BBC Seven Wonders Of The Industrial World
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Ladies and Gentlemen step inside and see the marvel,
such enormity, such immensity, such unimaginable monstrosity.
There has never been anything like it in the whole of human history.
Behold, London, the world`s first megalopolis.
The biggest, the richest, the most densely populated city on the face of the earth.
The teaming streets Ladies and Gentlemen, the thralls he knew.
The population of London more than doubled in fifty years.
All are drawn in to this vast vortex.
London has more lrish than Dublin, more Catholics than Rome.
But this huge wave of humanity brought a crisis
that threatened to engulf the capital.
A torrent of human excrement clogged London`s arteries.
The foul air was not fit to breathe.
ln its wake had come a terrifying new disease and thousands were dying.
London stood on the brink of an abyss as the city drowned in its own sewage.
But one man believed he had the answer.
An unknown engineer with a vision of a subterranean world.
He would undertake the largest construction in England.
lt would become a life time struggle,
against a Victorian world blind to his vision for the first modern metropolis.
The name of that unknown engineer Joseph Bazalgette.
ln 1848 fear stalked the greatest city in the world.
An unknown unseen killer was moving through the metropolis.
This was the time of cholera, it was the worst outbreak of disease in the capital,
since the great plague.
The disease was also a mystery,
no one knew of a cure, no one understood the cause.
But there was a clue.
Cholera had struck as London`s sanitation system was collapsing.
When the city stank of human waste
people were starting to suspect there had to be a link.
The whole of the Thames is a fermenting sewer full of opaque brown fluid.
The foulness could scarcely be born.
Around the bridges the feculence rolls up in clouds
so thick the stench of excrement raids the city.
lt brings dysentery, typhoid and most deadly of all cholera.
We pride ourselves for our industry, our empire, our civilisation.
But without sanitation we are little more than beasts.
Trying to find an answer
to London`s crisis were the men of the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers.
Well meaning but ineffectual they argue, bicker, resign and regroup,
but agree on nothing, and nothing was done.
Then in August 1849 they made an unusually inspired decision.
The appointed a new assistant surveyor Joseph Bazalgette.
Where would you suggest.
His first task was to assess London`s old sewers.
These had been designed only to carry off surface water.
The sewage was dumped in a cesspit or carted away at night.
But with London doubling in size the old system could not cope.
And a new invention, the water closet, was making matters even worse.
The contents poured in to the old drains.
This created an unforeseen and utterly repulsive new problem.
The old drainage system grew around London`s rivers and streams.
As the city grew the water courses were covered,
this lies out the root of our present problem.
These culverts and conduits were intended to carry away rain water.
Not an unremitting deluge of detritus and sewage.
When there are heavy rains
these sewers are unable to store the increased volume of sewage,
which then rises back up the house drains and floods the basement.
The sewage backed up,
it seeped through the floor boards and the poor took the brunt of it.
ln desperation fifty four people wrote a letter to The Times.
Sir.
May we beg and beseech your protection and power.
We ask sir as it may be living in a wilderness so far
as the rest of London knows anything of us
as the rich and great people live in muck and filth.
The stench of a gully hole is disgusting.
We all of us suffer and many of us are ill.
We are looking like pigs and it `aint fair, we should be so ill treated.
The Sewer Commissioners in Soho Square take no notice
whatsoever about our complaint
The sewer commissioners in Soho Square did take notice,
but they simply had no idea what to do.
So they also turned to The Times and appealed to their readers for ideas.
Bazalgette had the unenviable task of sorting
through a hundred and thirty seven madcap replies.
Here is a proposal from the prominent newsagent Mr W H Smith.
He has the novel idea of carrying the sewage out of London on railway trains.
This proposes the construction of a tunnel beneath the Thames, lengthways.
Some l fear have proven to be the work of cranks and crackpots.
But l am not downhearted.
Bazalgette cut his teeth as an engineer in the heyday of railway expansion.
But his obsession had almost cost him his life.
lt`s only two years since his terrible illness.
His efforts on the railways made his so poorly
that we had to retire to the countryside for a year while he recovered.
Since the age of seventeen he`s been occupied with his engineering.
But he`s so little time for anything else.
He loves his children dearly, but he sees them so rarely.
l sometimes think there`s a more glamorous position than being in sewers
but he`s very dedicated.
