Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  However, as cities grew larger, their self-regulatory ecosystems began to break down. Fourteenth-century Coventry, for instance, had 10,000 inhabitants, making it the fourth-largest city in England, and to judge from the flurry of ordinances emanating from the city council, rubbish was becoming an issue. Although human and animal dung were valued for manure, the supply in larger cities often outstripped demand, leading to an insalubrious gloop that clogged the streets and blocked the drains. The council’s response in Coventry was to decree that ‘no person within this City shall from henceforth sweep their streets in any rain time, whereby to pester the river with filth and muck’.5 Similar ordinances prohibited the washing of entrails and other ‘filthy operations’ in the market, forbade butchers to slaughter cattle in the open, and banned the throwing of fish water into the street, except after dark (quite what this did to alleviate its stench remains unclear).

  If the ‘filth and muck’ of fourteenth-century Coventry caused a nuisance, that of London, a city 10 times the size, can be readily imagined.6 Few houses in the capital had access to cesspits or back gardens, so the large amounts of waste thrown into the street included every sort of ‘muck’, from kitchen scraps to human ‘night soil’. The city was forced to employ hundreds of ‘muck-rakers’, professional street-sweepers, to collect the stuff and cart it off, either to ‘laystalls’ on the city fringes, where it was matured into manure, or to special wharves, where it was loaded on to barges and taken downriver to be dumped. The authorities’ battle against the rising mire was reflected, as in Coventry, by a stream of ordinances, of which the opening salvo of 1357, requiring citizens to ‘remove from the streets and lanes of the town all swine and all dirt, dung and filth … and cause the streets and lanes to be kept clean’, set the tone for the following centuries.7

  Despite all the mayoral huffing and puffing, nothing approaching major sanitary reform was attempted in London, and slowly but surely the city simply clogged up. By 1661 things were so bad that the diarist John Evelyn was moved to write a diatribe, Fumifugium, in which he described the capital ‘burning in stench and dark clouds of smoke like Hell’. ‘The City of London,’ he wrote, ‘resembles the face rather of Mount Etna than an Assembly of Rational Creatures.’8 Five years after Evelyn’s outburst, his ‘Etna’ finally erupted, its timber houses and putrid filth helping to fuel a four-day-long funeral pyre. For Evelyn, the Great Fire was not so much a tragedy as an opportunity, and just three days after it died down, he visited Sir Christopher Wren, urging him to adopt his proposals to rebuild the smouldering city over a series of subterranean vaults that could both service its buildings and carry their waste away. But it was not to be. The urgent need to rebuild and get trading again, combined with complex patterns of land ownership in the city, put paid to any grand visions Evelyn, Wren or anyone else might have had for London. Within the space of a year, the capital had risen again from the ashes more or less as it had been, with just the occasional nod in the direction of what we would now call health and safety. Streets were a little wider, buildings made of brick rather than wood, the noxious Fleet was covered over – but as far as the city’s muck was concerned, it was back to business as usual.

  Over the next two centuries, London got on with what it did best: making money. Although the city was soon choking on its own effluent again, the value of night soil and animal dung was still firmly engrained in people’s minds – particularly since seventeenth-century Londoners had discovered the pleasures of fruit and vegetables grown in their own manure. Indeed, demand for the latter had been so great in 1617 that the newly formed Gardeners’ Company felt able to claim that it had ‘cleared the city of all dung and noisomeness’; and although John Evelyn’s account of the capital a few decades later rather suggests otherwise, there is no doubt that commercial market gardening provided a viable alternative to waste disposal in London.9 The capital’s most famous horticultural enterprise, Neat House Gardens in Chelsea, enjoyed a special relationship with Covent Garden for over two centuries, exporting high-quality produce to the market and receiving boatfuls of fresh dung in return. As John Strype noted in 1720, the arrangement was both efficient and highly profitable:

