Solving the 'Great Stink'

Discover how the Great Stink of London led to the creation of today's modern sewerage system

A pipe with a 1 meter (3 foot) diameter is lowered into place in a new main sewer at Nunhead in London, completed in 1889. Photo courtesy of Thames Water Utilities Limited

“Miles of close wells and pits of houses, where the inhabitants gasped for air, stretched far away towards every point of the compass, through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of a fine fresh river.” Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, 1857

For many years, London, which in 1801 had a population approaching 1 million, had struggled with the system of sewage disposal inherited from medieval times. Cesspools were emptied by nightsoilmen, who sold the contents to farmers just outside the city. Public sewers in and beneath the streets were intended for the disposal of rainwater, although garbage, including butcher’s offal, was surreptitiously dumped in them and the kennels, as had been observed during the reign of Edward III.

Nevertheless the Thames was a reasonably clean river and salmon – the litmus test of water quality – were still being caught in the first decades of the 19th century. But three factors now combined to interrupt these arrangements. First, London grew and the countryside moved farther away. Moorfields and Spitalfields ceased to be fields by the end of the 18th century, so the nightsoilmen had to carry their sewage a greater distance. Secondly, from 1847, a more effective fertilizer became available in the form of guano (solidified bird droppings), imported from islands off the coast of Chile. The Gibbs family used the enormous fortune they earned from the trade to built Tyntesfield, now a National Trust property in Somerset. The nightsoilmen struggled to compete.

But the most decisive factor was the introduction of the water closet, invented by Sir John Harington. In 1775 a patent was registered by a Bond Street watchmaker named Alexander Cummings (1773-1814) for improved version of Harington’s device. In 1778, a Yorkshire-born carpenter and inventor called Joseph Bramah (1748-1814) was asked to install one of the closets in a private home and realised that he could improve the design further and simplify the process by which its components were manufactured. He patented his version of the WC and started to make them in large quantities. He made and sold over 6,000 closets by 1797 and his company continued to flourish until 1890.

A Victorian businessman called Thomas Crapper (1836-1910) started a competitive business in 1861 and nine years later opened a showroom to display his wares, which were advertised under the slogan ‘A certain flush with every pull’. The business continued to operate from 120 King’s Road, Chelsea until 1966 and still trades, dealing in sanitary fittings online. The products were of high quality, with many still in use – for example at a public house called The Parcel Yard adjacent to the Harry Potter Platform 9¾ at London’s King’s Cross Station. In 1849, Thomas Twyford (1849-1921) opened a factory for the production of sanitary ware in Stoke-on-Trent and in 1883 began to manufacture the ‘Unitas’ ceramic closet for export to the world. To this day the word ‘unitas’ in Russian means ‘toilet’. The WC was one of Britain’s greatest gifts to civilization.

But the greatest ingenuity of all was shown by George Jennings (1810-82), who was born in Hampshire and joined the plumbing business of his uncle in Southampton. He is remembered for his enterprise in installing WCs in the Crystal Palace, which housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. Some 827,000 people used these conveniences, many experiencing them for the first time, and each paying one penny for the privilege. This gave us the expression ‘spend a penny’ and effectively drew attention to the advantages of the devices. But water closets have one major disadvantage when used in conjunction with cesspools. When flushed, they discharged a small amount of faeces and urine, potential fertilizer, and 8 litres (2 gallons) or more of water, rapidly filling the cesspools with liquid that farmers did not wish to buy and which leaked.

It was these conditions, to which Michael Faraday drew attention in 1855, that led to the creation of the Metropolitan Board of Works who began work the following year. The board replaced a multitude of parish vestries, liberties, commissions and similar bodies that had come into existence over centuries. Their aims had been twofold: to spend as little ratepayer’s money as they could and to despatch their sewage to the adjacent parish as quickly as possible. Sizes and shapes of sewers were not coordinated and the arrangement was particularly unfortunate for those parishes that were situated in the low-lying parts of London, close to the Thames, where everyone’s waste accumulated before entering the river. The Metropolitan Board of Works was the first body established for London as a whole, with authority to construct roads, bridges and parks but above all street drains and intercepting sewers or ‘collectors’.

In 1856 Joseph Bazalgette was appointed Chief Engineer to the Metropolican Board of Works. He was born in England, but was descended fro a French grandfather who had arrived in England in 1770s. He learned engineering, as most did at those times, be being an articled pupil, in his case to Sir John MacNeill (1793-1880) who gave him his first experience of draining by employing him on land drainage schemes in Northern Ireland. He also worked on railway proposals, which gave him experience in dealing with politicians and he came a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1838. When applying for the post of the Metropolitan Board’s chief engineer, his referees were Robert Stephenson (1803-59), designer of The Rocket, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-59).

