The Great Stink of London (eBook)

Introduction: who was Joseph Bazalgette?

In 1997 the Highways Agency announced that Hammersmith flyover, at the London end of the M4 motorway, would be closed for urgent repairs. Thirty years of traffic had worn out some of its concrete supports and the closure was likely to be for a long period. At the same time it was announced that the nearby Hammersmith suspension bridge, reopened in 1887 after it had been strengthened to convey horses, carts and pedestrians across the Thames, long before the days of heavy goods vehicles, would also have to be closed for repairs. The Victorian engineer’s design had lasted almost four times as long as had that of his twentieth-century successor, bearing traffic whose weight and volume he could not possibly have imagined. In the same year, 1997, Thames Water PLC started to commission a huge incinerator at the company’s Barking sewage treatment works, the largest in Europe. The treatment works was built by the same engineer who designed Hammersmith bridge. The new incinerator would, in 1998, finally replace the sewage treatment system bequeathed to London County Council when that engineer retired over a century before, in 1889.

To find a monument to this distinguished Victorian you will have to make a thorough search of the Victoria Embankment, another of his great works, which runs beside the Thames between Westminster Bridge and Blackfriars. The monument lies in a hidden corner beneath the railway bridge at Charing Cross, at the foot of Northumberland Avenue, which the same engineer created after a long dispute with the Duke of Northumberland whose London home was demolished to make way for it. The engineer was Sir Joseph Bazalgette (1819–91), Chief Engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works which was London’s first Metropolitan government between 1856 and 1889, when it was replaced by the London County Council. Bazalgette’s monument is to be found in the Embankment wall and takes the form of a bust unveiled in 1901 showing a bewhiskered figure, framed in a circle. Underneath is the Latin text Flumini Vincula Posuit (‘He placed chains on the river’).

The inscription and the circle in which the monument is framed modestly represent the achievement for which his fellow citizens were most grateful. The circle symbolises the sewers which he designed and built and which lie beneath the feet of the few who stop to look at the monument and wonder who Bazalgette was. The Victoria, Albert and Chelsea Embankments, on each side of the river, were built to house a small part of the system of intercepting sewers which he designed to prevent London’s sewage from running into and polluting the Thames: hence the Latin reference on his monument to ‘the chain on the river’. His numerous other responsibilities included over twelve million pounds worth of London street improvements, of which the best known are Garrick Street, Queen Victoria Street, Northumberland Avenue, Shaftesbury Avenue, Southwark Street and Charing Cross Road. Twelve bridges across the Thames were acquired and freed from tolls; all were strengthened under Bazalgette’s supervision and three were rebuilt to his designs: Putney, Hammersmith and Battersea. He instituted the Woolwich Free Ferry and in October 1878 he persuaded the Metropolitan Board to experiment with electric lighting on the Victoria Embankment. He even submitted a design for Tower Bridge, though not the one that was chosen.2 In addition to his responsibilities for London Bazalgette found time to design or advise on sanitation systems for numerous other British cities as well as for foreign and colonial communities including Budapest and Port Louis, Mauritius.

In his book The Living Thames: the Restoration of a Great Tidal River, the author John Doxat described Bazalgette in these terms: ‘Though perhaps less remembered than his contemporary, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, this superb and far sighted engineer probably did more good, and saved more lives, than any single Victorian public official.’3 That Bazalgette is less well remembered than Brunel, his friend and colleague, is uncontroversial. Brunel is perhaps the most celebrated of all engineers, the subject of many biographies, his name associated with railways, bridges, tunnels, stations, steamships and numerous other achievements of the early Victorian period. Brunel’s statue is a prominent feature of Paddington Station, the London terminus of the Great Western Railway which he designed, and he even has a university named after him. Paradoxically, a further statue of Brunel is a prominent feature of the Victoria Embankment, close to Somerset House. The Embankment was designed and built by Joseph Bazalgette, yet Bazalgette’s own monument nearby is easily overlooked. A more recent historian of London has also noted Bazalgette’s contribution to its fabric in appreciative terms. In writing of Wren’s work in the reconstruction of London after the fire of 1666 Roy Porter writes that ‘thanks to Wren the reborn City was left more attractive. Alongside Nash and Bazalgette, he stands as one of London’s noblest builders.’4 Brunel and Wren are celebrated. By contrast, no biography of Bazalgette has ever been written though the infrastructure that he built for London has long outlived Brunel’s broad-gauge railway, and the streets, bridges and embankments that he designed for the capital are certainly of the same magnitude as Wren’s works.

Although he is now sometimes forgotten, Bazalgette was celebrated in his lifetime. While the system of intercepting sewers was being constructed he was a major public figure and there are numerous references to him and his work in The Times, the Illustrated London News, The Builder and other contemporary publications. Another indication of his stature may be gained by examining biographical dictionaries of the period. From 1865 until his death in 1891 Bazalgette has a regular entry in George Routledge’s Men of the Time. The entry ranges in length from about one to one-and-a-half columns. This is comparable with the entries for Matthew Arnold and Cardinals Manning and Newman, rather longer than that of W.S. Gilbert and a little shorter than the entries for Florence Nightingale and Charles Babbage. The entry for Charles Dickens ran to three columns while Gladstone, at the height of his power, qualified for seven.

Bazalgette’s contemporaries might well have agreed with Doxat’s flattering assessment that he ‘saved more lives than any single Victorian public official’. In August 1890, less than a year before his death in March 1891, Bazalgette was interviewed at his home in Wimbledon for Cassell’s Saturday Journal, one of a series of sketches of ‘Representative Men at Home’. The writer of the profile began his article by referring to the fact that the construction of London’s system of main intercepting sewers had ended the scourges of cholera, typhoid and other water-borne diseases which had carried off tens of thousands of citizens during the terrible epidemics of the mid-nineteenth century. The opening sentence of the article reads: ‘If the malignant spirits whom we moderns call cholera, typhus and smallpox, were one day to set out in quest of the man who had been, within the past thirty or forty years their deadliest foe in all London, they would probably make their way to St Mary’s, Wimbledon.’5 In the same interview, Bazalgette himself described the problem which his employers, the Metropolitan Board of Works, had been called upon to solve forty years earlier:

Bazalgette’s death was widely reported both in the national press and in engineering publications. The Illustrated London News in March 1891 began its obituary notice: