London Under (9 page)

Building techniques: a view from Wick Lane in Bow, 1860s
(illustration credit Ill.16)

Bazalgette’s Thames Embankment, 1867
(illustration credit Ill.17)

In the spring of 1861, the
Observer
described Bazalgette’s enterprise as “the most extensive and wonderful work of modern times.” It was compared to the seven wonders of the ancient world. It encompassed 82 miles of main sewers, and over 1,000 miles of smaller sewers. It utilised 318 million bricks and 880,000 cubic yards of concrete. This is the system that, with improvements and extensions, is still in use. The brick, known as Staffordshire Blue, is intact within its bed of Portland cement. Bazalgette also realised that the flow of the river would be much increased if it were more narrowly embanked;
so the Albert and
Victoria Embankments were created. With Nash and Wren, Bazalgette enters the pantheon of London heroes.

It has been said that
sewers exercise a curious fascination upon otherwise healthy and happy people. Many have undertaken the journey into Bazalgette’s sewers in the role of tourists seeking sensations. They must be prepared for the descent, however, with the ritual of changing clothes; they wear waders that come up to the waist, woollen socks that reach the thigh, and white protective paper coveralls. A hard hat and a miner’s lamp are also part of the equipment. They listen in silence to a recitation of rules and regulations. Their progress is equivalent to the journeys of classical mythology, where a living person travelled downwards into the realm of the dead before returning to the upper world with the tale of his or her descent. They are entering what is in a literal sense the wasteland.

A recent traveller went beneath Piccadilly in 1960 where “down below it was like crossing the Styx. The fog had followed us down from the streets and swirled above the discoloured and strongly smelling river like the stream of Hades.” Another traveller described the
Fleet sewer when seen fitfully by the light of the lanterns as “one of the prisons designed by Piranesi.” That is one of the fears of walking under the ground; you may be trapped and imprisoned by the weight of the darkness. Sewers might induce fear and even hysteria.

The reports of the world beneath are written in a generally breathless tone, compounded of fear and awe. The underground chambers are compared to cathedrals, complete with pillars and buttresses, arches and
crypts. One visitor, discovering an archway through which a cataract tumbled, remarked that it was as fantastic a scene as “a dream of a subterranean monastery.” The travellers walk along tunnels that may reach a height of 17 feet, the cool tainted water lapping at about knee-height around their waders. Many are disconcerted by the pull of the water, and feel disoriented; they lose their equilibrium. They feel the sediment beneath their feet, as if they were walking on a beach at low tide. Great iron doors loom up at intervals, acting as valves. The noise of roaring water, somewhere in the distance, can generally be heard. It is the sound of cataracts and waterfalls. Yet the sounds of the outer world—the general roar and tumult of London—can also clearly be heard from the ventilator gratings in the roads above.

The travellers journey through great brick vaults where the various sewers join together. If they are unfortunate they might pass great deposits of fat fastened to the sides of the tunnels, some of them 30 or 40 inches thick; they have accrued from the ingestion of deposits of “fast food.”
Rats can occasionally be seen. They were more plentiful in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in what were known as blood sewers; these were the sewers under slaughter-houses and meat-markets.

The smell is sometimes offensive but often simply musty, with the odours of damp and stone; the atmosphere is close and clammy. A mist may hover over the turbid liquid. The vistas of brick in these curiously egg-shaped tunnels stretch ever onward. It would be easy to get lost. It would be easy to remain concealed. Some of the sewers have not been visited in the last fifteen years.

