The Great Stench, Stink Pipes and Joseph Bazalgette

Now, one of the reasons I like living where I do, aside from the fact that is affordable, is that, unlike other parts of London, it was not bulldozed to make way for high rise blocks and 'new maisonettes' in the 'lets pour some reinforced concrete in a mould and see how that looks' style.

Granted, it is home to the building recently voted 'the ugliest building in London', an office block in the 'Chicago' style, nicknamed the 'Vortex' because gale force winds whip around the structure as you leave the tube station; I call it Barad-Dur, the dark tower. It is home to the monstrosity that is the 'Sainsbury's SavaCentre' (think giant 'Nissan Hut') and a few 'riverside apartments' (think over-priced, bland, brick constructions with imitation stone cladding, big windows and too small balconies) but it largely preserves a character from a hundred years ago.

Imposing Victorian family houses, Edwardian maisonettes built on the cheap to house families moving in from rural areas, tiny cottages, a trout stream and watermills (well one at least, working); there are even a few examples where the decorative tiles that used to adorn the pillars of shop fronts are still extant, uncovered by aluminium fairings or plastered-over and whitewashed.

Some extensive building work went on in the '30's, and these sit alongside, somewhat incongruously, earlier more imposing houses, but by and large, it retains a flavour that someone born a hundred years ago would not fail to recognise. Even the local Tesco supermarket is low key. (Take heed, Sainsburys. You may have given us Deen City Farm but we would have preferred the ruins of 'Merton Abbey', not some car park, topped by a Nissan Hut on stilts, however convenient shopping there may be! I think Nelson would be turning in his grave to know what you, and the Council, have made of his estate! Yes, that right! Admiral (Lord) Horatio Nelson used to live just up the road! It's why there are a bunch of roads called 'Hardy Road', 'Victory Road', 'Trafalgar Road', 'Hamilton Road', even, obviously, 'Nelson Road'. (Home to the best beer shop in South London. If they don't stock it, it's not made!). Although it's odd that there's not one called 'Nile Road', after all, the Battle of the Nile was just as significant as the Battle of Trafalgar. But then again, he didn't die there. Just as well really.)

Now, you may be wondering what all this has to do with the title of this blog. Well............................

In a road, one stop up from me on the 'Tube' (subway, metro), perhaps 10/15 minutes walk, is a Victorian, Edwardian 'Stink Pipe'. A vent to the sewage system. A vent, high above the road. To avoid gases building up; and putting the stink under the noses of the pedestrians. A survivor from a bygone age, just like my 'maisonette'. Crumbling, dilapidated (just like my flat) but standing, nonetheless. That got me thinking about the 'Great Stench'.

Sometime in the mid-1800s, they got the idea that cess pits were not a good idea, especially in cities; all that waste and excrement just lying around. Just asking for disease. (And Londoners got it; usually in the form of cholera!) And so they decided that, henceforth, all waste had to be connected to the sewers, some of it dated to Roman times. Cess pits were banned.

And where was this untreated waste to be dumped? In the River Thames! (Needless to say, shortly after, the salmon stopped coming back for a bit of "'ow's your father"). Of course, the city planners didn't think of the repercussions; they were only interested in preventing disease. It didn't. Cholera is caused by contaminated water supplies; directing untreated sewage into the Thames at that volume simply made matters worse.

Unlike today, all sewage was discharged 'raw' into whatever watercourse was convenient, if at all. There was no treatment and treatment plants did not exist. It's easy to see therefore why the Thames became what, to all intents and purposes, was one big, open drain flowing through central London. London has always been, relatively speaking, a very large city. To dump that much untreated waste directly into the river was bound to cause probelms!

Little wonder it stank!

And it did. To hell! All of that waste decided to decompose IN the river. And not just in the poor people's stretches of the river! The newly built Houses of Parliament was home to the most nauseous of stenches. The Government had to do something! After all, it was their noses being assaulted! The Great and the Good! And so they did. After previously rejecting countless (oh alright, more than a hundred) proposals, they finally appointed one Joseph Bazalgette (crazy guy, crazy moustache!) to decide on a plan which would work. A sewage system that would work and get rid of the awful smell hanging over the Houses of Parliment.

(It, in the end, was only a partial success. No mere sewage system could hope to eradicate the stench of corruption hanging over the place. Only the extermination of 'Rattus Lobbyistensis' could do that!)

Bazalgette's solution, in the absence of any way to treat the sewage, was to move it downstream towards the estuary where the tidal flows would more easily move it into the open sea. To do so, he designed a network of circular brick-lined 'main' sewers, 83 miles in length and a smaller, in size, network of 'street' sewers, connected to the 'main drains', totalling 1,100 miles in length. The street sewers would discharge the waste from houses, shops etc as well as disposing of rainwater into the main sewers and then this waste was pumped downstream to finally empty their contents into the Thames well away from the inhabitants of London. The project took ten years to complete!

I well remember the big, elaborate, Victorian building which used to house one of the pumping stations, on Chelsea Embankment, near where I used to play as a child. It was many years before I found out what it used to be used for!

Bazalette's genius lay in the size of sewers he designed. Working from the densest population he could imagine and the most generous allowance of sewage per household, he came up with the diameter of the pipes. He then doubled it! "Well, we're only going to do this once." he is said to have remarked. Just as well. He couldn't have envisaged 22 storey tower blocks springing up all over London in the '60s.

The fact the Victorian water supply system is now cracking at the seams , literally - London loses a fifth of its potable water to leaks - it is good to know that Bazalgette got it so right. The sewers are still in use today, just as he built them and it is a very rare event that they are not able to cope. Even with 8 miliion people here!

If Bazalgette did nothing else except design the London sewer system he would go down as one of the UK's great engineers, perhaps the greatest of the nineteenth century, Isembard Kingdom Brunel notwithstanding. But he was not satisfied with the sewer system. Hammersmith Bridge, Putney Bridge, Battersea Bridge, Chelsea and Victoria Embankments (to house the sewers), the Woolwich Ferry. Still, crazy moustache!


Footnote: Battersea Bridge which Bazalgette replaced was the last surviving wooden bridge over the Thames. Nice to know Battersea (where I grew up) is famous for something!