Of all one hundred and thirty seven plans not one offers an affordable,
practical means of getting the sewage out of London.
Londoners are dying in their thousands yet still there is no agreement on a plan.
All the while the cholera was spreading.
Many suspected that the smell of sewage alone could strike a man dead.
They were convinced that the thick fog hanging over the city spread the disease.
They called it the miasma.
This was believed by Florence Nightingale and other leading health authorities,
amongst them Edwin Chadwick and William Farr.
The miasma is all about us, it rises from the breath of t millions of people.
From sewers and cess pools, graves and slaughter houses.
ln one season it carries cholera, in another scarletina,
influenza, measles, small pox.
For centuries it`s hovered over London like an angel of death.
lt is simple, all smell is disease.
Edwin Chadwick was so certain that the disease was caused by smell
that he committed a terrible error.
We are going to make sure
we remove this smell from London by flushing the sewers in to the river.
lf we can control the smell we will control the cholera.
What does that mean for ordinary people Mr Chadwick?
So Chadwick flushed out the old sewers.
Over night years of accumulated waste were washed
and scoured straight in to the Thames,
but it didn`t help, the death toll continued to rise.
The disease struck its victims with devastating speed.
The first symptom of cholera was acute diarrhoea.
Severe dehydration followed causing the liver to weaken.
The skin turned a greyish blue colour.
Death often occurred within forty eight hours of onset.
The graveyards started to overflow.
ln the East end there were riots because the poor could not even bury their dead.
Corpses often had to be kept for weeks.
Families ate and slept next to their dead.
The bodies surrounded by onions to hide the smell.
We`re living in an age where child mortality is commonplace.
But why should it be so?
My mother lost four children, two of my sisters and two baby brothers.
Her grief at times is almost too much to bear.
Now l fear for my own children.
Cholera is ruthless and random.
There are children dying needlessly throughout this great city.
Cleansing London is the most pressing concern of the day yet
still parliament will grant us neither the money
nor the power to accomplish the job.
Before the epidemic ended in the winter of 1849
more than fourteen thousand Londoners had died.
And still no one understood the disease.
No one knew what caused it or how to stop it spreading should it return.
What is cholera?
ls it a fungus, an insect, a miasma, an electrical disturbance,
a deficiency of ozone, a morbid off-scouring of the intestinal canal?
We know nothing.
We are at sea in a whirlpool of conjecture.
Cholera had defeated the finest minds of Victorian medicine.
But in Soho one doctor was gathering
evidence for a new theory on the cause of the disease.
John Snow, pioneer in the fields of anaesthetics and epidemiology,
a man ahead of his time.
A drunkard.
Snow was the first to doubt the miasma theory.
The proliferation of disease is generally ascribed to noxious exhalation.
But how can that be when its distribution is so uneven?
During the recent epidemic
the dwellings on this side of the street suffered fearful devastation,
whereas on the dwellings on the other side there was but one fatal case.
Yet their occupants breathe the same air.
Surely if cholera was caused by miasma both sides would be equally affected.
ls that not curious?
working just one street apart Snow and Bazalgette would spend years grappling
with the same problem from two different points of view.
Yet ironically they never met.
Then in 1853 the disease returned.
The mortality in this limited area probably equals any in the country.
More people have died here in the past few weeks than during the plague.
From the start of a new outbreak Snow
had been meticulously plotting the spread of the disease.
The distribution is remarkable.
Houses marked in black have suffered cholera deaths.
The outbreak is concentrated here in Broad Street, in the vicinity of a pump,
which enjoys a high reputation for the taste and purity of its water.
There are eleven other pumps in the district,
yet around those there is virtually no cholera.
An army officer from St John`s old dined in Soho,
drank water from the pump and was dead within hours.
The coffee shop owner supplied her customers
with the same water at dinner time, nine died the next day.
The Percussion cap factory in Broad street supplies its workers with the pump water.
So far eighteen of them are dead.
Yet the brewery,
almost next door where the workers drink only beer has suffered no deaths at all.
But most convincing of all is the case of a widow and her niece
who hailed from Hampstead a high and healthy part of the city.
When both ladies succumbed to cholera at the beginning of the outbreak
l was at a loss to explain why.
