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Joseph Bazalgette

From the Middle Ages, the Thames and its tributaries had effectively been treated like an open sewer. By the 1800s, London stood over a network of excavated domestic cesspools, these should have been emptied by ‘nightmen’ but sewage frequently overflowed back into houses and streets.

A breakout of cholera in 1832 and a typhus epidemic in 1837-1838 illustrate just how bad the situation had got. The final straw was the ‘Great Stink’ in the summer of 1858, when the heat made the Thames smell so bad that the curtains in the Houses of Parliament had to be soaked in chloride of lime to try to disguise the smell.

In 1855, the Metropolitan Board of Works was established and its chief engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, was tasked with designing a new sewerage and drainage system to alleviate London’s problems. Bazalgette’s solution was over 1,300 miles of enclosed brick sewers and four pumping stations.

One of these stations, the Abbey Mills Pumping Station, is visible from Three Mills Green. It was designed by Bazalgette with Edmund Cooper and architect Charles Driver, and built between 1865 and 1868.

The pumping station was required to lift waste from the low-lying sewers of the city into the bigger Northern Outfall Sewer, from where it travelled to the River Thames (today it goes to the treatment works in Beckton).

It was a major innovation of the 19th century and helped earn Bazalgette a knighthood.

 

Image credit:
Sir Joseph William Bazalgette by Lock & Whitfield, 1877 or before © National Portrait Gallery, London

 

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