We live in a world where money is tight, where public projects take years to get off the ground, and when they do eventually start, will commonly run over on time and budget. When we see how short-lived the benefits are we will ask ourselves if the disruption was worth it. Cones seem to close down road lanes for months on end, all with no one working, and once removed barely any time seems to pass before the potholes re-emerge. The benefits of civil engineering projects aren’t always ephemeral, and when they last serve lifetimes they should get even more attention.
In 1858 the brand new Houses of Parliament opened in London, the River Thames was a running sewer, the city had been battling a series of cholera outbreaks for nearly 30 years, and the Great Stink, as it was known, was so bad the residents hung sheets dipped in disinfectant (chloride of lime) to suppress the smell. Moreover, many still equated the smell with the spread of cholera.
Just a few years earlier Dr John Snow deduced contaminated water the the problem, after seeing 70 brewery workers, who were only drinking beer, survive an outbreak. We now now the disease was being spread through infected faecal matter, i.e. the River Thames, which was the primary source of drinking water, but that wasn’t a widely held view at the time. When the Great Stink arrived, ironically without a major cholera outbreak, and even more ironically in the same year Dr John Snow died, it all became too much.
The Thames had not always been a sewer, but through the 19th century a massively swelling London population, the accumulation of a series of changes in the way people managed their personal waste, and even the recent introduction of the flushing toilet, had led to the river becoming everyone’s dumping ground. When the exceptionally warm June of 1858 arrived, along with a stench that was just too much for the people who lived and worked there, something had to be done. Enter Joseph Bazalgette.
Bazalgette had already spent years drawing up plans for a sanitation system, only to see submission after submission go nowhere. Now he had his chance. He oversaw the construction of a monumental sewage system: 165 miles of old sewers were replaced, 1,100 miles of new sewers were constructed, four major pumping stations were constructed. He oversaw the construction of giant Victorian steam engines, which swallowed vast quantities of coal as they worked to raise the sewage up from the depths so it could be disposed. The scale of the project was immense, but there are two things in particular that stand out for me.
The first is the lime mortar traditionally used to hold brickwork together was not going to last long in brick tunnels carrying sewage water. Bazalgette not only opted for the use of water-resistant Portland cement, he instituted a quality control system to ensure the mix was correct, and oversaw much of these quality checks personally.
The second thing that stands out was Bazalgette’s vision. He didn’t just fix the immediate problem – as we commonly see today when, for example, a local council will fix a broken paving slab without setting the foundation, meaning it’s not long before the slab breaks again, tripping some poor unsuspecting soul. Bazalgette stood back, and built in room for growth, a LOT of growth. He considered the greatest demand the system might face from the population at that time, he looked into the future and asked himself what the London of the future would need – he doubled the sewer diameter. Some of his work was still in use over 100 years later.
Bazalgette also played major roles in Albert Bridge, Putney Bridge, Hammersmith Bridge, Victoria Embankment, Chelsea Embankment, and Victoria Embankment. The three embankments hid the sewage systems, reclaimed acres of land from the Thames, wiped out the tidal mud flats, allowed people to walk and travel safely along the banks of a now clean river, with the option spend time in the new gardens that were built to accompany them. He quite literally transformed the face of London. As a bonus he also saved lives, with a near eradication of cholera, and a massive decrease in typhus and typhoid. The smell was gone too.
Thank you Jospeh Bazalgette! I reserve the term ‘hero’ for those close to me, those I know and love. Too often we assign hero status to celebrities who subsequently fall from grace, or to people whose lives we don’t know wholly. So let me instead describe Bazalgette not as a hero, but as an inspiration, for his persistence, his determination, his work ethic, for his attention to quality, and for his foresight in assessing what will serve people well beyond even several of his own lifetimes.
