This is a story of parallel cities, of equal and opposite worlds. Brighton, that rather ritzy resort on the south coast of England, means different things to different people: the onion-domed Brighton Pavilion and the excesses of the Regency period; the sleazy pre-war milieu of Graham Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock; the notably gay-friendly environment of the post-war years. I, for one, will always associate it with Conservative Party Conferences – one in particular, when five people were murdered and many others were seriously injured in a terrorist bomb attack on the Grand Hotel, very shortly after I had left it.
I shall address this terrible episode later in the book. For now I wish to explore a Brighton that few visitors pause to consider: the one beneath their feet, the one they can’t see but would know about soon enough if it ceased to function. It may not be as grand-looking as the one up top, the Brighton of the aforementioned Pavilion, of cream stucco, ornate ironwork and glorious Regency squares. But it was actually better built because it had to be. The health of a rapidly expanding town depended on it, and still does.
This hidden Brighton is the system of sewers that processes the waste of its citizens and visitors. It is an aspect of public health that we take for granted now, but in mid-nineteenth-century Brighton it was a suitably bold and dramatic solution to a problem that was threatening to overwhelm the town. To understand the full extent and implications of that crisis I turned to an expert on Brighton’s cultural history. Geoffrey Mead is a social geographer who grew up in Brighton, studied at the University of Sussex and now teaches there.
We met on the beach by the Palace Pier and strolled west, in silence at first as we absorbed the unique pleasures of being beside the seaside. ‘I love walking along Brighton Beach,’ he said. ‘If you close your eyes and walk you’ve got water lapping at the stones, you’ve got the cry of the seagulls, and then you open your eyes and you’re on the seashore of a large city, full of people enjoying themselves.’
Two hundred years ago, visitors to Brighton were not here just to have fun. They were on a mission to improve their health. A short time before, Brighton had been an obscure fishing village with the much less snappy name of Brighthelmstone. Its fortunes were turned around by a physician called Richard Russell, who cannily marketed what were essentially detox breaks for London’s leisured upper classes. ‘He starts to direct people down to property he owns on the coast, to the new “simple life” that you have in Brighthelmstone,’ Geoff told me. ‘It’s about getting away from London. London is the most polluted spot on earth. When you come down to the seaside you are dipped in the sea, you get a wash, which not many rich people did. You’re given seawater to drink, either neat or mixed with rum or porter, or, excruciatingly, with milk. Of course, seawater is an emetic and with the diet that the very rich had at that time – too much rich food and alcohol – making you sick is very good. You go back to London and people say, “Michael, you look exceedingly well!” To which you answer, “I’ve been to Brighthelmstone!” That’s how it starts.’
In 1810 this rapidly expanding resort officially changed its name to the more user-friendly ‘Brighton’. On 21 September 1841 the railway arrived in Brighton, slashing travelling time from the capital to less than two hours, and in the following decade the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray coined its most popular nickname when he referred to ‘kind, cheerful, merry Doctor Brighton’ in acknowledgement of its supposedly health-giving properties. The trouble was, a booming population – swelled by the seasonal influx of visitors – was turning the town into the very opposite of healthy.
Geoff took up the story again: ‘There was no provision for sewage disposal. The authorities were relying on the fact that Brighton is built on a chalk landscape. You dig a hole in the chalk, pour liquid into it and the liquid disappears.’ The question was, where did it disappear to? In 1849 an engineer called Edward Cresy produced the answer in a report to the General Board of Health ‘into the sewerage, drainage, and supply of water, and the sanitary condition of the inhabitants of the town of Brighton’. Cresy pinpointed, as an example, one street of fifty-five houses which was served by two cesspits that were never emptied. ‘Which isn’t a major problem,’ said Geoff, ‘until you realize that they’re on a steep hill, and the next street has its well immediately below that, and below that is another street with stables, and below that is another well. And so the entire water table is heavily polluted.’
Inadequate or non-existent sewage treatment, contaminated water supplies, poor sanitation and hygiene – all the conditions were in place for the spreading of waterborne and other diseases. The neighbourhoods where the poorest families lived, servicing the needs of the burgeoning middle class and health-conscious visitors, were particularly vulnerable. In 1849, the year of Cresy’s damning report, Brighton suffered a virulent outbreak of cholera which claimed the lives of more than 200 people. The good doctors and burghers of Brighton, however, were conspicuously silent on the matter: to publicize the problem was to risk killing the goose that, even then, was laying the golden egg of health tourism.
It was left to The Lancet, the house journal of the medical profession, to campaign to alleviate the conditions in Brighton that made it particularly prone to outbreaks of cholera and diseases such as typhus and scarlet fever. To follow what happened next, I left Geoff Mead to his beloved beach and doubled back towards the Palace Pier before crossing the seafront road and walking away from the sea into Old Steine Gardens.
