London's Labyrinth E-Book

Fiona Rule

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 368

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Do you know what's under your feet? The London Underground was the very first underground railway – but it wasn't the first time Londoners had ventured below ground, nor would it be the last. People seem to be drawn to subterranean London: it hides unsightly (yet magnificent) sewers, protects its people from war, and hosts its politicians in times of crisis. But the underground can also be an underworld, and celebrated London historian Fiona Rule has tracked down the darker stories too – from the gangs that roamed below looking for easy prey, to an attempted murder–suicide on the platform of Charing Cross. Underneath London is another world; one with shadows of war, crime and triumph. London's Labyrinth is a book that no London aficionado should be without.

Leseprobe

LONDON’S

LABYRINTH

For Mum – the person with whom I first ventured into London’s Labyrinth, via the Piccadilly Line.

Cover illustrations:Above: Traffic on Westminster (Joseph Plotz/Creative Commons) Below: Workmen checking a document at a junction of tunnels in London’s sewer system, 15th April 1950. (Photo by Charles Hewitt/Picture Post/Getty Images)

First published in 2012 by Ian Allan Publishing

This edition published 2018

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Fiona Rule, 2012, 2018

The right of Fiona Rule to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9033 2

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1     The Great Stink

2     The Underground Visionary

3     Charles Pearson and the Subterranean Railway

4     The Subterranean City Expands

5     The Transport Boom

6     Wartime Underground

7     The Underground Underworld

8     Danger Underground

9     Terror On The Underground

10   The Post-War Underground

11   Abandoned Underground

12   Ghost Stations

13   Tracking London’s Lost Rivers

14   Into Tomorrow

Postscript: Tyburn River Walk

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the immensely knowledgeable and helpful staff at the London Transport Museum, the National Archives, the Westminster Archives and the London Metropolitan Archives for their assistance with my research.

I am also indebted to Celia Harrison, Jack Hawkins and Akile Osman at London Underground for their generous assistance, and would like to express my gratitude for the help that the late Suki Harrison gave me by putting me in touch with these knowledgeable people.

Finally, many thanks to my agent, Sheila Ableman, for her advice and guidance; Mark Beynon and colleagues at The History Press for their help and enthusiasm; and last but not least my husband Robert for his constant support.

Introduction

My journey into London’s underground labyrinth began on a warm July afternoon, in the leafy communal gardens that lay behind the red-brick walls of a mansion block in west London. A residents’ party was in full swing and, as the wine flowed and tempting smells wafted from the barbecue, I struck up a conversation with a fellow partygoer. I told her about my fascination with London, and how I’d always been especially interested in the city hidden beneath our feet. ‘There’s all sorts of things down there,’ I enthused. ‘Old tunnels, bunkers, disused Tube stations …’

‘My daughter works for London Underground,’ she told me. ‘She might be able to show you around some of those abandoned stations.’ So began my exploration of the secrets of subterranean London.

London’s underground railway is indeed a labyrinth. Although hundreds of its winding tunnels are seen by thousands of travellers every day, there are many more that lie dark and deserted beneath the city streets, hidden from view behind anonymous doors, ignored by hordes of commuters who pass them every day. But, for anyone interested in the history of the city, these blank doors are the gateway into a wonderland.

On a quiet street off Piccadilly, a graffiti-covered entrance leads to a tiny stairwell that descends into total blackness. This is what remains of Down Street Tube station, an abandoned stop on the Piccadilly Line. Never having been used very much, the station closed its doors in 1932 – only to find an unlikely purpose as a secret government bunker known as ‘The Burrow’ during the Second World War.

Soon after the grave declaration of war was made, Down Street’s abandoned platforms were hurriedly bricked up and the station became the makeshift headquarters of the Emergency Railway Committee, whose unenviable task was to keep London moving throughout the duration of the conflict. Their subterranean headquarters served them so well that Winston Churchill and his Cabinet used some of the rooms from time to time. As Hitler’s bombs began to rain down on the city, soberly dressed civil servants, cabinet members, secretaries and telephonists slipped quietly through the station’s side door and made the way down to their top-secret workplace. Here they would stay for hours, or sometimes days, at a time, concealed from the view of passengers on the trains rushing past the platform’s edge.

Today, the Down Street war bunker is long deserted but its shell still remains, along with a few clues to its incongruous former use. In a narrow, claustrophobic corridor an old telephone switchboard stands in the darkness, covered with sixty years of dust and grime. Other, smaller rooms in the complex are still fitted with washing facilities, for staff forced to sleep there when the Blitz was at its most ferocious.

