London Under

by Peter Ackroyd

  The association with disease was just as strong as that with criminality. In the twelfth century the monks of Whitefriars complained that the smell of the river penetrated the odours of their incense, and that several of their brethren had already died from its “putrid exhalations.” The inmates of the Fleet Prison were also killed by the waters encircling them. In 1560 a city doctor wrote that in the “stinking lanes” in the vicinity of the Fleet, at the time of epidemic fever or plague, “there died most of London, and were soonest inflicted and longest continued.” An outbreak of cholera in Clerkenwell Prison, in 1832, was also attributed to the presence of the effluent waters. It was one of the most defiled areas of the city.

  A stairway to the buried Fleet (illustration credit Ill.12)

  Schemes have been proposed to allow the Fleet to flow again through the streets of London. A plan has been made to build an observation platform beneath Ludgate Circus, where the buried waters might be seen. The river has not entirely lost its hold upon the imagination of the city. On the corner of Warner Street and Ray Street, in the road before the Coach and Horses pub, a piece of grating can be found. If you put your ear close to it, you can still hear the sound of the river pulsing underneath. It is not dead.

  There is no better preamble to the world of London’s sewers. It is truly a journey into the night. The sewers are places of universal defilement, filled with matter that we have ejected from our bodies and flushed out of sight. They collect the waste of the world, left in streets or thrown down drains. They are the repository of primitive and repulsive, or simply outmoded, things. They represent putrefaction and dissolution.

  Sewers were certainly the token of death. In a nineteenth-century report, it was concluded that if “you were to take a map and mark out the districts which are the constant seats of fever in London … you would be able to mark out invariably and with absolute certainty where the sewers are.” The track of fever followed the contours of the underground. The several outbreaks of cholera in the city were closely identified with the course of these pestilential tunnels.

  In London mythology the sewers contain fearsome underground creatures, among them rats as big as large cats. “I’ve often seed as many as a hundred rats at once,” a nineteenth-century sewer-man confided. “They think nothing of taking a man, if they found that they couldn’t get away no how.” The tunnels sweat as if in a fever. Yet they may also be the womb of strange birth. In previous centuries excrement was used as a great fertiliser; schemes were proposed to take the contents of the London sewers and spread them over the adjacent countryside.

  “The Rat-catchers,”from Mayhew’s London Labour, 1851 (illustration credit Ill.13)

  If there were sewers in Roman London, they have not survived. In the general model of Roman building they would indeed have existed. The original sewers of Rome itself lasted until 1913. There are Roman sewers in York. Yet in London they seem to have crumbled into decay and dust, leaving not one relic behind. It is not impossible, however, that they still lie buried beneath the modern city.

  The sewers of early medieval London were the streams and rivers and ditches that ran down to the Thames. Cess-pits, lined with brick or stone, were also in common use and were cleansed weekly or fortnightly by urban workers known as “gong-fermers.” In 1326 one of them, “Richard the Raker,” fell into his own cess-pit and suffocated “monstrously in his own excrement.” The first pipes to carry waste, in an underground drainage system, were introduced to London in the thirteenth century during the reign of Henry III.

  But they were not sufficient to contain the city’s effusions. Mr. William Sprot complained in 1328 that his neighbours, William and Adam Mere, had allowed their “cloaca” or sewer to discharge its contents over his wall. Two Londoners were in 1347 accused of allowing their “odours” to escape into an adjacent cellar. In 1388 an Act was passed to punish those “who corrupt or pollute ditches, rivers, waters and the air of London.” It would have been easier to stop the tides of the Thames. As the city grew, so did its stench.

  An Act of 1531 created a group of London officials known as “commissioners of sewers,” whose job it was to superintend the existing sewers and to create new ones. There were nine such commissions: for the City and Westminster, Holborn and Finsbury, Tower Hamlets and Greenwich, St. Katherine’s and Poplar and Blackwall. A large system of underground drainage was already in use, although it was intended to remove only surface water; house refuse was still collected in cess-pools and then distributed as manure or illegally dumped in the Thames.

  A novel use for excrement was found in the late sixteenth century, when its nitrogen content was discovered to be useful in the manufacture of gunpowder. There arose a gang of workmen, known as “saltpetremen,” who were empowered to enter any house and remove all its excreta. It was complained by one member of Parliament in 1601 that “they dig … in bedchambers, in sick rooms, not even sparing women in childbirth, yea even in God’s house, the church.” It might seem, therefore, that London was sitting on a lake of shit. This may be one of the reasons why the concept of the underworld or underground still has offensive connotations.

