The Big Necessity

by Rose George

  In the Fleet, we are to hunt for leaks. Water systems always leak. In 2006, Thames Water lost 915 million liters of clean water from its drinking-water pipes, an amount that a City of London inquiry called “staggering.” The job tonight is to see whether water is leaking into the sewers from drinking water pipes nearby. Rob Smith is my guide. He’s a tall, powerful-looking man, not far from retirement, who spent twenty years building tunnels before moving into sewers. Both his chosen occupations probably explain his decision to live on the coast while working in London, a commute of a few hours a day. He likes fresh air.

  Smith is now a senior engineer, a few rungs on the wastewater ladder above a flusher, and he doesn’t need to go into the sewers anymore. But, he says, “I can’t be responsible for the safety of my men without knowing the environment.” So down he goes, regularly enough, sometimes with a journalist or prince in tow. Thames Water runs open days at its Abbey Mills pumping station where visitors are served sandwiches and tea then led into the trunk sewer below. (It is considered sensible to serve food before seeing the sewers, not the other way around.) Smith has seen all sorts. “Prince Charles came once, down the sewers. We’ve had lords and ladies. They’re all the same once they get down there. If anything happens and someone needs to be pulled out, nobody gets priority. A sewer is a great leveler.”

  Smith enters first, nimble and fast down the ladder. I romantically assume he’s gone before me because his nose can sense danger. But he has lost much of his sense of smell from hydrogen sulphide exposure. This is annoying above ground but potentially lethal beneath it. Smith’s fatigued nose will be backed up by his turtle.

  My best defense is a big, long rope that links my harness to a hoist above. A line of life. I’m glad of it, being so weighed down with turtle and tungsten that a stride over to the manhole takes twice the effort. I follow instructions: sit on the pavement. Swing legs over to the ladder. Grip the manhole cover for purchase. Go down, as slowly as possible. Really, really slowly. “Take your time!” the flushers shout down, because I am precious cargo. “No one gets killed in my sewers,” Smith says. “Not in, under, or above them. It causes a hell of a lot of paperwork.”

  The ladder is rusty and damp. The rungs are far apart. I’m apprehensive, waiting to be hit by a stink, but nothing comes. “That’s what people do,” says Smith. “They get down, take a sniff, say, ‘Is that poo?’ I say yes. They say, ‘It doesn’t smell much, does it?’ They think that because when they go to the toilet, it smells, that this will, too. They think it’ll smell like three million toilets.” This is not a bad odor. It’s musty, cloying, and damp, but it doesn’t stink. It’s diluted, after all. Without water, the average human produces 77 pounds of excrement and 132 gallons of urine a year. Add toilet flushes, and the total jumps to 4,000 gallons. Thanks to the WC, the flow is 98 percent water.

  Down below, I am unhooked. My safety now depends on the monotonous beeps of the turtle, which signal safe air, and on the men in front and behind me. They set off with the walk of the flusher and I do my best to copy. The sewerman does not walk like an ordinary man. Lifting the feet, as a normal gait requires, risks kicking up the flow and splashing foul water on yourself or your workmate. For this reason, and to get better purchase on slimy brick, it’s better to glide. Feet close together, buttocks clenched (as tightly as the lips, which are best kept pursed to defend against splashes), smallish steps. It’s mincing that manages to be macho. I try to glide satisfactorily while I take in the sights. There are bricks, shadows, and light. There is a surprising amount of beauty, which explains why sewers have their obsessive fans, and why they are so beloved of filmmakers. What lighting director wouldn’t want to rise to the task of shadowing a Harry Lime in black, white, and gray menace?