My exploration of the underground railway’s hidden places revealed the many diverse stories the Tube network has to tell. At Aldgate, I was shown the shadowy remains of the original station, just visible in the fading light before blackness engulfs the tunnel. At Moorgate, the tiny blind tunnel that a packed Northern Line train ploughed into at full speed, one terrible day in 1975, was grimly indicated. The front carriage of the doomed train slammed into the tunnel wall with such force that the two carriages immediately behind it were forced up and under each other, trapping the people inside in a tangled forest of warped metal and shattered glass. The scene that met the men and women who came to rescue them must have been hellish.

I found my excursions underground fascinating, sometimes unnerving but always intriguing. The stories I uncovered inspired me to journey deeper into the subterranean city, to explore all the facets of this complex labyrinth. What I found was a hidden network as essential to the life of London as anything above ground. From the miles of electrical and telecom cabling secreted beneath the pavements to the sewers that carry the city’s waste, what goes on beneath London is essential to the city’s existence.

Underground London is largely Victorian. Britain’s emergence as a nineteenth-century superpower prompted its capital to grow at an alarmingly fast rate. Suddenly, the above-ground infrastructure that had worked for centuries became woefully insufficient. Faced with such a challenge, Victorian engineers found the answer lay beneath their feet. Thus the underground labyrinth began to evolve, in order to enable London to survive.

The fetid miasmas created by the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858 prompted the engineer Joseph Bazalgette to originate one of London’s first underground innovations – a network of subterranean pipes that carried away the city’s rotting detritus. This visionary project saved countless Londoners from the horrors of the deadly water-borne disease that had ravaged the city for generations.

The first forays beneath the streets were dirty and massively disruptive, as teams of burly ‘navvies’ dug colossal trenches into which pipes and tunnels were laid. As Londoners picked their way through the towering piles of earth that lined the streets, a man named James Greathead was busy putting the finishing touches to his ‘tunnelling shield’ – a monstrously large circular device that worked on similar lines to a giant pastry cutter, slicing through the sticky subterranean clay and avoiding the need to start digging above ground. The ‘Greathead Shield’, as it became known, took the subterranean city into a new era where no project was deemed impossible. Soon, the labyrinth beneath the streets began to stretch away from the city centre, toward the new housing estates that lay on its perimeter, providing the residents with water, light and transport – with all workings hidden from view.

Since then, the city under London has found other, more ominous uses. Ministers and military men followed the course of the Second World War from bunkers buried deep beneath the streets, while civilians sat anxiously in subterranean shelters and deep-level Tube stations, listening to Hitler’s bombs raining down on the city above. Later, the Cold War prompted the construction of ever deeper shelters that might give a handful of Londoners a chance of surviving the atom bomb.

Today, parts of London’s bafflingly complex network of underground tunnels and pipelines are over 100 years old. The labyrinth has acquired its own history and folklore. Fascinating stories abound of abandoned tunnels, ghost stations and shadowy spaces hidden beneath the city streets.

Over the last two centuries, subterranean London has continued to grow and evolve. Today, its labyrinthine byways stretch out for miles, from the centre into the adjacent suburbs and surrounding countryside. They are the roots of the city, giving life to the metropolis above.

Chapter 1

The Great Stink

The earliest days of June 1858 brought balmy summer weather to London. The city basked under clear skies, interrupted only by occasional brief night-time thunderstorms. However, as mid-month approached, the weather suddenly turned more sultry and oppressive. Temperatures soared to well over 80°F and, as Londoners went about their business along the sun-baked city streets, those closest to the Thames began to notice how the great river’s waters were becoming somehow thicker, darker and distinctly fouler smelling.

On Saturday 12 June, a young man who set out from Westminster pier in a small rowing boat, destined for the Crabtree Inn at Putney Reach, was so overcome by the foul-smelling river he was almost compelled to turn back. Further east, lightermen delivering cargo to the tall sailing ships berthed at the docks found the stench so bad in places that they were forced to rush to the side of their boats, where they became repeatedly and violently sick.

As the heatwave continued unabated, the whole city surrounding the Thames became shrouded in a stinking miasma. Work became almost impossible as Londoners deliberated over which was the lesser of two evils – the heat or the smell. ‘T.S.’, a lawyer whose offices were in the Temple, wrote, ‘The stench … today is sickening and nauseous in the extreme … If I open my windows in rushes the stench; if I close them the heat is so great that I am almost suffocated.’

The lawyer’s dilemma was shared by thousands of other Londoners, including Members of Parliament whose meeting rooms at the Palace of Westminster overlooked the river. As temperatures reached a stifling 93°F on Wednesday 16 June, MPs at the House of Commons reeled from the stench permeating the rooms closest to the river. The Times reported, ‘A few members, indeed, bent upon investigating the subject at its very depth, ventured into the library, but they were instantaneously driven to retreat, each man with a handkerchief to his nose.’

Determined to seek out and identify the cause, Parliament’s ‘Inspector for Ventilation’, Mr Goldsworthy Gurney, was dispatched in a boat to investigate the situation on the Thames. During his unpleasant journey, Gurney noticed that the cloudy, reeking water stretched along the entire central section of the river, from Woolwich in the east to Putney in the west. He also saw that this foul-smelling soup primarily comprised sewage. In his subsequent report to the House of Commons, Gurney concluded:

The water that comes into the Thames no doubt goes to the sea and carries some of the sewage with it, but a very large proportion still remains sufficient to settle on the banks of the river and to produce a nuisance. The black water is deposited on the flats or banks on the sides nearly the whole way.

The fact that the city’s sewage was disgorged into the Thames had been a cause for concern for years. However, the stinking fumes from the river had been at their worst while Parliament was on its summer recess and, consequently, very little had been done to address the problem. The fact that the government was now experiencing the disgusting odour at first hand was wholeheartedly welcomed by the press. On 18 June The Times wrote:

We are heartily glad of it … It is their fault that the river Thames has not … been purified … On Wednesday, when the heat was overpowering, they began to imagine that there was something in the popular outcry. Conviction rose with the quicksilver of the thermometer.

During the early decades of the nineteenth century, it had been a popularly held belief that although the odour periodically emanating from the Thames was hugely unpleasant, it was in no way harmful. However, in the 1850s opinion began to change and many London doctors were increasingly concerned that the water may indeed have been carrying a hazard to health.

During the Great Stink of 1858, Bermondsey’s chief medical officer, Dr John Challice, wrote:

I have daily persons consulting me who have been seized with nausea, sickness and diarrhoea, by them attributed to the effects of the effluvia from the river. Some have complained that the peculiar taste remained on their palate for days.

William Ord, surgical registrar of St Thomas’s Hospital, investigated the effects of the stench on river workers and noted:

They described themselves as experiencing, at first languor, and soon afterwards, nausea and pain, beginning most commonly at the temples and spreading over the head. After a time followed giddiness, and in many of them temporary loss or impairment of sight, the presence of black spots before their eyes and often utter mental confusion … In a considerable number the throat was swollen and red, causing much ‘soreness’ and intense thirst.

The river workers struggled through the physical discomforts caused by its dirty waters, totally unaware that they had fallen prey to one of the most dangerous diseases of the nineteenth century – cholera.

London experienced its first cholera epidemic in 1832. By the end of that year, it had killed over 6,000 inhabitants. A second epidemic broke out in 1848, killing around 14,000, and the disease would strike again just four years later. As more and more people succumbed to the sickness, a physician named John Snow vowed to stop it in its tracks by proving his theory that cholera was not caused by bad smells – as most people believed – but by contaminated water. He identified a small area of Soho, between Regent Street and Wardour Street, which had been badly affected by the epidemic, and questioned local residents about where they obtained their water. To his excitement, a huge proportion of households affected by the disease used a specific pump in Broad Street (today’s Broadwick Street). Snow petitioned the local parish council and, after telling them of his findings, persuaded them to remove the pump handle to stop anyone accessing the contents of the well beneath. Once this had been done, the cholera outbreak began to subside.

With the cause now identified, Dr Snow analysed the pump water and investigated the condition of the well. Although the samples yielded nothing conclusive, he was intrigued to discover how the well was situated very close to an old, leaky cesspit. It suddenly became clear that cholera epidemics were not only waterborne but were effectively created by contaminated sewage. Armed with this new information, he turned his attentions to the greatest water source in London – the Thames. His most significant realisation was that riverside companies were systematically poisoning their customers by supplying them with disease-ridden water.

John Snow’s discoveries were among the most important scientific advances of the era. However, like many trailblazers before him, he failed to convince the government. His detractors argued that he relied too heavily on circumstantial evidence rather than scientific fact, and further, that by the time the pump handle in Broad Street had been removed, the cholera epidemic was already in decline. This, coupled with the prohibitive expense that a countrywide investigation into levels of water pollution would entail, prompted the authorities to disregard Dr Snow’s hypothesis.

Although Snow was largely ignored by those in power, ordinary Londoners were not surprised by his findings. For decades, people living close to the Thames had found its water so unpalatable that they opted to give their children beer, or even gin, to drink. In his book Town Swamps and Social Bridges, published a year after the Great Stink, the writer George Godwin noted:

Fifteen or sixteen years ago, the Thames water was not so bad, and persons on the river did not hesitate at dipping in a vessel and drinking the contents. Such a thing now would be an act of insanity; and yet we are told, on good authority, that in a part of Rotherhithe a number of poor persons, who have no proper water supply, are obliged to use, for drinking and other purposes, the Thames water in its present abominable condition, unfiltered.’

It seems incredible now that London, then the richest and most influential city in the world, had allowed the river at its heart to become so horrendously polluted. However, the poisoning of the Thames had been a very gradual intermittent process, with its roots in the medieval period. Several centuries earlier, a network of rivers had run through London into the Thames from sources high in the surrounding hills. These rivers provided the obvious means to dispose of both sewage and industrial waste, which slowly turned them from pleasant waterways into filthy open drains. Keen to obscure these unsightly, foul-smelling watercourses from view, residents began to cover them over, and thus London acquired its first underground tunnel network. Over the centuries, these rivers would be diverted deeper underground – still flowing silently beneath our feet to this day.

The London landscape looked very different before the rivers were closed off from view. Close to the River Lea, the forbiddingly named Black Ditch flowed through east London into the Thames at Limehouse. The sacred Walbrook ran through the centre of the Roman city of Londinium, where the occupying soldiers worshipped at the Temple of Mithras. The Fleet and the Tyburn rose at rural Hampstead and streamed past the villages that surrounded the northern and western edges of the metropolis. The River Westbourne provided a pleasant place for travellers to rest their livestock at Bayard’s Watering Place (modern Bayswater) before flowing into Hyde Park, where Queen Caroline dammed its waters in 1730 to create the Serpentine. Further west, Counter’s Creek and Stamford Brook provided water for the inhabitants of the ancient settlements we now know as Chelsea and Hammersmith.

South of the Thames, the Falcon meandered through the common land of Wandsworth and Clapham while the Effra’s course led from Norwood, through the villages of Dulwich and Brixton, down to the Thames at Vauxhall. Today, the Imperial War Museum conceals the source of the River Neckinger, which flowed through south-east London (possibly joined by two tributaries – Earl’s Sluice and the Peck) before forking into two rivulets that formed a watery boundary to the notorious rookery of Jacob’s Island.

London’s rivers had become dangerously contaminated by the Middle Ages. As early as 1290, the prior of a Carmelite monastery in Whitefriars complained of how members of the brethren had succumbed to miasmas rising from the Fleet. In addition, the Walbrook was constantly choked by refuse thrown into its waters by the numerous skinners practising their craft on its banks. The Common Council endeavoured to rectify the problem, making leaseholders of land surrounding the riverbanks responsible for keeping the waterways clear of filth.

Nevertheless, the Fleet and the Walbrook grew more choked and foul-smelling with every year that passed. In order to obscure the revolting sight of the fetid waters flowing through their midst, landowners began to pave over parts of the rivers. In his Survey of London published in 1603, John Stow wrote of the Walbrook:

This water course having diverse Bridges, was afterwards vaulted over with bricke and paved levell with the Streetes and Lanes where through it passed, and since then also houses have been builded thereon, so that the course of the Walbroke is now hidden under ground, and thereby hardly knowne.

It was the first of London’s rivers to vanish from view.

The River Fleet remained above ground for some years more, although it was generally perceived as a blight on the city. By the 1600s it was referred to by Londoners as a ‘ditch’ rather than a river, its central section impassable due to use as a dump for butchers’ refuse. Numerous clean-up attempts were made throughout the century, but each time the Fleet quickly refilled with rotting viscera and sewage. Its muddy banks became treacherous to pedestrians and rumours abounded of unwary individuals slipping into the slurry. One particularly grisly story related the fate of a barber from Bromley, Kent, who, after a drunken night out at a City hostelry, fell into the Fleet. He was found the next day standing upright in the mud, frozen to death.

By the early 1700s the authorities had admitted defeat and attempts to clean up the Fleet were abandoned. Respectable families living close to its banks fled to more salubrious climes and the once pleasant riverside properties degenerated into slums. The area surrounding the Fleet Ditch at Clerkenwell became one of London’s worst rookeries, packed with dilapidated lodging houses occupied by thieves and other undesirables. According to local legend, the worst of these lodging houses stood at the corner of Brewhouse Yard. Commonly referred to as ‘Jonathan Wild’s House’, after the notorious thief-taker, it contained myriad hiding places and escape routes for villains on the run. Trapdoors were concealed in cupboards and behind curtains, through which felons could disappear into the murky depths of the Fleet. The ditch also provided a handy place to dispose of incriminating evidence, which quickly sank into the mud.