  In 1634, on the instigation of Inigo Jones, a large vaulted sewer was built in place of the open Moor Ditch. After the Great Fire, when there was an opportunity to build anew, John Evelyn imagined an “underground city” with “all the vaults, cellars and arched Meanders yet remaining” to be connected with “new erection.” The plan came to nothing. A series of local responses, however, tried to address the problems of pollution. The first brick sewers were built in the seventeenth century. The lower sections of the Fleet were arched over, and used as sewers, in 1727. A London Bridge sewer was constructed, using the Walbrook as its medium. Between 1756 and 1856 more than a hundred sewers were constructed beneath the streets. By that later date there were in London approximately 200,000 cess-pits and 360 sewers.

  The new wave of construction yielded strange evidence of London’s history. When workmen were digging up part of Smithfield, in the spring of 1849, in order to lay a new sewer, they came upon a mass of crude stone that was blackened by fire; the stones were covered with ashes and human bones. They had discovered the place of martyrdom in sixteenth-century London, where the Henrician and Marian heretics were burned to death. Many of the bones were removed as relics. The exact nature of the faith they once espoused, Catholic or Protestant, was not considered to be important.

  The cess-pits and the new sewers were not entirely beneficial. Methane or swamp gas, generated by the cess-pits, often caught fire and exploded; those trapped in their houses were burned or suffocated. Many of the sewers were in a state of dilapidation. The bricks of the Mayfair sewer were said to be as rotten as gingerbread; you could have scooped them out with a spoon. Sewer-workers were suffocated by a gas, sulphurated hydrogen, that was the product of putrid decomposition.

  A survey of the sewers of London was undertaken in the summer and autumn of 1848 when their condition was described as “frightful”; the system was dilapidated and decayed, even dangerous. The sewer for the Westminster workhouse was “in so wretched a condition that the leveller could scarcely work for the thick scum that covered the glasses of the spirit-level a few minutes after being wiped.… A chamber is reached about thirty feet in length from the roof of which hangings of putrid matter like stalactites descend three feet in length.” One of the investigating party was “dragged out on his back (through two feet of black foetid deposits) in a state of insensibility.” This was the heart of darkness, the lowest depth of a city that was already being described as a wilderness. It represented what was called a “monstrous evil.”

  Thus, in October 1849, four men were killed when entering an unventilated sewer in Kenilworth Road, Pimlico. In the same period an explosion at the Kennington Road sewer injured some workmen with “the skin peeled off their faces and their hair singed.” In November 1852, two men were instantly killed from poisonous air when they entered a sewer in Compton Street, Clerkenwe
ll. In 1860 four men were suddenly killed in the Fleet Lane sewer by some unknown discharge.

  Innumerable reports can be found of explosions caused by “coal gas.” On 16 October 1833, a house in King Street, St. James’s Square, was the site of such an event. “The gas appears to have made its way from the sewer up the drain into the house, and a servant entering with a light, it ignited; the room was filled with flame, the woman was lifted to the ceiling by the force of the explosion, which also blew off the skylight over the staircase.” The underworld was a place of threat as well as degradation. Its forces could find a way secretly into the outer world.

  Yet underground London had already attracted its own clientele. A subterranean race of “toshers” was born, people who earned their living by scavenging in the sewers for any items of value. They looked for pennies or sovereigns, or the fabulous ball of moulded coins known as a “tosheroon.” They worked in silence and in stealth, closing off their bull’s-eye lanterns whenever they passed a street-grating “for otherwise a crowd might collect overhead.” Their work was of course illegal. They may also have been mistaken for an underground race coming up for air.

  They soon acquired a legendary quality, and became the object of sensational reports and descriptions. They were the beings of the underworld who entered the sewers on the banks of the Thames at low tide, armed with large sticks to defend themselves from rats. They carried lanterns to light their way, and wandered for miles beneath the crowded streets. They wore a distinctive uniform, with canvas trousers and long coats with large pockets. They found metal spoons, iron tobacco-boxes, nails and pins, bones, marbles, buttons, pieces of silk, scrubbing brushes, empty purses, corks, candle-ends, seed, pieces of soap, false money and false teeth; these objects were the relics of Victorian London, scavenged by outcasts.

  “The Sewer-hunter,” 1851 (illustration credit Ill.14)

  And how did these outcasts cope upon their quest? John Archer, in Vestiges of Old London (1851), reported that “many venturers have been struck down in such a dismal pilgrimage.” Their role as pilgrims reinforced the notion that the tunnels and streams underground were still somehow sacred. Archer speculated that “many have fallen suddenly choked, sunk bodily in the treacherous slime, become a prey to swarms of voracious rats, or been overwhelmed by a sudden increase of the polluted stream.” It is an apocalyptic fate. Henry Mayhew, in London Labour and the London Poor (1851), suggested that they were enveloped in darkness, “their lights extinguished by the noisome vapours—till, faint and overpowered, they dropped down and died upon the spot.” That was the fate of the devotees of the underground gods, a race of supplicants doomed by their own calling. They were the pale votaries of darkness and excrement.

  The dirtiest jobs do not change. The sewers of London are much the same as those first built at Knossos in 1700 BC, and the activities of sewer-workers or “flushers” have been the same for thousands of years. In the nineteenth century it was reported that they actively enjoyed their work. The air of the sewers was supposed to be a sovereign defence against disease. The men preferred it to the atmosphere above the ground. Mayhew himself was surprised to note the good health of these underground workers; they were “strong, robust and healthy men, generally florid in their complexion.” Yet he also described them as “with a few exceptions stupid, unconscious of their degradation, and with little anxiety to be relieved of it.” This is the dismissive and contemptuous discourse of those above the ground.

  The words of the flushers themselves have often been reported. “They was like warrens,” one sewer-man of the mid-nineteenth century recalled, “you never see such shores [sewers]…. It’s pretty stuff, too, the gas, if you can only lay on your back when it goes ‘whish’ an’ see it runnin’ all a-fire along the crown o’the arches.… One mornin’ when the tide was all right, we goes down to work, an’ picks up a leg.” And, he added, “Not a wooden one neither.”

  Despite their bravado and their evident enjoyment of their work, they could not successfully deal with the damaged sewers or their contents. The “great stink” issued forth in 1858. This was the period when the water closets of a quarter of a million households were directly connected to the public sewers, with the result that the waste was discharged immediately into the Thames. It became a river of effluent and an open sewer. The foreshore was black. Victoria and Albert embarked upon a pleasure cruise, but within minutes the smell had driven them back to the shore. The water supply of many Londoners was piped directly from the Thames, and was now described as being “of a brownish colour.” The windows of the Houses of Parliament were covered with sheets soaked in chlorine, but they could not prevent the stench from what Disraeli called “a Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror.” It was the “unbearable horror” of the city. Disraeli himself left a committee room of Westminster in some discomfort. “With a mass of papers in one hand and with his pocket handkerchief clutched in the other, and applied closely to his nose, with body half bent, [he] hastened in dismay from the pestilential odour.” The underground world had invaded the surface. All that was ejected and rejected had come back with a vengeance.

  “Flushing the Sewers,” 1851 (illustration credit Ill.15)

  The parliamentary authorities were now acutely aware that the sanitary conditions of the nineteenth century had changed not at all, and had in fact deteriorated, from the conditions of the fifteenth century. They were obliged to take general and immediate action. The chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, Joseph Bazalgette, found a solution. He proposed to build an elaborate system of sewers, running in parallel with the river, that would intercept the pipes going down to the Thames and carry the effluent beyond the city into “outfalls” at Barking in north-east London and at Crossness south of the Thames on the Erith marshes. He also managed the reconstruction of the smaller sewers already in existence. The five principal intercepting sewers were at different depths, the lowest being some 36 feet beneath the surface.

  Some were fearful at the enterprise of meddling with the underworld. They believed, according to an essay in All the Year Round, that the new sewers might become “volcanoes of filth; gorged veins of putridity; ready to explode at any moment in a whirlwind of foul gas, and poison all those whom they fail to smother.” This is a vision of Hades let loose upon the outer world. Yet Bazalgette’s work continued. Ford Madox Brown’s painting of heroic labourers, Work, completed in 1863, depicts men laying an underground sewer in Heath Street, Hampstead.

  One of the lower sewers runs from Ravenscourt Park and Hammersmith to Kensington; it then proceeds beneath the Brompton Road and Piccadilly, and makes its hidden way along the Strand and Aldwych before going under the City and Aldgate. Another sewer starts at Hammersmith and begins its long journey towards the river Lea. It passes under Fulham and Chelsea before being propelled by a pumping station towards Millbank and the Houses of Parliament. From there it travels unseen beneath the Victoria Embankment, Blackfriars and Tower Hill, where it is directed to Whitechapel and Stepney. It has traversed the depths of London. In the tunnels themselves there is much elaborate architectural detailing and decoration, such as the graduated edging of the arches, even though the effects will rarely if ever be seen; it is almost Egyptian in its secrecy.

  The whole system finds its quietus at the Abbey Mills Pumping Station in Stratford; the original building, now used as a “back-up,” was conceived in a style variously described as Venetian Gothic or Slavic or Byzantine as a suitably solemn tribute to the matter of the underworld. It was called “the cathedral of sewage,” again connecting the sacred and the underground worlds. Its sister station at Crossness was also described as a “perfect shrine of machinery,” with its interior resembling a Byzantine church. Abbey Mills was seen as a magical space, “poetical” and “fairy-like” according to a journalist from the Daily Telegraph, in the spring of 1865, thus confirming the underworld as a place of gleaming treasure. Yet the same journalist, entering the empty subterranean reser
voir, also believed himself to be “in the very jaws of peril, in the gorge of the valley of the shadow of death”; he was close to “the filthiest mess in Europe, pent up and bridled in, panting and ready to leap out like a black panther.” The two images of the underworld, the magical and the demonic, are here conflated.

  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.