  The men have their eyes cast upward, looking for the incursion of leaked water. Mine look the other way, into the stream. I am nervous about what I might see and curious about what I might recognize. There’s a floating bloated tampon. There goes part of a polystyrene cup. I find myself peering for brown solids, alert and excited, like a kid with a fishing rod. In olden days, sewers had hunters called “toshers.” They moved into the sewers from the banks of the river, in search of discarded riches. Sometimes they found gold; sometimes they lost their lives. There are still sewer hunters today, and there is cause: the flushers find all sorts of things in the flow. Bits of motorbikes (easily shoved down a two-foot-wide manhole), baby strollers, goldfish. Coins, sometimes, and jewelry. Cell phones by the hundred (one recent survey concluded that 850,000 handsets a year are inadvertently flushed down British toilets). That’s all due to haplessness, but there’s also ignorance. Wastewater utilities have had a long-running “Bag It and Bin It” campaign to educate people into what they shouldn’t flush. The list includes condoms, tampons and applicators, sanitary towels, panty liners and backing strips, facial and cleaning wipes, diapers, incontinence pads, old bandages, razor blades, syringes and needles, colostomy bags, medicine, toilet roll tubes, and pantyhose. Bras are also unwanted: in June 2007, a lingerie set flushed down a toilet clogged sewers in County Durham, collapsed a road, and caused £15,000 in repairs. “Throwaway society,” says Smith. “My goldfish has died? Throw it down the toilet. My hand grenade doesn’t work? Throw it down the toilet.”

  Hand grenade? It belongs in Smith’s best sewer anecdote, which he has told before and will tell again. He was working with a gang in the mid-level sewer near Greenwich when a flusher handed something to him. It was filth-encrusted but then he made out its shape through the muck. “I thought, ‘Oh shit.’” He couldn’t see if the grenade was live, but if it had been, it could have blasted a hole up to the sewer above. The gang would either be blown up or drown, or both. Smith climbed up the ladder one-handed, having warned the lads above, who disappeared. He lobbed it down an embankment and hoped for the best. “The next day,” he says, “a policeman phoned to ask me why I’d done that. I said, ‘I didn’t have a choice.’ I asked him if it had been live, and he said, ‘You don’t want to know,’ so I presume it was.”

  I love sewer anecdotes as much as the men like telling them. The stories are rich and funny, with a spirit mined from working at extremely close quarters—flushers have to pull and push each other in tight spots, in splendidly intimate isolation—in a job that gets only mockery and disregard from the public. The jokes are revenge. The writer Sukhdev Sandhu met a flusher who “remembers the night he emerged from a sewer at Leicester Square dripping of filth and shit only to find a young woman tourist peering at him. He held out his hand. ‘Smell that. That’s Canal No. 5, that is.’”

  Humor helps because the work is hard. The pay isn’t great, there are shampoo bills, and then there are the daily grievances, like Q-tips. “They are the bane of our lives,” says Smith. “If someone had searched for something that could clean your ear and also stick perfectly in the six-millimeter holes of a sieve [filter], they couldn’t have done better.” He shines his light on a pipe mouth to one side, encased with something I can’t recognize, dripped solid like stalactites. “Concrete. Unbelievable. Someone’s just poured liquid concrete down a drain.” The liquid has now hardened, embracing and defeating the black pipe it arrived down, a sign of shortsighted selfishness.

  The men stop to shine light at roof bricks, searching for cracks. While they look at the bricks with a purpose, I just look at the bricks. Smith is proud of them. “If you had a garden brick wall,” he says, “think of the condition it would be in after fifty years. These are over one hundred years old, and they have sewage flowing through them constantly.” He gives them his considered engineer’s opinion. They are “in pretty good nick.”

  A century in age makes this sewer relatively young. The core of London’s sewer network was built between 1858 and 1866 by a man whose name is now venerated only among flushers and historians, though he was probably the greatest of the famed Victorian engineers, such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, bridge builder, or the locomotive-designing Stephensons. The man wh
o built London’s sewers, though, is as obscure as the network he constructed.

  Since its beginnings as a trading center on a useful river, London dealt with its excrement as other settlements did, with what is known today as “on-site sanitation.” In short, this meant that its citizens generally did their business in a designated, confined place. It was a private matter unregulated by any authority and done mostly in a privy, from the French word privé (private). Privies were used alongside cesspools and middens (dungheaps). The cesspools were designed to leach their liquids into the soil, leaving the solids to be collected by “gong fermors” (a corruption of “gunge farmers”) and sold to farmers as manure. It was a sensible system with much to admire. Nothing was wasted; everything was recycled. The nutrients ingested by humans in food were taken from their cesspools and placed back into land that would grow more food, which would be consumed by more humans, who would in turn produce more useful “waste.” It was a harmonious recycling loop that also managed to be lucrative. It satisfied the demands of nature and of capitalism. But it did not work perfectly.