The Fleet became nothing more than an open sewer and the decision was made to henceforth conceal it from view. In 1735, the section running from Ludgate Hill to Holborn Bridge was covered over and a marketplace was laid out on the new land. A quarter of a century later, work began to cover the remaining part of the Fleet that lay within the city boundaries. By 1768, virtually the entire river – from Holborn to the Thames – had been forced underground.

Despite the problems caused by the dreadful state of the Fleet and the Walbrook, London’s waste still had to be disposed of. The rivers’ convenient habit of carrying deposits to the Thames, where they were dragged out to sea by the tide, meant that they remained the favoured method of refuse removal. All manner of rubbish found its way into the city’s waterways, but the most revolting was undoubtedly human waste. Originally, Londoners had dealt with the disposal of sewage themselves, quietly spreading it on their gardens or surreptitiously dropping it into the nearest drain. However, by the 1300s, the sheer volume meant it was impossible to dispose of it personally. As a result, men were employed as ‘rakers’: freelance workers who removed the contents of household cesspits. The first recorded mention of a raker dates from 1327, while thirty years later a civic document declared, ‘The dung that is found in the streets … shall be carried … out of the City … by the Rakyers.’

However, the onerous task of emptying the cesspits was often left to the householders. In 1535, London physician Thomas Vicary wrote, ‘The Raker … shall have a horne, & blowe at every mannes doore … to lay owt theyre offal.’ Some rakers were willing to do the job themselves for more pay, most notably the unfortunate ‘Richard le Rakyere’ who, in 1326, fell into a cesspit he was emptying and drowned.

Once the raker had filled his cart he would drive out to the countryside, where his unsavoury product was sold to farmers who found it to be excellent manure for their crops (particularly those of the root vegetable variety). In 1816, Solomon Baxter, owner of Potteral’s Farm in North Mimms, Hertfordshire, took out advertisements in the newspapers extolling the benefits of human excrement for turnips, which apparently ‘came up very luxuriantly, and continue uncommonly strong and healthy’.

Due to the nature of their business, London’s rakers were increasingly obliged to carry out their work after dark to avoid complaints from neighbours. By the mid 1700s they became known as ‘night soil men’, with local bylaws passed to ensure their business was conducted in a discreet and sanitary manner. The night soil men were forbidden to offload the contents of their carts in built-up areas and had to adhere to strict rules as to when collections could be carried out. For example, in the parish of St Clement Danes, fines of up to £5 could be issued to any night soil men caught ‘beginning to empty any bog-house, or taking away night soil, at any time, except between 12 at night and five in the morning’.

For centuries, the valuable (if nauseating) work of the rakers or night soil men ensured London’s rivers remained relatively free of household sewage. However, by the 1700s the whole idea of domestic cesspits was being questioned. Traditionally, even the smartest houses had privies close to their backdoors for ease of use, particularly in the cold winter months. Some homes even had indoor facilities with cesspits dug underneath their ground floor. Almost without exception, these pits were not enclosed and so, consequently, the effluent leaked into the surrounding soil, producing an aroma that pervaded the house, particularly on hot summer days. As London’s streets became more densely populated and the smells worsened, so it became clear that waste had to be taken away from the buildings. As a consequence, homes began to attach drains to their cesspits which led, via sewer pipes, to the nearest river.

By the end of the 1700s, rivers in previously rural areas had begun to fill with waste. It became clear that it was only a matter of time before they suffered the same fate as the Fleet and the Walbrook. By 1827, the section of the Westbourne that ran from Hyde Park to Sloane Square had become such a hazard that it was covered over and built upon. Less than ten years later, it was considered too filthy to continue providing the water for Queen Caroline’s Serpentine lake. In 1854, doctors petitioned the sewer commissioners to conceal the remaining part of the river that ran from Sloane Square to the Thames, after numerous local residents succumbed to a devastating cholera epidemic everyone suspected was linked to the stinking river. By this time, the Westbourne was generally referred to as the ‘Ranelagh Sewer’ – an apt description of the foul stream that ran through lands in Chelsea once owned by the wealthy Earl of Ranelegh.

