Sewers and street lighting
More than 200 years after gas lighting was first introduced on London’s streets, in Pall Mall in 1807, 2000 gas lamps still provide flickering illumination in areas such as Mayfair and Covent Garden. The strangest of them has burned day and night for 100 years in a ravine-like street called Carting Lane next to the Savoy Hotel. In 1894, Joseph Edmund Webb patented his »sewer gas destructor lamp«. Its purpose was to burn methane. It is sometimes said that the lamp in Carting Lane uses the vapours generated in the toilets of the luxury hotel next to it, and that the street should therefore be renamed »Farting Lane«. It is true that a sewer, to which the Savoy is connected, runs down the lane to the Embankment, but since the 1950s the lantern has operated on normal gas.
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Address Carting Lane (WC2R 0DW) connects the Embankment and The Strand | Public Transport Embankment (Bakerloo, Circle, District, Northern Line) | Tip On Victoria Embankment at the end of Northumberland Avenue is a memorial to Joseph Bazalgette.
Webb’s invention was not intended to replace the gas produced from coal in a gasworks, but to have an additional safety benefit. During its operation with conventional gas, it drew explosive methane, which was a hazard to the public, out of the sewers and burned it along with the gas from the mains supply. The problem and Webb’s solution were consequences of the construction of sewers in London by the engineer Joseph Bazalgette. Following the »Great Stink« in summer 1858, when the stench from the Thames made it impossible for Parliament to sit, over 400 miles of sewers were built. The system drained into the river east of London. The project included the building of the Embankment road. Two of the original pumping stations still exist: Abbey Mills to the north and Crossness to the south of the Thames, the latter a superb industrial monument with impressive cast-iron architecture. The engine there is under steam on several days a year (www.crossness.org.uk). Bazalgette’s work put an end to the cholera epidemics that killed thousands of Londoners in the mid-19th century.
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