Until l interviewed the widow`s son who informed me
that his mother once lived in Soho
where she developed such a taste for the Broad Street water
that she had a bottle sent up every day by carrier`s cart.
Both ladies drank the bottle on Thursday and were dead by Saturday.
Ergo, cholera can not be caused by miasma, atmospheric effluvia or bad air.
This proves without a doubt that it is spread in the water supply.
Cholera is a waterborne disease.
But Snow`s theory that cholera was spread by drinking was too radical for some.
So when he presented it to health officials they dismissed it out of hand.
Among the doubters was William Farr,
serving on the committee for scientific enquiry in to cholera.
We`re all familiar with Dr Snow`s revelations,
but we are reluctant to accept his suggestion
that the outbreak in Soho was due to the contamination of a particular well.
lf the Broad Street pump was the source of the disease
then it was not due to its contamination with noxious excrement,
but simply to the fact of its impure waters participating
with the atmospheric infection of the district.
As we all know cholera is caused by noxious exhalations.
Despite these official objections Snow still succeeded
in getting the Broad Street pump handle removed.
Within days the disease began to disappear from the area.
Even so the authorities still insisted that the cause of cholera was miasma.
Then at last things began to change.
ln 1856 Bazalgette became Chief Engineer of a powerful new body,
the Metropolitan Board of works.
Devising a new sewer system was now down to him.
He had spent years assimilating and analysing the problem,
studying other people`s ideas.
The scheme he was developing was based on a beautifully simple principal.
Gravity.
London is built on the slopes of a valley.
lf we can intercept the existing sewers
before they debouch their contents in to the river
we can follow the lines of the Thames Valley
and use the force of gravity to carry the sewage away from the Metropolis.
ln Bazalgette`s plans the old drains
would no longer feed their filth in to the river in London.
lnstead he would build new sewers to carry the effluent out
in to the Thames estuary to be discharged and washed safely out to sea.
First he had to calculate the gradient of the fall and the speed of the flow.
Too fast and the sewers would wear away, too slow and the sewage would stop moving.
My calculations show
that an average velocity of one and a half miles an hour will be sufficient.
This will require a minimum fall of two feet in every mile.
To maintain the gradient so that the sewage could be taken far outside
London meant dropping the drains well below the level of the river.
But that could create a new problem.
Thousands of tonnes of sewage would then have to be pumped
back up to ground level for it to be discharged in to the river.
No one had invented an engine capable of pumping such huge volumes.
The engines would pump the sewage up in to giant reservoirs.
This would permit his masterstroke,
a controlled release of sewage in to the river.
Just after high water on the outgoing tide it is then
that we shall be able to release exactly the right quantities of sewage,
at exactly the right time.
Crucial to the whole venture
was the siteing of the outfalls in to the Thames estuary.
Each yard further meant longer sewers, extra pumping and more cost.
So Bazalgette had to choose locations just outside London.
From there the tide would wash the sewage out to sea.
Everything depended on his calculations of the exact ebb and flow.
Mr Bazalgette is investigating the tidal flow of the Thames,
in order to er, discover the best position for the outflow pipe.
lf our, calculations are correct the sewage
can be let out far enough down stream for the tide to take it out to sea.
Of course if the tide comes in as well as out,
so if our calculations are wrong everything up,
well as little as a hundred yards,
the er flow of the river will take the sewage back in to London.
Bazalgette faced a tricky dilemma,
the government insisted the outfall should be further down river
so that the sewage couldn`t flow back towards London.
But this would take longer to build and cost far more.
With the sewers funded by public money
Bazalgette was under pressure to keep costs down.
lf we can discharge as the tide starts to ebb the sewage will be carried
between twelve and sixteen miles towards the sea diluting all the time.
That`s why we`re here observing these floats.
lf l get my time incorrect we can discharge a further twelve miles upstream
and let the tide do the rest.
And twelve miles less sewer will save many thousands of pounds.
On February 18th, 1856,
convinced that he had satisfied all the government`s requirements
Bazalgette began drawing up the plans.
l propose to construct three great main sewers running north of the river.
A high level sewer
that begins in Hampstead and follows the waters of the fleet.
A middle level sewer
that runs from Nottinghill and passes under Oxford Street.