Although many people would have preferred to see the rivers cleaned rather than driven underground, the sheer quantity of waste produced in the capital by the beginning of the 1800s made their fate inevitable. Even an attempt by Lord Kensington to turn the filthy Counter’s Creek into a canal, in the 1820s, turned into a commercial disaster when the canal quickly silted up, making it impossible to navigate. Only thirty years after it opened, the canal was sold to the West London Railway, which diverted the creek underground and laid railway tracks in the old canal bed.

By the late 1820s, the population of London reached over 1.3 million as the Industrial Revolution drove thousands of ex-agricultural workers into the city in search of work with the new manufactories. As the city expanded, the dangers associated with dumping industrial waste in the rivers became manifest. On 25 January 1828, The Times warned:

Accounts are constantly appearing in the newspapers … establishing beyond doubt the great impurity of the Thames water taken up at London. The Commissioners of Sewers have endeavoured to prevent the refuse of the gas works from escaping into the river, but from the immense quantity now used, it inevitably finds its way thither. I am assured that the refuse water discharged into the Fleet ditch sewer at Battle Bridge, which runs into the Thames, is equal to that of a gutter on a rainy day; forming a perpetual stream of poisoned fluid, and depositing a green sediment upon the stones over which it passes. Not long ago it was proved upon trial, that a horse was actually poisoned by drinking water impregnated with the refuse of the gas-works in the Horseferry Road.

Horses were not alone in succumbing to poison. The newspapers were inundated with reports from concerned passers-by who had seen huge quantities of dead fish floating in the Thames. Londoners realised it was not only the sewers and manufactories that were polluting the river. For many years, the huge enclosed docks that ran along the banks of the Thames had been discharging all manner of chemical and industrial waste into their vast basins, where it was inevitably dragged into the river as the tide receded. On 28 August 1828, newspapers carried the tragic story of William Nurse of Charles Street, Westminster, who died after falling into the West India Dock’s export basin. Witnesses to the accident were certain the poor boy had been poisoned by the huge amount of copperas (iron sulphate) released into the water by the copper-bottomed boats that berthed there.

In addition to spewing toxic chemicals into the Thames, the sewers themselves could be highly dangerous places. Three months after the death of William Nurse, the residents of College Street, Cowley Street and Wood Street in Westminster were thrown into panic by loud explosions emanating from a sewer leading from the gasworks in Great Peter Street. Eyewitnesses watched in horror as huge flames leapt from the drain grating, almost knocking a man off his feet as he walked out of the nearby Bull’s Head pub.

On a lighter note, concealment of the rivers underground shrouded them in mystery, with tall stories and incredible sightings abounding. In 1836, The Gentleman’s Magazine related one such story that had been doing the rounds for 100 years:

A fatter boar was hardly ever seen than one taken up this day coming out of the Fleet Ditch into the Thames. It proved to be a butcher’s, near Smithfield Bars, who had missed him five months, all of which time he had been in the common sewer, and was improved in price from 10 shillings to two guineas.’

During the 1700s, the positioning of London’s sewers had been dictated by geography. The ancient rivers provided the main channels leading to the Thames, to which manmade drains were connected. However, as nature’s sewage system struggled to cope with the sheer amount of waste relentlessly piled into it, the authorities tried to introduce order to the labyrinth of stinking waterways now flowing beneath their feet. By 1834, seven trusts had been set up in the capital with responsibility for maintaining the underground sewers. Six of the trusts controlled areas north of the Thames, namely Westminster, Holborn and Finsbury, Blackwall and Poplar, the City of London, Tower Hamlets and Regent Street. Only one single trust was responsible for sewers in south London, managing a massive area stretching from the River Ravensbourne in Kent to the Ember branch of the River Mole in Surrey.

By this time, the majority of West End and City households had drains connected to the river sewers. This made them major contributors to the increasingly dreadful state of the Thames, but the fact that their sewage was carried away meant they were generally in a much finer state of health than their neighbours in east London.

In poverty-stricken districts such as Bethnal Green and Shoreditch, the way the inhabitants disposed of their waste had not changed for centuries. As late as the 1840s, Bethnal Green had 33 miles of streets (not including the innumerable courts and alleys) and just 7¾ miles of sewers. Here the night soil men, long since made redundant in the West End, found plenty to employ them. The impoverished residents invariably disposed of human waste in the same manner as the Elizabethans, throwing it into gutters or spreading it over the few gardens that existed in this densely populated neighbourhood. Occasionally, the council would build a sewer along one of the main thoroughfares but it would remain virtually unused, as few householders could afford to have their home connected to it. Consequently, disease was rife, particularly in the old slums tucked away behind the major roads, where access to drainage was impossible. In these places waste was left to fester, contaminating local water supplies and attracting disease-carrying vermin.