Bazalgette’s was not the first such appointment. In May 1847, James Newlands (1813-71) had been appointed as the first borough engineer in Britain to prepare a comprehensive sewerage plan for the troubled, disease-ridden city of Liverpool, whose population had been swelled by impoverished Irish fleeing the potato famine and who were living in conditions of inconceivable squalor, in flooded cellars without sanitation. Liverpool was at that time the most populous city in Britain beyond London, with a population of 400,000. The appointment of Newlands had been preceded, in January of the same year, by the appointment of Dr William Henry Duncan (1805-63) as Britain’s first Medical Officer of Health. Together, the two men campaigned, with eventual success, for the construction of sewers and clearance of cellars, which meant that when cholera returned to Britain in 1854, its effects were far less virulent than previous epidemics. Newlands has a claim to have been the first engineer to introduce egg-shaped sewers (sometimes referred to as ‘English sewers’), designed to concentrate the liquid in a narrow channel during times of low flow levels. This speeds the movement of the water and the solids it carries, though even the Cloaca Maxima, the ancestor of all large sewers, was higher than it was wide. During the Crimea War, James Newlands was sent to the Crimea as Sanitary Commissioner, earning from Florence Nightingale the accolade: ‘Truly I may say that to us sanitary salvation came from Liverpool.’ Dr Duncan is remembered in Liverpool by a pub named ‘Dr Duncan’ in his honour in the city centre and a special brew called ‘Dr Duncan’s IPA’.

Bazalgette set to work without delay. He new the task ahead of him, as he had previously been employed by one of the commissions that had done some preparatory work and and built some new street sewers. By June 1856, he was able to submit his plans, a system of intercepting sewers running parallel to the river. On the north side of the river, he proposed that the sewage was taken mostly by gravity to Abbey Mills, near West Ham, before being lifted by huge pumping engines into outfall sewers that took it on to Beckton in Essex for discharge at high tide. On the south side it would taken to Crossness, in Kent, where the largest beam engines ever built could lift it into reservoirs where it was discharged into the river before beginning its voyage to the North Sea.

This is an extract from An Underground Guide to Sewers by Stephen Halliday, published by Thames & Hudson (2019). The book explores the history of sewer networks that lie beneath the world’s greatest cities, and includes archival plans, maps and photographs of these subterranean labyrinths.

Wellcome Collection, London

Image courtesy of Library of Congress, Washington, D.C

Photo courtesy of Boston Public Library, Edgar Sutton Dorr Photograph Collection

Photo courtesy of Bibliotheque nacionale de France, Paris

Photo courtesy of Thames Water Utilities Limited

Photo courtest of Boston Public Library, Edgar Sutton Dorr Photograph Collection

Photo courtesy of the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission, Newark, New Jersey

Photo courtesy of Boston Public Library, Edgar Sutton Dorr Photograph Collection

Photo courtesy of Thames Water Utilities Limited

Human microbiome as coral reef

In his Magic Circle series of cut paper sculptures, artist Rogan Brown depicts the microscopic structures and bacteria present in the human body, imagined as a coral reef

Detail from Rogan’s Magic Circle series. Image courtesy of Rogan Brown

Rogan, your work is incredibly intricate - how do you go about creating these sculptures?

Some pieces are entirely hand cut whereas others are laser cut then hand mounted, which is the case for the sculptures in the Magic Circle series. Obviously these are time and labour intensive pieces to make; they grow slowly and organically, starting as drawings, then single layer cuts and finally three-dimensional sculptural motifs made up of many layers.

What is it about the 'micro world' that fascinates you?

I think we all have a memory from the biology lab at school when we looked through a microscope for the first time and were blown away by the amazing detail and intricacy of a fly's wing or a fragment of leaf. I suppose that sense of awe at the sheer scale of the natural world has never left me, and it's that moment of amazement I try to recreate in my work. The human brain is not very good at processing scale, and so the vastness of the universe revealed to us through science tends to overwhelm us, therefore we block it out. My work simply reminds people of what they're unconsciously forgetting.

Where do you turn for inspiration?

Art and science and the relationship between the two are real inspiration behind my work. I spend a great deal of time looking at a wide variety of images from different sources: electron micrographs of microbes and cell structures, satellite images of the surface of the Earth, anatomical drawings of the human body, telescope images of the heavens, etc. In short, images of nature in all its myriad forms at scales and in different contexts.

What would you love to create if money and materials were no object?

I'd love to scale up the sculptural elements from Magic Circle, cut them from sheets of metal instead of paper, then mount them on the exterior of buildings to make them look as though they were growing and alive.

Any other projects in the pipeline?

