Until the 1850s, London’s sewerage system consisted of the unregulated dumping of effluent into the River Thames or any other watercourse that would wash it away. An unsurprising rise in disease, including recurring cholera epidemics, added pressure on the authorities to take action against the growing number of deaths. Piles of sewage lined the river banks for decades until the ‘big stink’ in July of 1858. An unusually hot summer brought a heatwave which lifted the aroma of the raw sewage to a level unbearable by the city’s population. The false belief that cholera originated in sewage and was spread through the atmosphere in a ‘miasma’ led to the realization that something had to be done to solve the problem.
A proposal from an engineer named Joseph Bazalgette was accepted, which would have London equipped with interconnecting pipes, draining the sewage into East London, where it would be treated and released into the Thames, downstream of the city. The mammoth project ran from 1859-1875 and created some of the most wonderful structures of the Victorian age, such as Abbey Mills Pumping Station. Bazalgette would later be heralded as a hero for saving an immeasurable number of lives (albeit through dispersing the pathogen, not the miasma) and for pioneering a system that would later be adopted by cities across the world.
This photograph shows the intersection of two streams of sewage in a combined sewer overflow; designed to collect and divert rainwater runoff to prevent the main system from being overloaded. The beautiful brickwork of the sewer here is preserved as well as the day it was laid.