by Tim Moore
Cowering at the foot of the huge buildings whose unlovely rear aspects engulfed it on three sides, Vine Street was not so much a runt as a rectum, a back passage, a workman’s crack poking out round the back of Piccadilly’s fancy façades. Along one side were the grimy sit-upons of Egypt Air, an Abbey National and a sushi restaurant so shy it displayed no menu and bore a sign only in Japanese, but the dominant structure was the Meridien, its muscular hindquarters draped with pigeon-netting, its back doors stacked with old barrels of vegetable oil. A man came out from under a doorway labelled ‘Meridien – Welcome to Work’ carrying two fire extinguishers like the proud new father of twins; he laid them tenderly in the back of a red van and reversed out, leaving me and Vine Street alone together.
No one’s sure how Vine Street earned its name – possibly something to do with a Roman era vineyard – but then few can have bothered to ask. The only story the street had in its locker (admittedly it’s a cracker) concerns the encounter that took place there between Frantisek Kotzwara and Susannah Hill on 2 September 1791. Then sixty-one, Kotzwara was one of Europe’s greatest double bassists and the noted composer of fantasias with a military bent – The Siege of Quebec; The Battle of Prague. Bohemian by birth and nature, he was a regular in the bagnios and fleshpots of Georgian London, and on the night in question found himself in the company of the aforementioned sex worker at her room at No. 5 Vine Street.
Nothing if not a gentleman, Kotzwara suggested a meal before the main business of the evening, furnishing Susannah with two bob for a substantial and well-lubricated spread of victuals. Some people like to round off a good meal with a smoke or a snooze, but Kotzwara was made of different stuff. ‘After a dinner of ham, beef, porter and brandy,’ read one studiously sober account, ‘he asked her to cut off his genitals.’ Perhaps unwilling to bite the hand that fed her, as it were, Hill refused, but interestingly agreed to assist Kotzwara in fastening a ligature first round the doorknob and thence his neck. Five minutes later, the kneeling, trouserless maestro eagerly conducted himself to a breathlessly memorable finale – tantalisingly uncertain, even at the end, whether he was coming or going. Arrested and charged with murder, Hill was acquitted after the judge accepted her testimony. The court records were withheld to keep the precise and shocking details from the public domain, but the case still remains a landmark for suicidally adventurous perverts and bored law students alike.
My 1933 directory’s assessment of Vine Street read, in toto: No. 13 – Man in the Moon public house; No. 10 – Police Station. The first – now the slightly ponced-up Swallow Street Bar – still offered refreshment to the many students and stag-night young bucks who set off around London on Monopoly pub crawls, but the second had gone. Now I was here I remembered, and not that many years ago, shepherding a distressed pickpocketing victim from Piccadilly Circus Tube station up to Vine Street police station. But the steps I’d led her up then were now topped with a sign identifying this as the headquarters of Red Media. A young man in a white T-shirt came out down the steps and lit up a fag; I asked with what Red Media concerned itself and he flatly replied, ‘Graphics.’
I was still none the wiser as to why Vic and Marge had considered it so important to include a law-themed set: possibly, as with the motoring fines, a private joke based on bitter experience; more probably a reflection of the period’s fixation with crime and its detection, a fixation that saw the publication of whodunit novels running at almost one a day and remains the only possible explanation for the abysmal Cluedo’s rampant success. But now it didn’t matter, and the only mystery left to solve was what currently linked the set. Great Marlborough Street had lost its court and Vine Street its cop shop; by the same token, Bow Street was already one down with one to go. All I could think to characterise the oranges in twenty-first-century London was that, alone amongst the Monopoly groups, its three streets couldn’t muster a single McDonald’s between them.
‘This used to be a police station, though, didn’t it?’ I said, eliciting a skyward expulsion of smoke and, after a long gap, a two-tone hum of reluctant assent. ‘So are the, er, cells still down there?’
If graphic designers were happy to line their Apple Macs along walls that for many generations had rung with the ragged cries of apprehended felons, then maybe there really was something in the absurd scheme I’d been reading about to convert Pentonville and London’s other Victorian prisons into desirable loft-style accommodation.