Dr Hector Gavin, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, studied conditions in the East End in the mid 1800s and began to suspect the local population was being poisoned by its water supply. On a trip to the Hackney Road (an area where disease was rampant), he examined several communal water tanks and was horrified at their contents, later writing:

one contained the remains of fish, in a putrescent state; the wood of the second was rotten, covered with green, slimy mould, and the surface of the water iridescent from the scum floating on it; the third was an open kind of horse trough, adjacent to the privy.’

In addition to contaminated water tanks, Gavin also found many East End residents were living in conditions not seen in wealthier areas for decades. Many homes still had open drains running directly under the ground floor, and some cesspits were so full that their contents oozed over the boards of the outhouse, forcing any visitor to stand in raw sewage. In a couple of locations, filth had spread out of the privy, and the unfortunate tenants resorted to dumping ashes in its path, in a vain attempt to stop it creeping into their home.

Given this deplorable state of affairs, it might have been assumed that landlords of sewage-ridden properties would feel obliged to employ the services of night soil men. However, this was not the case. As Hector Gavin explained:

when it is considered that the usual cost of cleansing cesspools in London is £1 each time, and that the rents of the dwellings of the poor range from one shilling to … five shillings a week, it can be readily understood that the poor cannot cleanse their cesspools and privies, and that the landlords consider the expense very oppressive, and consequently neglect the operation.’

Of course, if the landlords had cared about the living conditions of their tenants and connected their homes with the main sewers, the situation on the River Thames would have been even worse. As it was, the river was in such a filthy state that, by 1855, the London waterworks was banned from supplying its customers with water taken from the tidal reaches of the Thames. However, a few forward-thinking politicians and civil servants saw the situation as an opportunity rather than a nuisance. One such man was Charles Pearson, solicitor to the City of London.

By the time of the Great Stink, Pearson had been working for the City in various capacities for over forty years – including a stint chairing the Board of Health from 1831–33. During his time in office, he had been horrified by the living conditions that prevailed in less affluent areas and had resolved to improve the lives of the City’s poor. He also had firsthand experience of the summertime miasmas emanating from the Thames, as his home was just a few minutes’ walk from the riverbank in Park Street, Westminster. As the state of the river reached crisis point in June 1858, Pearson urged his peers to force Parliament into action. But ridding the city of the river-borne stench formed only a small part of his master plan. Pearson’s subsequent campaigning on behalf of London’s poor would, in less than a decade, transform the terrain that lay beneath the streets forever.

While Charles Pearson formulated his grand plans for the City of London, his contemporaries searched in desperation for a way to clean up the Thames. Eventually, a possible solution emerged from across the English Channel. For decades, Paris had periodically been enveloped by unbearable stenches emanating from the Seine. However, in 1850, Baron Haussmann oversaw the construction of new sewer and water supply networks under the city, reputedly rendering the once filthy river clean enough to wash fine linen in. As London continued to suffer under the riverside stench, The Times cried in despair, ‘If the English engineers are not up to it, let’s send for a Frenchman.’

Chapter 2

The Underground Visionary

As fate would have it, The Times’s plea for a Frenchman was not ignored. During the Great Stink, the man in charge of the capital’s public engineering works was one Joseph Bazalgette, grandson of Jean Louis Bazalgette – a wealthy tailor from Ispagnac, France, who had arrived in England in 1784.

Joseph was born in 1819 in Enfield, Middlesex, to Joseph William Bazalgette, an officer in the Royal Navy, and his wife Theresa. At the time, Enfield was a sleepy market town beyond which lay acres of fields and woodland, providing a perfect playground for Joseph and his sister. However, shortly before his tenth birthday, the family moved away from the open, airy countryside into the urban heart of London. At first they took a house at 5 Lower Lisson Street, just off the Edgware Road, but soon moved to 48 Hamilton Terrace in the exclusive enclave of St John’s Wood.

Now living in the grimy and overcrowded metropolis, Joseph was exposed to the appalling living conditions endured by London’s poor. Just a short walk away from his home, behind the bustling thoroughfare of Edgware Road, were the labyrinthine street slums of Lisson Grove. This forgotten part of London had been ignored when the smart houses of Marylebone were fitted with new, sweet-smelling drainage systems, still languishing amid the stench of cesspits in the backyard until well into the middle of the nineteenth century.

Such sights were to have a profound effect on Joseph Bazalgette’s professional life. Unlike contemporaries such as Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew, however, he did not choose to help the poor by exposing their desperate living conditions through the written word. Instead, he was to give more practical assistance by using his engineering skills.