  The private matter of excretion spilled into public life in many ways. There were unemptied, overflowing cesspools, like the one into which Samuel Pepys trod in 1660, when he ventured into his cellar to find it filled with the contents of his neighbor’s privy. There was the common practice of slopping out, when chamber pot contents were flung from windows in the early morning, which made for unpleasant streets, especially since pavements were not common. There is a theory that the popularity of high heels dates from this time, something that might amuse Yahoo!’s sewer-footwear fetish group, as would the fact that the uppers of Parisian sewer waders were popular with boot makers. They valued the leather—hardened by contact with fats and acids in sewage—and turned it into ankle boots for fashionable ladies who remained happily ignorant that their new purchases had spent years wading through the most unfashionable muck.

  By modern standards of smell and hygiene, London was disgusting. So was everywhere else. Over the Channel in Paris, contemporary accounts tell of grand aristocrats regularly soiling the corridors at Versailles and the Palais Royal. At Versailles, the garden designer Le Nôtre deliberately planted tall hedges to serve as de facto stall partitions. The eighteenth-century writer Turneau de la Morandière described the Versailles of Louis XV as “the receptacle of all of humanity’s horrors—the passageways, corridors, and courtyards are filled with urine and fecal matter.” Waste matters in the Kremlin were no better, and toilet facilities only improved because it was feared all that excreta would corrode the gold.

  Nonetheless, London and Paris both continued on their smelly way until population growth intervened. With industrialization and rural migration, London grew from 959,000 residents in 1801 to 2.3 million in 1851, making it the largest city in the world. The on-site system could no longer cope. There was too much waste to dispose of and inflation didn’t help: the cesspool emptying fee was by now a shilling, twice the average laborer’s daily wage. Also, the gradual introduction of the flush toilet increased the amount of water to be dealt with. Faced with expense and hassle, people did what people still do, and illegally dumped their cesspool contents into the nearest pond, river, or sewer.

  London had had sewers for centuries. Henry VIII issued the first Bill of Sewers in 1531, which gave “the loving Commons” the powers to appoint sewer commissioners, Tudor environmental health inspectors who inspected drains and gutters. But neither the commissioners nor the sewers they protected were concerned with human excreta. The word sewer either derives from “seaward,” according to one source, or, according to the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary, from the Old Northern French seuwire, meaning “to drain the overflow from a fish pond.” Somehow, in a way obvious only to etymologists, seuwire in turn derived from the Latin ex [out of] and aqua [water]. Sewers have always been a carriage for dirtied water, but the degree and manner of dirt has changed. The modern assumption that sewers carry sewage is relatively new, as is the presumption that waste and water have always gone together.

  There were some in antiquity who decided water was a clever way to carry away the contents of their latrines. Primitive forms of the flushing toilet, together with channels to carry foul water away, were found at the 3,700-year-old palace of King Minos at Knossos. (This allowed one twentieth-century Englishman to wonder why his Oxford college “denied him the everyday sanitary conveniences of Minoan Crete.”) The Romans had the Cloaca Maxima, a large city sewer that was cleaned by prisoners of war.

  But most ancient societies did not think of using water to transport waste because they didn’t need to. The volume of waste and of people could be satisfied with on-site containment and removal services. Even after toilets became popular, it remained illegal for London’s citizens to connect their waste pipes to the sewers. It had to go somewhere. By 1840, as the Victorian builder Thomas Cubitt testified before the Parliamentary Select Committee into the Health of Towns, “The Thames is now made a great cesspool instead of each person having one of his own.”