He surveyed me sourly. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think . . . well, do you know, I think I’m falling in love with you, you splendid little man,’ I said, in the manner of one astride an alloy-framed racing bicycle facing an adversary with a nicotine habit and undone shoelaces.
It was a fitting farewell exchange. Vine Street had more cause than any other to get down on its little orange knees and thank heaven for its miraculous inclusion on over forty million game boards, a presence that had made it famous from Aberdeen to Auckland. But instead it looked ugly and ungrateful, as surly and bitter as the man who now dismissed me with a wristy gesture more practised and insouciant than any professionally delivered by Mr Kotzwara’s service provider in her pomp. Frankly, you expect a lot better from not just the premium property in a group, but holder of the Chris Award for Lucrative Probability. In the thirties Vine Street was where you came if you’d been caught pissing or puking or doing other drunk stuff. Now it was where you came to do that self-same stuff if you didn’t want to get caught.
I pedalled down to Piccadilly, then turned up Regent Street to the junction with Oxford Circus, where I dismounted feeling rather thwarted. Because there was a big picture of a policeman on the board, and because of the London game’s particular devotion to crime and the fighting thereof, I’d been planning to spend at least one day on the beat with the Vine Street coppers: pushing electric vehicles off bridges, taking kickbacks from vice kings, enticing my neighbours at a Soho urinal into an incriminating display of indecency. Withdrawing the board and resting it on an unmanned newsstand, I atoned as best I could, waving cheerfully but rather self-consciously up at the towering black lollipop that I knew to contain a police CCTV camera. I rolled a four, but clacking my racing car from Bow Street to Free Parking accepted an unannounced encore was required. I rolled again, waiting for a Tannoyed boom of ‘WE SAW THAT, MOORE’ to thunder from some unseen emergency-service loudspeaker. A five and a three took me to Water Works. And a very long car journey the next weekend took me to the Crossness Sludge-Powered Generator.
CHAPTER 9
Water Works
CONCEIVED AT THE height of the cholera epidemics that ravaged London in the mid-nineteenth century, the capital’s drainage system is a typically Victorian triumph. Joseph Bazalgette, encouraged by the hands-on civil-engineering enthusiasm of Prince Albert, oversaw the creation of 1,300 miles of new sewers, along with pumping stations, drainage reservoirs and the creation of the Embankment to narrow the Thames and so speed the river’s flow as it sluiced away the bountiful unpleasantness.
The scheme took thirty years and swallowed enourmous sums of public money – the Embankment alone cost a million quid. So extensive were the necessary gradient-related preparations that the cartographical department it spawned later evolved into the Ordnance Survey. But the Victorians never thought in the short term: by the twenties, London’s fifty-year-old sewerage system was being single-handedly credited for a ‘remarkably low death rate never surpassed by any other capital city’. Continental visitors might still complain about the smoke, but few European cities in the Monopoly age could match the quality of London’s drinking water. Scratch and sniff a wall in many French or Italian cities and even today you’ll release a pungently medieval waft. Over-engineered and under-praised, almost 150 years on Bazalgette’s network is still heroically keeping London’s waste out of sight and mind.
Out of sight, at least, until it reaches the rather too evocatively named Outfall Works way out east at Beckton, and, on the opposite bank, Cr
ossness. Here, until 1998, was enacted a daily ritual that emphasised perhaps more graphically than one might wish the extent to which subsequent London authorities had failed to build on the Victorians’ impressive platform. Pulling up at the quayside, a fleet of vessels were filled to the gunwales with thousands of gallons of ‘residual solid waste matter’ – London’s sludge, in the marginally more acceptable industry shorthand – and despatched down the Thames estuary towards the aptly dismal Black Deep. Here, the Thames Water Authority vessels unceremoniously flushed their tanks – four million tons annually, over 80 per cent of the UK’s total marine effluent discharge.
This cavalier disregard for the maxim about shitting on your own doorstep would surely be cheerily ongoing had Brussels not called a halt, an intervention that surely more than atones for any regulation on the shape of bananas. After bumping my car through an excitingly awful wasteland of burnt-out Transit vans and flytippings, I finally came upon the EU’s creation. Up it rose across the once malaria-infested Plumstead Marshes, a curvaceous, crested wave of glass and anodised aluminium, a slice of Sydney Opera House: in Crossness did Eurocrats a stately poo-furnace decree.