By the time he was in his early twenties, Bazalgette had qualified as a civil engineer and set up offices at Great George Street, Westminster, close to the home of City solicitor Charles Pearson. At the time, Britain was in the grip of railway mania and Bazalgette soon became inundated with work drawing up plans for new tracks, stretching the length and breadth of the country. His practice prospered and by 1845 he had acquired sufficient personal wealth to propose to Maria, the daughter of a rich Irishman named Edward Keogh. One year later, their first son was born and his new family gave Bazalgette further incentive to make his fledgling engineering business succeed. With little mind to his own well-being, he took on project after project until, in 1847, the massive workload overwhelmed him and he was forced to leave London for a long recuperative break.

This bout of mental exhaustion suggested the relentless work and financial precariousness of self-employment did not suit Bazalgette’s constitution. Indeed, a contemporary description of him as ‘very slight and spare, and considerably under the average height’ does not suggest a man destined for greatness. However, Bazalgette’s return to London in 1849 started a chain of events that would ultimately make him one of the founders of London’s underground labyrinth.

In the August of that year, Bazalgette was appointed assistant surveyor to the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers. This government body had long been wrestling with the problem of how best to dispose of London’s sewage, but had failed to find a solution. Consequently, in the year prior to Bazalgette’s engagement, the Commission was receiving an average of 100 complaints a week from disgruntled ratepayers. In October 1849, The Times came to the sorry conclusion that, ‘This sanitary council is wholly inefficient and useless.’ After staggering on for another six years and achieving very little, the Commission was scrapped, while a new body (the Metropolitan Board of Works) was created in its place. Joseph Bazalgette was retained as its chief engineer.

At first, the new board seemed to be following in the weary footsteps of its predecessor. For two years following its inception, very little was achieved apart from relentless repairs to old sewer pipes and countless meetings to discuss the best way forward, prompting the public to christen the new council the ‘Metropolitan Board of Words’. However, the stench of the Thames during the summer of 1858 forced the government to pour funds into the board’s coffers and finally, with sufficient money at his disposal, Bazalgette sprang into action.

The problem faced by Joseph Bazalgette and his team was truly massive. By the middle of the nineteenth century, London stretched for miles and comprised thousands of homes and businesses, the waste of which ultimately ended up in the Thames. The most popular solution was to resurrect the old practices of the night soil men and use the sewage as agricultural manure. Enthusiastic members of the public submitted plans to the Board of Works, showing how a series of gigantic pipes running to the suburbs could divert waste away from the Thames toward the market towns of Hertfordshire, Essex and Surrey. However, the draughtsmen of these grand schemes failed to take into account that London was situated in a valley and, as such, gravity would simply not permit their ideas to work.

Bazalgette knew that recycling the city’s sewage was impractical, expensive and virtually impossible to engineer. So, instead of getting rid of the problem, he decided to relocate it. Anyone watching the progress of flotsam and jetsam on the central part of the river could see it was little affected by the tide. Junk floating on the surface sometimes remained visible for days, only moving a few feet as the tide flowed in and out. However, further downriver, towards the Essex border, tides were stronger and refuse deposited near the riverbank at Barking disappeared with the first high tide it encountered. Realising that sewage deposited at this point in the river would quickly vanish, Bazalgette began to draw up his plans.

The second problem was how to stop underground rivers and drains from disgorging their contents into the central London stretch of the Thames. To change their course would have been hugely expensive and disruptive, so instead Bazalgette resurrected an idea for the contents of the old sewer system to be diverted before reaching the river. After studying the routes of the existing system and the volume of sewage that passed through it, he decided that a total of five intercepting sewers should be built, each running west to east across London.

Three of the new sewers were planned north of the river, rather unimaginatively christened the High Level, Middle Level and Low Level Sewers. The High Level Sewer would begin at Hampstead and run 7 miles along the perimeter of the metropolis, draining Highgate, Kentish Town, Holloway, Hornsey, Stamford Hill, Stoke Newington, Homerton and Hackney. Further south, the Middle Level Sewer would start at Kensal Green and run under the Regent’s Canal at Paddington to Notting Hill, where it would continue its subterranean journey east through Bayswater and down Oxford Street. After coursing its way under this major thoroughfare, the sewer would travel through Holborn to Clerkenwell Green and thence to East London via Old Street and Shoreditch. From there, it would follow the line of Bethnal Green Road and Green Street towards Bow, where it would join the High Level Sewer.