  In these conditions, diseases thrived happily and fruitfully. Feces carries nasty passengers, and one of the worst is cholera, which arrived from India by ship in 1831. Cholera’s primary vehicle is the excrement of humans, who act like inadvertent seeders of the bacteria by expelling diarrhea violently and relentlessly. In a good sanitary system, where excreta are kept separate from drinking water, cholera would be contained. But in early nineteenth-century London, when five of the city’s nine water companies drew drinking water from the great cesspool of the Thames, cholera was in its element. The first epidemic of 1831 killed 6,536 people. In the 1848–1849 epidemic, 14,000 died in London alone and 50,000 nationwide. Cholera’s increased murderous performance was due, ironically, to sanitary reform.

  The Victorian century gave us many wondrous things, but one of my favorites is the now-lapsed vocation of sanitarian, a word taken by men who occupied themselves with the new discipline of “public health.” The most famous was Edwin Chadwick, a difficult character who left a legacy of reforms that were magnificent—the 1848 Public Health Act, for one—but also mistaken and deadly. In Chadwick’s landmark 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of Great Britain, a Victorian bestseller, he condemned the filth in which working classes were forced to live, its effects on their health, and the consequent losses to the economy. (Henry Mayhew, in a letter to the Morning Chronicle, wrote of meeting a woman in cholera-ridden Bermondsey who said simply, “Neither I nor my children know what health is.”)

  Chadwick decided the solution was to organize and expand the sewer system, but to use it for sewage—a word newly invented—and to discharge the sewage into the Thames. It might hurt the river, he reasoned, but it would save people’s health. Sewers were built and did as he said they would. And the Thames ran browner and thicker, and people drank it, and cholera loved it. There were fulminations against filth in newspapers and Parliament, but nothing was done. The medical establishment, in these pre-Pasteur times, was still convinced that disease was spread by contagion via miasmas, or bad air.

  It took a long dry summer to force change, and because of the foulness of the air, not of the water. In 1858, the weather and the sewage-filled Thames came together disastrously to form the “Great Stink,” when the river reeked so awfully that the drapes on the waterfront windows of the Houses of Parliament were doused with chloride to mask the smell. Politicians debated with their noses covered by handkerchiefs. After prevaricating for years, parliamentarians debated for only ten days before signing into law the Metropolis Local Management Act, which set up a Metropolitan Board of Works to sort out the “Main Drainage of the Metropolis.”

  Joseph Bazalgette was the board’s chief engineer. He was a small man with excessive energy. His plan was grand: enormous main sewers would run parallel to the river on upper, middle, and lower levels. They would be fed by a vast network of smaller sewers, and the whole flow would be conducted by gr
avity and sometimes by pumps (London is partly low-lying) to two discharge points, Barking and Crossness, in London’s eastern reaches. There, the city’s sewage would continue to be dumped into the river, but suitably far from human habitation. Dilution, as the engineer’s mantra still goes, would take care of pollution. Construction lasted nearly twenty years. By then, Bazalgette had used 318 million bricks, driven the price of bricks up 50 percent and spent £4 million, an enormous sum (£6 billion in modern money). He had also built the Victoria Embankment along the way, reclaiming land from the river near Westminster and running a sewer through it. For all this, as Stephen Halliday writes in The Great Stink of London, he should be considered the greatest sanitarian of all. His sewers may have saved more lives than any other public works. Yet his efforts have only been rewarded with a small plaque on his embankment, a mural in some nearby public bathrooms, and two streets named after him in the far-off London suburb of New Malden. There is no statue or public thoroughfare celebrating his Main Drainage of the Metropolis, though Bazalgette arguably did more than Brunel to shape modern life.

  The flushers love Bazalgette, and particularly because he built his sewer network with 25 percent extra capacity to allow for population growth. But they have more pressing thoughts than their hero’s cultural legacy. However ingenious Bazalgette’s design was, a system built for 3 million must now cope with the excreta and effluent of 13 million people and hundreds of thousands of industries. Bazalgette couldn’t imagine there would be so many houses, with so many toilets using so much water. That this much can be thrown away, when it needn’t be. He certainly didn’t account for sewers that take everything out being defeated by takeout of another sort.