AFTER THE GRAND OPENING of the main drainage system in 1865 and 1868, London’s new sewers continued to be refashioned – principally the smaller street sewers and household drains that all had to be connected up to the intercepting system (a process initially overseen by Bazalgette himself). There was also the continuing question of how best to deal with the sewage, which, in Bazalgette’s intercepting system, was carried away from London’s main built-up area and simply dumped into the River Thames further downstream. Unsurprisingly, the Thames Conservatory Board raised repeated objections to the vast amounts of sewage that were now polluting the river around the outfalls at Barking and Crossness. These disputes were intensified after a horrific accident in September 1878, when the pleasure steamer Princess Alice sank near the outfalls after a collision with a freighter, resulting in over six hundred deaths, which were mostly the result of poisoning by sewage rather than drowning. Later, in the 1880s, there was increasing concern that London might experience another ‘Great Stink’ on the scale of that witnessed in 1858, and this finally led the Metropolitan Board of Works to begin purifying the sewage at the outfalls instead of flushing it untreated into the Thames.
Away from the outfalls, London’s sewers continued to be enlarged as the population of the city grew far beyond that envisaged by Bazalgette; yet their engineering basis remained the same, with new lines of intercepting sewers added to increase the capacity of the original ones. Despite cleaning up the city, the intercepting sewers were never a perfect system; in times of heavy rain, raw sewage was, and still is, flushed into the Thames to avoid overloading the sewers.
As in Bazalgette’s day, London’s sewers continue to fascinate, despite (or even perhaps because of) their invisibility. In their annual ‘Open Sewers Week’, Thames Water plc open up the original Abbey Mills pumping station, showing visitors its elaborate decoration and pumping engines (albeit electric versions of the original steam-powered ones). The event also includes an optional underground walk through a small section of the northern outfall sewer at Wick Lane in Hackney. After being kitted out in protective clothing, lead-weighted boots and an oxygen tank in case of poisonous gas, visitors are lowered by a rope into the cavernous space of the northern outfall sewer. Once inside, it is clear just how hostile the interiors of the London sewers are; the visit entails wading through knee-deep sewage along a smooth but slippery brick-lined tunnel in almost complete darkness, guided only by the maintenance team who work in the sewers. For the majority of the public, however, London’s sewers can only be experienced remotely, for example, through television adaptations telling their story, such as the BBC film The Sewer King (2003), part of its series The Seven Wonders of the Industrial World, or through museum exhibits, such as the reconstruction of a London sewer at the Kew Bridge Steam Museum, complete with a peephole view of a London sewer.
The restrictions on access to London’s sewers have not deterred those determined to investigate these spaces, albeit illegally. Perhaps one of the first illicit sewer explorers was the Victorian journalist John Hollingshead (1827–1904) who, in 1862, published Underground London, an account of his travels beneath the city, but which mainly focused on London’s sewers. Hollingshead had a self-confessed ‘appetite for the wonderful in connection with sewers’ and his book catalogued many aspects of London’s drainage system, including the city’s old drains, journeys within the sewers themselves, or Bazalgette’s main drainage system, then under construction. As he stated in the introduction to the book:
There are more ways than one of looking at sewers, especially old London sewers. There is a highly romantic point of view from which they are regarded as accessible, pleasant and convivial hiding-places for criminals flying from justice, but black and dangerous labyrinths for the innocent stranger … [and] there is the scientific or half-scientific way, which is not always wanting in the imaginative element.
One of London’s dwindling band of sewer maintenance workers, pictured inside the northern outfall sewer, May 2007.
A view into one of London’s sewers: the peephole exhibit at the Kew Bridge Steam Museum.
In keeping with this view, Hollingshead described London’s main drainage system as a ‘great accomplished fact’ and a successful example of the ‘struggle of art against nature’; yet, he also stated that its vast intercepting sewers, which ‘dwell in perpetual darkness’ and concentrated all of London’s sewage in one space, might be seen by some as ‘volcanoes of filth; gorged veins of putridity; ready to explode at any moment in a whirlwind of foul gas, and poison all those whom they fail to smother.’ In a wonderful moment during one of his sewer journeys, Hollingshead was told by his guide that he was now walking beneath Buckingham Palace, whereupon he promptly sang the national anthem, while up to his knees in what was, presumably, royal excrement.
Hollingshead’s intrepid journeys are mirrored today in the practice of draining, an increasingly popular branch of urban exploration. For urban explorers, illicit sites – industrial ruins, abandoned buildings and underground spaces – are places where the normal rules of city life can be challenged. Visiting sewers presents an opportunity to discover a secret world under the city, one that might provide a completely new insight and experience of the city. Usually under the cover of night, sewer explorers descend into these spaces and explore them at will. This usually involves a degree of danger: mobile phone networks cease to operate; the space is usually pitch black, slippery underfoot, and highly disorientating. Because the sewers are designed in a grid-like network, they are easily comprehensible on a map of the city, but not so underground. However, this is unsurprising, for Bazalgette assumed there would be no visitors to these spaces: they were conceived to be self-cleansing and therefore no walkways or other helpful features for people were incorporated into their design.
There has been a variety of imaginative uses of the city’s sewers in both television and film. An early example was the giant human-eating rat that hid in the London sewers in ‘Gnaws’, a memorable episode of the 1976 ITV series The New Avengers. More recently, in Neil Gaiman’s 1996 BBC television series and popular book Neverwhere, London’s underground is re-imagined as the fantasy world ‘London Below’, where mythical characters use the city’s subterranean spaces – the sewers, the Tube, even the Crossness sewage reservoir – as passages through a city with a seemingly impossible alternative geography. In a different vein, Clare Clark’s 2005 historical novel The Great Stink sets most of its Victorian narrative in the London sewers, exploiting their dark associations to mirror the repressed yearnings of her central character, which are played out in the hidden spaces of the sewers before dramatically entering the life of the world above. More straightforwardly horrific is the deformed monster living in a self-made subterranean labyrinth under London in Christopher Smith’s 2004 horror film, Creep. This monster – the sole survivor of clandestine genetic experiments carried out under London – lives in the city’s sewers and in the Underground network, only emerging into the public part of the Tube to carry out brutal murders. Although far from subtle, the horrors in Creep seem to chime on some level with the much more tangible unease now associated with the city’s substructure, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 7 July 2005. London’s sewers might have originally been built to bring the city’s waste to order, and to keep these horrors reassuringly out of sight (and smell); yet, for some, these spaces represent something different: a fascinating, alternative way of seeing the city.
A storm drain beneath Brockwell Park in Brixton.