And a low level sewer following the line of the river from Chelsea.
Three similar sewers will run to the south of the river.
These will be interceptory sewers to catch
and carry away the unceasing flow of water,
refuse and plus the length of these new sewers will be almost one hundred miles.
They will require three hundred and eighteen million bricks
and the excavation of three and a half million tonnes of earth.
The interceptory sewers will be like great boulevards
eleven feet high running beneath the city.
For the tunnels to be robust enough to withstand
the entire weight of London bearing down upon them l have chosen the oval,
the strongest possible shape.
This will also ensure that even when the water level falls the stream will continue
to flow so the sewers will be self cleaning.
When the new sewer system is in operation half a million gallons of water
and waste will pass beneath this great city every single day.
And if it`s all working as it should no one will even think about it.
Now all we have to do is build.
Three cheers for Mr Bazalgette.
Hip, hip.
Bazalgette believed his scheme would save time, money and lives.
His plan even surpassed the government`s specification,
but the politicians were not convinced.
Mr Bazalgette`s scheme does have many merits.
But we do not believe his plans will guarantee
to carry the sewage beyond the metropolis.
Therefore as chief commissioner l regret that l must reject them.
Joseph has done practically nothing else for the last seven years.
Even he`s lost count of the number of times he`s had to redraft the plans.
Months of surveying and estimating and tendering.
And now he has to begin again.
work on the long awaiting new sewer system was postponed and postponed and postponed.
Bazalgette and his team went from heroes to laughing stocks.
The builder says you were considerably snubbed by the Chief Commissioner.
The London lllustrated News.
ln sullen pistol like compliance with the government`s desire
Mr Bazalgette has a fraction at a time amended his plans for Thames purification.
Though in this respect his latest effort is still a half measure.
lt will however ensure the destruction of the river born fish trade,
ruin the waterside towns
and waste upon the unthankful flood the fertilising matter.
We were reading yet another newspaper
which was condemning him for his lack of ability
for getting this project off the ground.
And l just couldn`t believe it yet again they`re criticising him for,
for what he`s trying to do which is just a good thing.
And they n`t let him get on and do it.
The Times sir?
Why is it called the Board of works
when Mr Bazalgette had neither the money nor the power to carry out the works.
Bazalgette and his team redrew the plans five times to try
and satisfy the government.
And five times the plans were rejected.
All the while the sewage was piling up.
A great stink enveloped London.
As summer temperatures soared the stench became unbearable.
Fearing that cholera would return all but a few MPs fled from the capital.
This lime solution is designed to stop the smell that comes off the river
which is due to all the sewerage
but er l think that the lime solution is a lot worse than the stuff
that`s supposed to be coming in.
The air now in parliament is poison.
The air is contaminated.
The steward of the Houses of Parliament has said
that he can no longer be responsible for the welfare and health of the house.
Even though there was no cholera outbreak
that summer of 1858 the smell was worse than ever.
The Great Stink had forced parliament`s hand.
Bowing to public pressure the honourable members finally passed a bill
that gave Bazalgette the go ahead.
After seven years of planning, endless setbacks, rejections and disappointments,
they gave him three million pounds, and told him to start immediately.
The main drainage of London are the interception of sewage
from the River Thames has finally commenced.
The spade, the shovel and the pick have taken the place of pen, ink and debate.
The task facing Bazalgette is truly immense.
Three hundred and eighteen million bricks were needed
to build eleven hundred miles of sewer
to carry away over thirty one billion gallons of sewage a year.
This will form part of the high level sewer, draining down from Hampstead.
What you see before you is a small section that will become a five mile trench.
The cheapest way to do it was the cut and cover method.
Dig the trench, build the sewer, and fill the earth back in on top.
There`s over twenty thousand of us on the picks and shovels alone.
Most of the work will be done this way.
Cut and cover in the trenches.
Once we get any deeper than this then it will be down to the miners.
Poor sods.
The mining part of the operation was immensely dangerous.
But first the only thing to keep the men
from being buried alive were timber supports.
Once finished the whole system relied on the strength of the bricks.
And above all the cement that held them together.
Bazalgette`s plan meant creating a honey comb of tunnels under London.
Any weakness and the City would collapse on top of them.