  A parcel of houses, most seated on the banks of the river Thames, and inhabited by Gardiners, for which it is of note, for the supplying of London and Westminster markets with asparagus, artichoaks, cauliflowers, musmelons and the like … which by reason of their keeping the ground so rich by dunging it (and through the nearness to London they have the soil cheap) doth make their crops very forward, to their great profit in coming to such good markets.10

  By the start of the nineteenth century, London’s population had grown fourfold, and its market gardens, which now stretched as far as the River Lea, still received regular exports of manure from Dung Wharf, the city’s main waste depot at Blackfriars. But as increasing volumes of people and goods flowed into London, the city’s supplies of dung and muck began to seriously outstrip demand. Matters finally came to a head with the popular adoption of the latest must-have accessory, the flushing water-closet, first patented by Joseph Bramah in 1778.11 At the mere pull of a lever, centuries of emptying chamber pots and ducking at the shout of ‘gardy-loo’ were banished to the past. But if WCs relieved an age-old domestic problem, out in the city they were creating havoc. Vastly increased volumes of waste water began to enter the sewage system, causing ancient cesspits to overflow and street drains, designed to take rainwater only, to become blocked and polluted. Most loathsomely of all, swollen underground sewers began to seep through the floorboards of houses in low-lying districts.

  From the 1830s onwards, London was hit by a series of cholera epidemics, which were linked, naturally enough, to the evil miasma that hung over the city.12 In 1842, the pioneering social reformer Edwin Chadwick published his Inquiry into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, painting a gruesome picture of life at the start of Victoria’s reign. Having reviewed the appalling conditions in which the majority lived, Chadwick concluded that

  … the various forms of epidemic, endemic, and other disease caused, or aggravated, or propagated chiefly amongst the labouring classes by atmospheric impurities produced by decomposing animal and vegetable substances, by damp and filth, and close and overcrowded dwellings prevail amongst the population in every part of the kingdom … as they have been found to prevail in the lowest districts of the metropolis.13

  The government responded in 1848 with the creation of the aptly named Consolidated Commission of Sewers, whose first move – encouraged by Chadwick – was to flush out every one of London’s existing 369 underground drains; a well-intentioned but disastrous act, since all it succeeded in doing was to disgorge several centuries’ worth of backed-up detritus into the Thames. Since many Londoners got their drinking water directly from the river, the operation, far from improving their health, actually made matters worse. Over the next few years, a series of even more destructive cholera epidemics resulted, killing up to 10,000 people a year. It was becoming clear that simply flushing out the city’s existing sewers was not going to work. A more radical solution was needed.

  London’s crisis sparked an international debate; not just about the capital’s embarrassment, but about the issue of urban waste in general. Among those taking part was Justus von Liebig, the ‘father of fertiliser’ whose 1836 discovery of the importance of minerals in plant nutrition convinced him that it was vital that the nutrients contained in urban sewage were returned to the soil. Without them, he reasoned, a city’s hinterland would eventually be reduced to desert. Liebig drew his conclusion partly from studying that ultimate consumer city, Rome. Soon after its foundation in the sixth century BC, Rome (ever the exception to the rule) had begun constructing an elaborate series of underground drains that it continued to expand throughout its later development.14 This extraordinary piece of foresight (arguably as vital to the capital’s future as the aqueducts it began to construct three centuries later) was inherited
from the neighbouring Etruscans, whose expertise in draining hills and marshland had long been applied to their own city-building.15 Pliny declared that Rome’s sewers matched the grandeur of the capital they served. Some were large enough for a wagonload of hay to be driven through, and when Marcus Agrippa had the felicitous idea of flushing out the system with overflow from the aqueducts, he was able to inspect the results of his scheme by boat.16 But the system’s crowning glory (beloved of many a Latin-studying schoolboy) was the Cloaca Maxima, a great semicircular tufa-hewn tunnel up to five metres wide that collected all the waste from the entire network and flushed its contents into the Tiber.17

