbub, her recent book on "filth, noise and stench" in England, was often used to bulk out the walls of houses.

Litter nostalgists look back no further than the 19th century and what John Scanlan, in his book On Garbage, calls "the great cleanup", signalled by the introduction, in 1848, of the Public Health Act and, with it, systematic waste regulation. The Victorians conjoined cleanliness and virtue, a union that endured until the 1950s before the slide into the litter free-for-all of today.

The 19th century also saw the expansion of the industrial revolution, born in Britain and the source of an explosion in the production of consumer goods. A nation of shopkeepers would seek to derive maximum profit from the latter by their minute dispensation in small glass, metal and, soon, plastic disposal packages. In time, pre-packaging, by the food processor or manufacturer, did away with the need for clerks measuring out supplies to customers on the shop floor. Thus were born the serried self-service aisles of packaged goods otherwise known as supermarkets - or dispensaries of pre-rubbish.

We live in the age of packaging, and much of it on the streets of Britain today has been wrapped briefly around a greasy burger or kebab. In its latest national muckraking survey, Keep Britain Tidy found fast-food litter on a quarter of British streets. Disposable containers, which save on washing-up labour, are relatively sanitary and will not be pilfered, are so much a part of the fast-food industry that without them it would not exist. And Britain, with barely even the leftovers of a culinary tradition to call its own, has taken to fast food faster than probably any other European nation.

Pizza slices

But our neighbours are catching up. Even the French, according to a recent survey, list pizza slices as their favourite takeaway. British rubbish, in other words, could be the future - and that, according to Alexander Judd, a retired American can-manufacturing supremo, would be no bad thing. In his treatise, In Defence of Garbage, he argues that the benefits of packaging, in cutting food spoilage, increasing choice and in its sheer convenience, far outweigh incidental things such as litter. He is incredulous at people's yearning for the unsanitary, unpacked food of old.

Deciding what is rubbish and what is good is a prerequisite of civilisation. There is, Scanlan reminds us, "no waste in nature". Similarly, Judd enjoins us to recognise garbage as part of "the inevitable residue of commerce"; he recognises that the profit motive, rather than any moral failing, explains much of our modern rubbish. For him, the middens of crisp packets, cola bottles, carrier bags and sweet wrappers that mark Britain like the spoor of some garbage monster should be taken as a sign of blooming economic health.

Yet it is, I suspect, precisely the intimate connection of garbage with civilisation that makes people abhor rather than applaud it. Rubbish, the sociologist Reiner Grundmann notes, "is matter out of place". The litter scudding about our city streets hints terrifyingly at the underside of civilisation, at the disorder into which it could so easily collapse.

That loathing can be exploited; unpopular councils do so regularly when they splash out on street-cleaning drives, for example. But such efforts, whatever their scale, must ultimately fail. Everything ends up as litter, including ourselves - which is perhaps what most bothers us about it.

· Simon Busch is a journalist