Built at a cost of £125 million, the Crossness Sludge-Powered Generator and its sister over at Beckton squeeze, compress and dry the ordure from four million households into what I’m afraid are known as sludge cakes, before torching the lot in a turbine-equipped incinerator. From a Monopoly perspective it had seemed ideal – with each incinerator generating 8.6 megawatts, here were the utilities combined: Electric Company and Water Works under one roof. Pay ten times the total on the dice and move on. Fast.
Regrettably, I could only gaze from a distance at the little dustbin-diameter chimney that seemed far too modest for the appalling enormity of its task. The SPG was open to the public today, but I’d been snootily informed by the relevant woman at Thames Water two days before that there wasn’t room on their visitors’ list. ‘Not even the reserves,’ she said snidely, in a tone hardly compatible with a tour round even the most modish crapatorium. Switching to Plan B, I drove back past the horses roaming wildly across sewage scented tussocks, through the Thamesmead estate whose doomed and desolate malls and marinas formed the backdrop of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, along the kind of lightly rubbled, under-trafficked roads where fathers teach their teenage daughters to drive. Opened by the Prince of Wales in 1865 and ever since the whiffy end of Bazalgette’s line, here was the Crossness Southern Outfall Works, mother of the SPG and London’s now-defunct cathedral of sewage.
‘There is bit of a smell,’ said one tidy old chap to another as the pair divided up their sandwiches on a discarded, rusting boiler panel driven through with rivet-heads the size of halved coconuts. Behind them stood the majestic if rather careworn Beam Engine House, within whose colourful and decoratively arched Romanesque walls stood four mighty rotative beam engines, in their malodorous pomp the world’s largest, each capable of pumping over six tons of raw sewage in a single stroke.
There was a bit of a smell; when the freshening wind blew back across a neighbouring field of open sewage-farm drums, it reached the high-heaven end of the odour spectrum. But by satisfying both an infantile fascination with bodily waste and a juvenile enthusiasm for the restoration of steam-powered machinery, Crossness held an irresistible lure for Londoners of a certain age (old) and a certain sex (male). Open Day at the Beam Engine House meant what it said; not my number one choice, perhaps, but better than an afternoon with those great big number twos at the hoity-toity SPG. As Marie Antoinette might have said in different yet oddly intriguing circumstances: let them burn sludge cakes.
‘See, the Victorians weren’t squeamish about any of this,’ said a man in a flat cap, one of the members of the trust which since 1985 has been toiling to restore the engines to their harlequin-hued, poo-pumping Victorian prime. I’d been following him and a small group of fellow visitors around the winningly forthright exhibition he and his colleagues had constructed in the room backing on to the pump chamber; at the end of his extended arm, and more precisely at the tip of his pipe’s gently smoking mouthpiece, was an etching of Edward, Prince of Wales, being escorted through a specially candle-lit underground chamber.
‘So what happened in there?’ someone asked, diverting my attention from a 1935 photograph depicting horse-drawn ploughs lifting spuds in a nearby corner of Plumstead Marshes.
‘It’s the subterranean reservoir,’ he said. ‘Six and a half acres; twenty-five million gallon dirty-water capacity.’ I’d already read enough captions to know what dirty water meant. He nodded at the floor. ‘Still down there now.’
I suppose it was just possible to imagine the present Windsors being proudly shown about an enormous underground pit hours before it was filled to the filthy brim with their subjects’ lurkers and floaters. But it was substantially more difficult to picture any current royal settling down at the head of a five-hundred-seat banquet in the Beam Engine House, as Edward had done later that day in 1865, and baldly ludicrous to entertain the possibility that even Prince Charles would honour the surrounding engines’ prodigious appetite for untreated ordure by proudly unveiling plaques that named two of them after his parents and the others after himself and his sister.