One nineteenth-century traveller reported that he saw, in an old sewer under
Blackfriars Bridge, “a cluster of mushrooms on the roof that were almost as large as ordinary soup-tureens.” On 28 July 1840, the first visitor to the newly bricked
Fleet sewer descended at Fleet Bridge. “I suspended my argand lamp on the breakwater of the sewer, and with my lanthorn light we proceeded towards the Thames.” It might be a narrative from the swamps of Borneo rather than the City of London. The sewer turned and twisted when suddenly, at a quarter to midday, they realised that the tide had come in to a depth of 2½ feet. He and his companions were in fear for their lives and “holding our Lamps aloft, dashed up the Sewer, which we had to get up one half before out of danger. The air was close, and made us faint. However we got safe to Holborn Bridge.…”

In
A Traveller’s Life
Eric Newby reflected on a journey within the
Tyburn sewer in the early 1960s. He was told to be alert to the presence of acetylene, petrol, carbon dioxide and hydrogen cyanide with “a nice smell of almonds, the faintest suspicion of which sent any gang
of sewermen” straight back to the surface at a very fast pace. Yet what caught his nostrils was the odour of coal gas, from leaking pipes, mixed with the unmistakable smell of untreated sewage. He noticed in the course of his journey families of
rats nestling in broken brickwork. They were known to the sewer-men of the time as “bunnies.” Newby was then taken into the Fleet sewer, where he was confronted by a warm and steamy darkness “rather like a Turkish bath with something wrong with it.”

A visionary work of modern times, in the spirit of Bazalgette, is now being undertaken. The
Thames Tideway Tunnel will run from
Chiswick in West London to
Beckton in East London, a distance of some 20 miles. It will carry away the sewage and excess waste that accumulates after heavy rain, catching it before it reaches the river. It is being built 200 feet beneath the surface, following the sinuous course of the river, and must rank as one of the largest engineering projects of recent times. It is hoped to be completed by 2020. Yet, as in all matters of the underworld, it is not widely known or discussed.

Two other tunnels of water pass beneath London. A canal runs for three-quarters of a mile underneath the streets of Islington, snaking below Muriel Street, Barns-bury Road, Tolpuddle Street and Upper Street before coming out beside Noel Road. The second tunnel under London, the
Maida Hill tunnel, runs under Edgware
Road and proceeds beneath
Aberdeen Place for 370 yards. The work on the tunnel was done by candlelight, and was constantly bedevilled by the discovery of underground
springs; the excavated earth was taken to “Mr. Lord’s field,” that later became
Lord’s Cricket Ground.

The Islington tunnel was opened in 1820, and the first boats were propelled by “legging,” whereby men lay on planks and guided their craft with their feet and legs against the sides of the tunnel; they were replaced in 1826 by a steam tug that hauled the vessels through by means of a strong chain. There was a saying of the time, “nearly gassed but nearly through.” A journalist recorded that this transport:

The tunnel was renovated in 2000, and is now of course the avenue of boats with engine power. The experience of the journey, however, is the same. The voyage takes approximately twenty minutes during which the voyager, on a barge or a small boat, has the uncanny sensation
of sailing beneath the city. It is possible to see a small circular light at the other end of the tunnel but then the darkness descends, described by one traveller as “thick” and “sooty.” The tunnel has its own weather. A pilot in the days of the steam tug remarked that “when it’s foggy outside it’s clear in the tunnel. It’s a very queer tunnel.” The wind, in winter, blows very hard.

Ready to start “legging” in the Islington canal, 1930
(illustration credit Ill.18)

The sewers of London are now dangerous rather than deadly. The sewer-men work in teams under the command of a “ganger.” They have their own patois, a kind of underground language, by which they identify
themselves and their colleagues in the often treacherous conditions. They are at risk from
Weil’s disease, spread by
rats, and from dizziness caused by working in the dark. They must also court the risk of explosion from the aggregation of gas or of drowning in a sudden storm of water. An hour’s thunderstorm may precipitate an inch of rain, which is equivalent to 100 tons of water per acre. The first sign of calamity is a fierce wind that blows through the tunnels. This is followed by the deluge rushing down into the storm-relief sewers, with a force strong enough to carry away anything in its path. Sewers can never wholly be trusted.

Opening a sewer by night, 1841
(illustration credit Ill.19)