How cholera changed the Leicester landscape | All the Year Round

#otd Lady Jane Grey, the Nine Day Queen, was executed for treason and the English throne reverted to the House of Tudor. What would Jane recognise about her childhood home, the beautiful Bradgate Park in the heart of England, if she could return to it almost half a century later?

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Transcript:
On this day in 1554 the seventeen year old Lady Jane Grey, who we now often refer to as the Nine Day Queen was executed by Henry the 8th’s first born daughter, Mary the 1st - taking back the line of succession after her half brother, Edward the 6th had tried to pass over both Mary and Elizabeth. But before Jane’s father in law tried to thrust her into the role of Queen of England and Ireland, Jane had spent her teen years at her family home in Bradgate Park, a beautiful expanse of land in Charnwood Forest.
If Jane could see Bradgate Park now, there would be a few shocks - she would find her grand home in ruins, if she turned and looked to the hills she would see the decorative folly called Old John, built 230 years after her death from which her descendants would enjoy watching horse races. She would see, just a little off to the side of that, a tall war memorial stood away from the treelines, commemorating the lives lost in the two world wars.
But aside from the man made structures, the land itself would look much the same. The jutting rocks that erupt from the land and the scenic outcrops boast some of the oldest and youngest fossil bearing rocks which were created from volcanoes rising out of the ocean, to tropical deserts and ice sheets. The deer that roam would also be familiar to Jane, having occupied the park since the fifteenth century. A stock was originally kept for hunting but nowadays it is a thriving sanctuary.
Looking away from the hills, down past the deer she might be surprised to see a large body of water that had definitely not been there before. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the city of Leicester was expanding rapidly - and it desperately needed more sources of fresh, clean water to combat cholera and the yearly ‘summer diarrhoea’ that contributed to Leicester’s high infant mortality rate.
In 1867, 180 acres of land was purchased from the Earl of Stamford for nearly 1.5 million, and cost another 3 million to build in today’s money with the inclusion of a stone wall to separate the deer park from the reservoir. It was a massive undertaking and with building the wall and fixing a leak and making sure it could merge with another nearby reservoir, it would take 3 years to complete.
This helped - but it wasn’t enough. Leicester expanded too much too quickly, and at one point was called a self-sufficient city because it produced so many things and didn’t rely on just a single industry. It would take another thirty years of local and national laws, interest, money, and medical professionals before the death rates finally began to drop significantly.