I'm currently working on some pieces inspired by both coral reefs and the human body in an attempt to combine and integrate these seemingly different elements. The aim is to create a powerful visual icon that makes us understand that the reefs are not outside us, they are part of us, and if we let them die as we are doing, then part of us will die too. The simple message is that ecological, environmental destruction is ultimately self destruction.

What’s on your bedside table?

Ernst Haeckel's wonderful book Art Forms in Nature. His images of oceanic microorganisms published over a century ago still have the power to astonish. If I look at it before I go to sleep I dream surreal, organic forms!

This is a full version of a Q&A with Rogan Brown featured in issue 9 of Ernest Journal, on sale now.

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Shooting the Faroe Islands

For issue 9 of Ernest Journal, Canadian photographer Graeme Owsianski travelled to the Faroes – a huddle of 18 islands rising from the North Atlantic, halfway between Norway and Iceland. There he photographed fell runners, foragers, conservationists and guano-covered, storm-battered cliffs

All images by Graeme Owsianski

Graeme, what are your outstanding memories of the Faroe Islands?

I would say the people and their sense of community. This tiny group of islands in the middle of the North Atlantic is a truly harsh environment, yet the close-knit communities endure it all.

My favourite part of the trip was foraging for ingredients and cooking a meal with Gutti Winther. The weather was against us from the start but it didn’t hold us back for a second. It was a day full of sharing stories, and it ended with one of the most memorable meals I’ve ever had. We also went out on a fishing boat, which was a big highlight. The Faroese are so connected to the sea, so I felt it was crucial to view the islands from out on the water and experience this connection.

What were the islands like to photograph, in comparison to other landscapes you’ve shot?

Trying to capture the scale and do it justice was very challenging. There’s not much to reference scale because the surroundings are just so grand – it was definitely tricky to capture just how small you felt among those towering cliffs. Many times I found myself standing on the edge of a 400-metre drop, which is something I hadn’t experienced before.

What's the most challenging landscape you've photographed?

The Galapagos Islands, which I shot for issue 6 of Ernest. Given that it has such a unique and fragile ecosystem, access can be quite limited. I kept wanting to get higher, to get a vantage point to overlook some of the island and sea but wasn’t able to get where I wanted to, unfortunately. That said, a majority of the beauty of the Galapagos is under water so if we direct the term landscape to what’s below the surface it was an absolute joy to explore and photograph. Not without its challenges though, there were quite a number of curious seals and sea lions that wanted to get up close and personal with my camera.

Where do you turn for inspiration?

Everywhere, to be honest! I find inspiration in all places: art, books, nature, movies, story telling, etc. I think if you hit a rut and feel uninspired, then you need to refocus and look somewhere completely new. Often just reading and letting your imagination conjure up ideas and images can spark new inspiration.

But if I had to pick one thing, it would have to be nature. The more you look, you realise everything is connected.

What's in store for you in 2020?

To finish my house that I’m currently building!

As far as photography trips go – my friend has invited to his newly opened eco lodge called Firvale Wilderness Camp, which is in the Great Bear Rainforest. I’m pretty stoked for that – it’s an incredible area in British Columbia and should have some great fishing and wildlife in store. Also, maybe a trip to Nepal? We’ll see.

Tell us about your kit.

My photo kit doesn’t change a whole lot – I shoot on a Canon 5d mark 1V. I’ve got a pretty wide range of lenses: 16-35, 24-70, 70-200, 100-400, and a 24, 50, 100 macro. There’s different tools for different jobs but if I had to limit myself to just one, I’d roll with a 50mm 1.2 prime. I love this lens for everything, from details to portraits and landscape.

I use a Gitzo carbon tripod. I’m not a huge tripod fan – I find it slows me down, but of course they have their uses. I also have Aquatech Imaging water housing – this opens up even more opportunities to photograph different things you otherwise couldn’t.

I don’t really follow gear and ‘the next best thing’ in camera tech. I use what I’ve got until it wears out. My advice on gear is: the best camera is the one you have with you.

What’s the best piece of advice you've ever been given, in regards to photography?

Shoot as much as you can and don’t be afraid to fail. Photography is something you can always continue to learn and grow at – every situation offers its unique challenges and that’s half the fun. But the light is always changing and the creative possibilities are endless.

Graeme grew up on Vancouver Island and calls Ucluelet on the west coast home. An outdoor lifestyle photographer, he also enjoys hiking, surfing, canoeing and fishing in his ‘backyard’. Follow his work on Instagram @graeme_o

You can see the full feature on the Faroe Islands in issue 9 of Ernest Journal, on sale now.

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Under the mountain

Woodworker David White carves spoons, jugs and other objects out of oak that he’s salvaged from the abandoned slate mines of North Wales, which has to be one of the most Ernest projects we’ve ever encountered…

Photo by David White

David, how did you come up with the idea to create the Mine Oak collection?