How things had changed by 1968, when seeking civic endorsement for their new £500,000 Crossness-based sludge-dumping vessel the Thames Water Authority was reduced to contacting the Mayor and Mayoress of Hounslow. As a resident of this distant London borough, I felt a twinge of betrayal looking at the photographs of the MV Hounslow’s launch ceremony: moments earlier, our guide had explained with the aid of an enormous map that the Crossness catchment area in fact ended at Chiswick Bridge, just shy of the Hounslow boundary. This had greatly excited a man from Putney, delighted to be assured that he had indeed made a small personal contribution to the outside stench, but I could not begin to understand why the Hounslow should in the most grotesquely literal manner have been forced to carry the can for something its borough hadn’t done.
‘A moot point now in any case,’ said the guide, moving us towards a definitive display of cistern history. ‘It was sold to the Ghanaians last year. They’re using it as a water carrier.’ Everyone went quiet after that, except one man who made a horrid tongue-swallowing noise before blundering straight outside. I expect he’d just returned from a holiday in West Africa.
The Thames was considered ‘a fine, health-giving river’ in the thirties. A bold statement given that not a single fish had managed to survive in its waters for eight years (salmon finally returned after a century and a half’s absence in 1974) but an accurate one when assessed relatively against the river’s immediate previous history. For the first thirty years of Crossness’s operation, the ghastly contents of its reservoir were discharged directly into the Thames out front at high tide: particularly unfortunate for the passengers of the pleasure steamer Princess Alice when on 3 September 1878 her captain chose that precise location to collide with a coal ship. Within minutes 640 had drowned in what remains the worst Thames disaster. ‘They weren’t so much swimming as going through the motions,’ said a boatman returning from the rescue operation, showcasing the Londoner’s ability to raise a smile in unhelpful circumstances.
Hard hats were donned and our group filed into the Beam Engine House. Around us, fitfully repainted in their original golds and scarlets, soared cast-iron grilles decorated with lilies and garlands and the proud acronym of the Metropolitan Board of Works. Industrial faucets just like the one on the Monopoly board jutted rustily through a bulkhead; up in the rafters a trapped pigeon fluttered into panic. Sending submarine echoes off the underfoot metalwork we gingerly crossed lattice walkways to peer 40 feet up to the huge 50-ton beams and 10 feet down to the bottom of their engines’ improbably diametered flywheels. Around me men with hairy earholes and pale-blue cardigans nodded quietly to themselves. They were thinking: boiler pressure 150 lb/sq in; 5,000 tons per annum coal consumption. I was thinking: Prince of Wales d
inner party; 6¼ tons of crap per stroke.
There was a click and a hum which wavered tremulously as a brave but clearly overawed electric motor tilted the beam of the most restored engine almost imperceptibly upwards. Everyone tried to look impressed – even the pair of panda-eyed Goths I was intrigued to note had joined us – but it was a feeble parody. I squinted up and imagined hobnailed workmen clattering up and down the grid-iron stairs clutching arm-sized spanners as the four mighty engines hissed and creaked and the beams rose and fell, rose and fell, 50 tons of James Watt & Co. of Birmingham’s finest forced up to the distant gables and down again every six seconds, every day for seventy years. In its prime the Beam Engine House was as definitively British as the SPG was approximately Scandinavian.
Just before the war the steam engines were replaced by diesel pumps, but those beamed behemoths were recalled for a heroic last hurrah to bail out London during the floods of 1953. Then the workmen left and the vandals and thieves moved in, stripping away the brass fittings and smashing the arched windows. The chimney, a gloriously ornate Blackpool Tower of sturdy yet fanciful multicoloured brickwork, had stood 208 feet above the marshes: it was still one of the tallest structures south of the river when demolished in 1956. Crossness remains an enormous site – like the gas flares in the Persian Gulf and the Great Wall of China you could probably see its huge field of open sewage drums from space – but the improbable glamour the Victorians worked so hard to build has gone.
Back outside in my car, I drove around the Beam Engine House peering up at the columnettes along its walls. Each was topped with a decorative block, most of them patterned but one, our pipe-puffing guide had told us, carved into a representation of Joseph Bazalgette’s head. I gave up after two laps, thwarted by a wind-whipped drizzle which smudged out the detail. A shame, as I’d wanted to pay personal tribute to the stupendous tenacity of a man whose personal contribution to everyday London life remains unequalled (except perhaps by his great-great-grandson, the executive producer of Big Brother).