  Rome’s sewers were a magnificent achievement, but to Liebig they were hardly a suitable model for London to follow; or for any other city, for that matter. To him, the Cloaca Maxima represented not an engineering marvel, but an environmental catastrophe – the means by which the greatest nutrient-squandering sump on earth had sucked up all the goodness from the soil and dumped it, never to be recovered, into the Mediterranean. Liebig wrote to the British prime minster, Robert Peel, urging him not to repeat the mistake:

  The cause of the exhaustion of the soil is sought in the customs and habits of the townspeople, i.e., in the construction of water-closets, which do not admit of a collection and preservation of the liquid and solid excrement. They do not return in Britain to the fields, but are carried by the rivers into the sea. The equilibrium in the fertility of the soil is destroyed by this incessant removal of phosphates and can only be restored by an equivalent supply …18

  Liebig’s arguments were supported by Chadwick, who, despite his recommendation to flush out London’s ancient sewers, understood the value of fresh dung. Chadwick’s own conversion to the uses of sewage had come on a trip to Edinburgh, where he had witnessed the prodigious fertility of a patch of farmland irrigated by the waters of one of the city’s main outflows, the descriptively titled Foul Burn. In 1845, Chadwick had urged that London’s sewers ultimately be reconfigured to create a ‘hydrological ouroboros’ that would, as he put it, ‘complete the circle and realise the Egyptian type of eternity by bringing as it were the serpent’s tail into the serpent’s mouth’.19 Although increasing awareness of pathogens made the use of night soil more problematic than of yore, the government was reluctant to give up on it altogether; and two chemists, Messrs Hoffman and Will, were commissioned in 1857 to look into the practicality of converting London’s sewage into manure – a practice that had gone on unofficially for centuries. But despite admitting that the nutritional value of the city’s sewage was equivalent to Britain’s entire annual imports of guano, the chemists ended up rejecting the idea:

  We have been taunted with the superior wisdom of the despised Chinese, who have no elaborate sewerage system, and who, instead of carrying away their floods of sewerage wealth into the sea … gather it every morning by public servant … and take it away to nourish agriculture. Our reply to these taunts is that people (adopting the vulgar superstition) who are as numerous as ants, and who have to live in boats because the land is too crowded to hold them with any comfort, must be often at their wits’ end to procure food, and are, therefore, no models for a well-to-do civilised nation to copy.20

  Just a few months after Hoffman and Will’s verdict, the blazing hot summer of 1858 made the niceties of what a ‘well-to-do civilised nation’ ought to do with its sewage appear somewhat immaterial. As the summer wore on, a ‘Great Stink’ began to emanate from the black and poisoned river, causing a stench so unbearable that the windows of the House of Commons had to be draped with lime-chloride-soaked cloth, while choking MPs inside debated whether or not to decamp to the relative fragrance of Hampton Court.21

  Heavy rains eventually dissipated the Stink, but by then it had accomplished its work. After centuries dabbling ineffectually with London’s sewage, MPs were finally persuaded it was time for a Plan B. The Metropolitan Board of Works, set up to replace the Consolidated Commission of Sewers, was tasked with coming up with a solution that would deal with the problem once and for all. Submissions were invited from members of the public, whose various contributions, numbering 140 in all, covered the full gamut of possibility. London’s sewage, according to one, should be conveyed to the countryside via a series of radiating drains like the spokes of a wheel, where it could be sold from small shops as fertiliser. Another suggested collecting the sewage in floating tanks and towing it out to sea; a third, building two enormous vacuum tubes capable of sucking all the waste from Westminster to the East End, where its fate remained unspecified. And so on.