I’ve always been fascinated by the slate mining landscapes of Snowdonia. It was while on a tour of the vast slate caverns that opened my eyes to how much wood was still underground. I made a couple of cups from a sample of oak I retrieved from a mine and realised the colours in the wood were completely unique. From there my imagination ran wild with the idea of weathered wood, the rugged landscape and the industrial heritage of the mines.

What was the condition of the oak that you salvaged?

The oak is very variable in condition – it can be very brittle if it’s been closer to the mine surface (nearer bacteria). The wood that’s deeper underground is more preserved; very dense, and dark in colour. The real alchemy I find in using the wood is the colouration throughout the grain, as the iron brought down to the mine has rusted down over a hundred years and made an iron-rich water that reacts with the tannins in the oak, leaving areas of black flowing through the grain like dark clouds. I never know what will be inside the wood until I remove the surfaces. I’ve taught myself to be very open to what the wood condition and colouring suggests as objects to make with it.

Were there any challenges?

The biggest challenge is getting the wood out of the mines. The tunnels linking the caverns are only about five feet high, and I’m six foot tall. The dense, sodden wood can be 30kg per piece. Once back in the workshop the challenge is to make objects while the wood is still wet, so I can use green woodworking techniques with an axe and carving knives. However carefully I dry the wood, it often splits, so I build the splitting in to my processes now and try to forsee where splits will be so I can ‘cold forge’ fill cracks with contrasting metals.

What inspired the shapes of the jugs?

The rugged, industrial looking jugs are a reaction to both the rough wood, the massive landscapes and the industry of the mines. If you imagine a roughly made slate trolley on rails underground, filled with slate and pushed along in the dark tunnels by a young boy, you see the inspiration I had for the shapes.

What's your favourite item from the collection and why?

As I started making pieces from the mine oak, I read about what working life was like in the mines and quarries of Snowdonia a century ago. There was a huge sense of pride and comradeship among the hard working quarrymen. The men self-selected into groups of five, a ‘Bargain Gang’ who would bid for work each month. In underground and cliff-side shelters called cabans, men rested between extracting slate, talking about politics, singing, reading poetry and of course drinking tea. I created a set of five caban jugs that imagine each member of the Bargain Gang; two rock men, a splitter, a dresser and a rybelwr (young apprentice learning the trade). For the two tough rock men, I used the rough weathered surface of the oak as the jug rims. The colours within the oak looked like a Welsh moorland landscape. These jugs somehow communicated everything I wanted to convey about the eerie landscapes of slate mines.

Do you have any further plans to work with salvaged wood?

The amount of inspiration I found from the mine oak versus what I would have created with fresh, green oak was quite surprising to me. I have plans to make further sets of mine oak functional objects that are even more closely linked to the rugged mountain landscapes of Snowdonia. I also want to look to the coast of north Wales with oak in mind; perhaps shipwreck oak?

Black and white images courtesy of National Slate Museum; other images by David White

Explore more of David White’s work at thewhittlings.co.uk

Woolly buggers and booby nymphs

Fly fishermen try to fool fish into thinking that tiny bits of hair, fur, feather and thread tied to a hook are in fact tasty insects. Broadly, there are two types of fishing fly: imitators, which are designed to look like real insects; and attractors, which often look like nothing on God’s green earth, but fish seem to like them anyway. Here are three outlandish patterns that caught (ahem) our eye

Woolly Bugger

Still one of the top patterns around, the Woolly Bugger is a popular and widely used fly for catching all sorts of fish. It has proven its effectiveness over many decades, which is perhaps largely down to its versatility – it looks like a lot of things that fish love to eat, from a drowning fly to a large nymph, or even a small baitfish.

Booby Nymph

This design, which is often irresistible to trout, came about following a cunning observation: that many emerging insects use a bubble of air to move from the lake bed to the surface, which then holds them in place while they transform into a flying insect. The basic booby is simple in design – a pair of foam boobies at the head, a short body and a fluffy tail of marabou feathers (to simulate the waving legs and wings as the nymph emerges). In still waters it can be ruthlessly effective. However, fly fishing purists consider the use of boobies to be as crude as the name, and akin to cheating. The issue is contentious enough that some lake owners ban boobies from their waters.

Tups Indispensable

Made for catching brown trout in the chalk streams of south west England, this fly was the brainchild of Devon tobacconist RS Austin in 1890. Its peculiar name stems from the fact that it utilised an unusual material in its manufacture; namely, wool taken from the testicles of a ram or ‘tup’. This fine substance was long noted by anglers for its “beautiful dusty yellow” colouring, as first recorded in Alexander Mackintosh’s 1806 book The Driffield Angler.

Words: Matt Jones, Illustrations: Louise Logsdon

This article originally featured in issue 9 of Ernest Journal, on sale now

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