This is the former heart of the old fishing village of Brighthelmstone and the centre of Regency Brighton, a beautifully tended and landscaped park with the Royal Pavilion and Pavilion Gardens lying slightly to the north and west. It’s a lovely spot in anyone’s book but looked especially attractive on this cold but sunny late winter’s day, with the promise of spring in the fresh sea air. However, I had no time for such a charming scene. I was seeking darkness, dankness and rank smells. I found them beneath a metal access hatch on the eastern side of the gardens.
Following reports in The Lancet on Brighton’s health crisis, it became apparent that Dr Brighton badly needed a dose of his own medicine. It came in the form of a plan to build an extensive network of sewers in order to separate humans from their effluent. This was an age of radical reappraisal of the causes of disease and the preventative role of good hygiene and sanitation. As discussed in the previous chapter, Florence Nightingale based her new regime of hospital care on lessons learned in the Crimean War. In Soho, central London, Dr John Snow traced the source of a cholera epidemic to a single public water pump in the mid-1850s. For this he is credited with being the ‘father’ of epidemiology, the study of the incidence, distribution and possible control of diseases.
In Brighton the cause of cholera and other disease outbreaks was incontrovertible. Between 1869 and 1874, the town council spent over £100,000 (the equivalent of more than £6.5 million today) constructing a vast network of sewers to serve Britain’s most popular seaside resort. The system included service and escape hatches at regular intervals and I was now hovering over one such hatch in Old Steine Gardens. I should point out, incidentally, that for my impending underground visit I had been togged out in a hard hat with head torch and gloves.
A steel ladder took me down into the bowels of Dr Brighton. It was unpleasant down there of course – humid, nasty and smelly, though the odour wasn’t nearly as bad as I had feared and I ceased to notice it after a while – but it was also magnificent in its own way, for this is a typically ambitious Victorian concept brilliantly realized by superb engineering work. Over five years of construction, millions of tons of earth were removed, not by mechanical diggers but by the sweat of labourers using picks and shovels. The resulting tunnels were braced with timbers and lined with an estimated 7 million bricks, every single one laid with skill and precision. The cross-section of the tunnels was egg-shaped rather than round, as the sewage was propelled not by pumps but by gravity and the shallow V-shape maximized the flow.
I squelched my way south (or possibly north) to a constant soundtrack of rushing water with my head torch sending light and shadows dancing along the walls. The dead roots of vegetation penetrated the vaulted brick roof. White salt crystals dusted the brick walls. The rush of water grew louder and deeper till it sounded as if the ocean itself were no further than an arm’s length away and I found myself in a large chamber – the place I had arranged to meet my next witness, Stuart Slark. He is an engineer with Southern Water, the water authority in charge of maintaining Brighton’s sewer network, and is intimately familiar with the labyrinth of tunnels.
We shook gloved hands and paused to consider our surroundings. As torchlight illuminated the brick roof, the chamber looked to be the size of an old railway station. ‘The Victorians always thought big and built large,’ said Stuart. ‘The tank we’re in now is an overflow chamber. On the right-hand side over there, where I’m shining my torch, on the other side of that wall is a foul sewer. If we have heavy rain it’ll come down that foul sewer and over that wall to where we’re standing now.’ These Victorian tunnels and chambers still provide the backbone of Brighton’s modern sewerage system, disposing of 22 million gallons of waste water on an average day. That figure rises to 90 million on a day of storms and heavy rain. When the foul sewers overflow, this chamber fills up in no time. If I were here when it happened, would I be able to escape? One thing is for certain, it would not be a pleasant way to go.
There are some 44 miles of sewage tunnels beneath Brighton that are either walkable or navigable by boat. ‘But there are so many arteries, veins and lead-offs, I don’t know how they ever managed to do it,’ said Stuart. It’s the precision of the engineering work that impresses him every time he comes down here: ‘This is the incredible thing.’
As he led me back through a twisting safety tunnel another thought struck me. I had only the vaguest idea of where we were in relation to Brighton’s street pattern, under which square or roundabout we may have been making our way. But suppose, for a moment, that we were directly underneath one of the town’s architectural showpieces, one of those seafront Regency terraces painted the colour of clotted cream, with capitals, architraves and other classical embellishments. As undeniably magnificent as they look, they are something of an illusion. The splendour of the façades often hides shoddy workmanship behind. This, in Graham Greene’s phrase, is ‘the shabby secret behind the bright corsage’ for many of Brighton’s Regency houses were built using a cheap and inferior material known as ‘bungaroush’, a mix of lime and flint and anything else that came to hand.
Bungaroush is notably porous and would never have done for Brighton’s sewers, which were built to last by skilled engineers and bricklayers using the finest materials. The truth is that the hidden city I was now exploring was constructed to higher standards than the one up top. When I climbed the steel ladder to emerge back in that world of sunlight and seagulls, it looked different, gaudy and complacent. But they are, of course, flip sides of the same coin. One would not exist without the other. In the space of thirty years in the mid-nineteenth century, railways, pleasure piers, grand hotels and, yes, sewers combined to usher in the golden age of the British seaside. It was, across the piece, a triumph of Victorian ingenuity.