The choice of cement was critical,
and Bazalgette opted for an untested new material Portland cement.
l am aware that my distinguished colleagues
Mr Brunel and Mr Stevenson have doubts about this.
And yes, it is considerably more expensive.
But this cement is perfect for the job.
lt hardens on contact with water.
lt will last for many, many years.
l am building not merely for this generation, but for generations to come.
Bazalgette`s entire reputation depended on this choice.
lt`s a problem,
the slightest change in the mixture and the strength is significantly reduced.
lf he got it wrong it would mean disaster.
Despite doubts Bazalgette remained committed to the Portland Cement.
But to minimise risk he introduced a rigorous system of testing,
effectively inventing modern quality control.
l had to fetch a sample from every batch before we could even touch it.
Over a hundred miles a time.
The sewer workers were right in the line of fire
from the Royal Artilleries practice range.
lnstructions have been forwarded to artillery practice in olwich,
to the effect that no more firing
in the direction of the drainage works is to take place for the present.
Despite these problems initial progress was good.
The northern high level is now completed
from Hampstead to Old Ford, length eight miles.
The middle level sewer is progressing well causing
but little impediment
as it traverses major thoroughfares such as Piccadilly in Oxford Street.
But within a year work had come to a standstill,
and each delay to its toll on Bazalgette.
lt`s taken seven years to get the work underway.
Now as soon as it begins the bricklayers withdraw their labour.
lt`s enough to try the patience of any man.
The bricklayers demanded a rise from five to six shillings a day.
Bazalgette had to give in.
There was no shortage of work for skilled labour in London.
Then as Bazalgette`s underground world started to take shape the accidents began.
A gas main was fractured by navies
digging the northern middle level sewer in Shoreditch, East London.
The gas exploded killing a passer-by.
Clerkenwell, work on the first underground railway
ran right next to the course of the Fleet sewer.
The railway workers had dug too close to the sewer wall.
The sewer burst, the railway flooded, and Bazalgette was blamed.
And then in South London.
A fatal accident happened yesterday at the main drainage works at Deptford.
At seven o`clock in the morning
a great mass of earth and timber fell upon the men working in a deep cutting.
Six men were missing, buried alive.
Following hours of frantic digging
the rescue team managed to bring out three survivors.
After more desperate efforts they reached another man, but he was dead.
The men even resorted to digging with their hands,
but again by the time they reached the next man Bray, he too was dead.
After fifteen hours digging another miner was still unaccounted for.
Dear Mrs Bray,
lt is with deepest regret that l, please accept my sincerest sympathies.
Bazalgette felt each loss deeply.
Compared with other engineers of the time he had the highest of safety standards.
Less than ten fatalities are recorded throughout the construction of the sewers.
Yet the still vilified him.
The Times was scathing.
The Mercury led with the uselessness of the Board of works.
So Bazalgette decided to win over the press.
He invited reporters to witness the joining of t sections of tunnel at olwich.
His reputation was on the line.
Welcome gentlemen, l trust you find the surroundings not too uncomfortable?
No, not at all.
You are now standing in the southern outfall sewer.
Connecting Greenwich to the Erith marshes, a distance of more than seven miles.
l have invited you out here today
to witness two sections of the tunnel being joined together.
Edward would you like to proceed?
Sir.
The risk Bazalgette was taking was huge.
His calculations may have been meticulous but there was no guarantee
that those running the project day to day were so precise.
No one could be sure the two tunnels would actually meet.
We should see some signs any moment now, almost there.
lf they didn`t he knew the newspapers would crucify him.
There, we`re through.
So accurate were the designs that when the different bodies of men met
there was not a deviation of a quarter inch in their projection.
To Mr Bazalgette no tribute or praise can be undeserved.
Once the olwich tunnel is completed
all South London`s sewage could start flowing
to the pumping station at Crossness.
This was always Bazalgette`s first choice for the outflow.
The government had fought him all the way delaying the scheme for years.
But now the politicians came to applaud his engineering marvel,
and in particular the biggest pumps ever made.
Well the James Watt company has designed
and built these four magnificent steam engines.
The largest of their kind in the world.
The engines will have to pump the sewage
twenty one feet up in to holding reservoirs.
Where the sewage can be held until the tide turns.
His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales,
will be turning them on for the first time, literally.
ln our haste to be ready for today
we haven`t been able to conduct all the tests that we would have liked.
