How to find out what was dumped near you

Someone on the street says the park "used to be a tip". The garden has odd lumps, or bits of brick and clinker keep surfacing in the borders. You can get a long way towards the truth in ten minutes with free public records — here's the trail, in order.

Step 1: check the licensed-era record (2 minutes)

Search your postcode here. We've mapped all 19,851 historic landfill sites the Environment Agency records for England, and about 55% of postcodes have at least one within 1km — so finding something is normal, not alarming. You'll see distance, direction, the site boundary on a map, who operated it, when waste went in, and what categories: inert (rubble), household, commercial, industrial, liquid/sludge or special (hazardous). Each site page has the full record.

Step 2: mind the gap before 1974

Waste licensing only began with the Control of Pollution Act 1974. Small pre-war and Victorian tips — the classic "they filled the old clay pit with ash and rubbish" story — often never made it into any national dataset. If your local rumour is old, absence from step 1 proves little. That's what the next steps are for.

Step 3: read the old maps (5 minutes)

The National Library of Scotland hosts georeferenced historic Ordnance Survey maps for all of Britain, free, at maps.nls.uk. Use the side-by-side viewer, find your street, and step back through editions (1890s–1960s). What you're looking for: "Refuse Tip", "Slag Heap", "Old Clay Pit", "Brick Works", quarries and pits that later vanish under housing — filled ground, in other words. A pit on the 1910 map that's streets by 1955 was filled with something.

Step 4: ask your council (free, slower)

Council environmental health teams hold records the national data doesn't: the contaminated land register (usually short), historic landfill files inherited from predecessor authorities, and site investigation reports from when nearby estates were built. Email them — ask specifically whether they hold any landfill or made-ground records for your address, and whether any Part 2A inspections have covered it. Under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 they must respond, normally within 20 working days.

Step 5: planning history for the detail

If a specific development sits on suspect ground, its planning file (searchable on your council's planning portal) often contains the best document of all: the ground investigation report submitted with the application, complete with borehole logs and gas monitoring. Search the estate name or road plus "contamination" or "ground conditions".

What to do with what you find

• Inert fill (rubble, subsoil): common, stable, and the reason nothing grows well over the buried hardcore. Not a health concern.
• Household/commercial waste: the main questions are gas (for sites that closed within the last ~30 years) and settlement. Read our landfill gas guide for the honest version.
• Industrial or special waste: worth understanding properly — see what the waste types mean, and if you're growing food directly in unknown made ground, raised beds with imported topsoil are the standard sensible answer.
• Buying or selling: the formal route is an environmental search, which wraps most of the above into one £30–60 report.