  In 1859, having received and rejected all 140 proposals, the Board finally plumped for a scheme put forward by its own engineer, Joseph Bazalgette. The scheme was based on one submitted 25 years earlier by the biblical painter John Martin, whose apocalyptic visions of doom and destruction seem to have given him an abiding interest in London’s sewage. In 1834, Martin had published a pamphlet (illustrated with painterly finesse by the author) in which he proposed ridding the Thames of its pollution by building two ‘interceptory’ sewers to run either side of the river beneath graceful arcades, which would encourage the ‘working population to indulge in the healthy exercise of walking’.22 The sewers were to terminate at two large receptacles at Limehouse and Rotherhithe, where their contents would be converted into manure and sold on to farmers, as ‘practised in China’. Despite the brilliance of Martin’s vision, he lacked the engineering genius to turn his idea into reality. That was where Bazalgette came in. Bazalgette proposed five interceptory sewers in all, laid to gentle falls in order to harness the natural drainage of the Thames basin, intersecting with existing sewers and tributaries and carrying their contents downstream under the force of gravity. The system would terminate at two main outfalls, at Beckton to the north and Crossness to the south, where its contents would be held in vast storage tanks to await the high tide, when they would be discharged and so carried off to sea.

  Bazalgette’s method of disposal was a departure from Martin’s scheme, and it put an end to any notion that London might extend its ancient habit of recycling its own waste. After the Great Stink, all the government was interested in doing was getting rid of the stuff, as quickly and effectively as possible. That was the task with which Bazalgette was charged, and the one which, triumphantly, he achieved. Completed within the astonishingly short space of just six years (including the wettest summer and coldest winter of the century), the project involved the excavation of 3.5 million cubic yards of earth and the use of 318 million bricks, the price of which rose by 50 per cent during construction. Eighty-five miles of interceptory sewers were built in all, each with graded egg-shaped cross-sections to maximise the speed of flow, whatever volume of fluid they were carrying. The network, which connected 450 miles of main sewers, was capable of shifting half a million gallons of sewage a day almost entirely by gravity. That ‘almost’ was where Crossness Pumping Station came in. Although Bazalgette used every ruse at his disposal to let gravity do its work, he still required four pumping stations (one north of the river and three to the lower-lying south) to raise the sewage to the correct height at the outfalls. Crossness, situated at the lowest section of the entire system, handled the greatest burden: that of raising half of London’s sewage by up to 40 feet and storing it in vast underground reservoirs. That was the task that Victoria, Prince Consort and the others accomplished, and although the monsters are no longer on active duty, they serve as powerful testimony to the pride and skill it took to empty the bowels of the greatest nineteenth-century city on earth.23

  Strolling along the Embankment today, few of us pause to think of what passes beneath our feet, or of the magnitude of Bazalgette’s achievement. The network he built is still in operation, and although much of it is hidden, no building project has had a greater impact on London. The Thames, previously a ramshackle waterway bounded by shingle banks and rickety wharves, was transformed into the smooth, canalised thoroughfare we know today, while the city,
long mired in the mephitic stench of filth and disease, was purged at last. Where the likes of Wren and Evelyn had failed, Bazalgette (with the assistance of several thousand flushing lavatories) finally succeeded. His feat was no less remarkable in its way than any carried out by his more glamorous contemporary, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but Bazalgette’s genius has never resonated in the public consciousness quite as powerfully as has that of his rival. People are never grateful for being made to think about their own shit.

  Although the modern sewage treatment works at Crossness lack the charm of their Victorian predecessor, they continue to do a vital job for the city, processing some 700,000 cubic metres of waste water each day.24 Getting rid of London’s sewage has become a lot more complicated since Bazalgette’s day, too. Before it can be released back into the wild, sewage must pass through a series of processes designed to remove all its polluting organic matter, so that what is left is water at least as pure as that of the river itself. The solid matter removed during purification (known collectively as ‘sludge’, the modern term for ‘muck’) was until recently taken by barge and dumped in the North Sea, so fulfilling the vision of at least one disappointed entrant from the 1858 competition. However, an EU directive in 1998 forbade the sea-dumping of sludge, since when Crossness has been consolidating and dehydrating it on site, baking it into cakes and burning it in its sludge-powered generator, a rather menacing-looking building with a swooping metal roof and tall chimney that dominates the site and provides it with three quarters of all its power.