There`s always the chance that it might not work.
Your Royal Highness, distinguished guests, Ladies and Gentlemen.
On behalf of the Board of works l wish to thank you all for coming here today.
A few years ago stench and pestilence were ubiquitous in our great city.
And terrible epidemics of the cholera claimed
the lives of many thousands of our fellow citizens.
Although differences continue to exist as to the causes of disease,
it is clear that our new drainage system is already
affecting a dramatic improvement in health across the metropolis.
l now ask his Royal Highness to switch on the engines.
l hope this country is as proud of him as l am.
l just can`t believe this day has actually arrived
after all these years of planning and politics and worrying.
But l never doubted he would triumph.
lt`s absolutely magnificent.
l think my wife will agree with me, l genuinely care,
don`t care for um much um hyperbole
when it comes to these things but er it`s been rather marvellous hasn`t it?
The celebrations were premature.
The new system may have been functioning in most of London
but it wasn`t yet in the East end.
Less than three months after the grand opening of Crossness the cholera returned.
Once again health officials had to resort to desperate measures.
The possessions of victims were fumigated
with sulphur in a vain attempt to stop the disease spreading.
But once again William Farr had the grim task of registering the deaths.
And there was a puzzle.
With the sewers almost complete the worst of the smell had gone.
So why had the cholera come back?
This reservoir provides drinking water to the East end.
l`m assured by the East London water company
that the river that feeds it has been filtered to cleanse it thoroughly.
Yet earlier today l saw something very strange.
That strange thing could be the vital clue
that eventually led Farr to unmask the true course of cholera.
The Russell family`s water supply in Poplar had suddenly stopped.
After five days without water Mr Russell unscrewed the tap
and found an eel fourteen inches in length.
lt was in a putrid state and the stench arising from it was most fearful.
Since then two of his children and his wife have been taken ill.
Eels caught in this reservoir today.
lf there are eels in the reservoir it can not be filtered.
Therefore sewage is getting in to the water supply spreading the disease.
And not through the air, through miasma like l had thought before.
Everything l have ever done for public health has been based on a falsehood.
A public enquiry revealed that the East London Water Company
had been supplying unfiltered water polluted by sewage.
No one had doubted the connection between cholera and sewage
but only Dr John Snow had understood exactly how they were connected.
Like many others l have always believed in the miasma theory,
that disease was carried by smell.
Now l`ve realised that l was wrong, that Dr Snow was correct.
Cholera is waterborne.
And yet since the sewers were built the cholera has died out
and everywhere public health has improved.
l thought the sewers were helping because they removed the stench,
the pestilence and therefore the, the disease.
That was our priority.
Purification of the water was always secondary.
Yet that is what has made a difference to my fellow citizens.
This then is the supreme irony of Bazalgette`s story.
He had built his sewers when almost everyone believed the miasma theory,
his aim simply to take away the smell.
But by also removing the sewage he had accidentally ensured
that future generations of Londoners would be safe from the deadly disease.
He had saved the city.
lf the malignant spirits whom we moderns call cholera, typhus and smallpox,
which are set out in quest of the man
who has been their deadliest foe in all London,
they would make their way to the home of Joseph Bazalgette.
The accuracy of John Snow`s observations was fully vindicated.
Cholera is a waterborne disease.
But tragically he never lived to see his theory accepted.
By the time he was proved right John Snow had been dead for eight years.
The effectiveness of Bazalgette`s great work was proven for all
when on July 26th 1867.
That night the equivalent of two months average rainfall fell upon London.
Bazalgette`s sewers coped with every last drop.
The final section of the sewer system was the Thames Embankment,
a mammoth engineering project in its own right.
lt houses both the northern low level sewer
and the metropolitan underground railway.
And in time the embankments would help to create a faster flowing clean river.
And if it was working as it should no one would even think, no one would even think.
When he`d finished
with the sewers Bazalgette turned his attention to London itself.
His bridges span the river at Putney, Battersea and Hammersmith.
He replaced narrow streets with broad boulevards.
He laid out parks right across the metropolis.
As much as any man Joseph Bazalgette made modern London.
As for cholera it never returned after Bazalgette`s sewers were completed.
We can only guess at how many lives he saved.
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