The Sun.
London, England, 1863-07-18 00:00:00

As on the occasion of the somewhat similar visit
the members of both Houses paid to the works
this time twelve months, so in this also Mr.
Bazalgette before starting addressed some short
remarks to the party on the nature and purpose of
the works they were about to visit. He pointed
out briefly how, with the enormous increase of the
metropolis, the increased facilities for drainage into
the Thames had added to the mass of sewage daily
poured into it, till the evil was now become almost
unbearable. For 18 hours out of the 24 the outfalls
of most of the metropolitan sewers were tide-locked,
and :on days of heavy rain the waters from the
higher grounds flooded the basements and cellars
of low-lying districts with both water and
sewage. These low-lying districts could only be
properly drained by continuous pumping, and
though one important feature of the new system
was to reduce pumping to a minimum and carry off
the water by gravitation, still pumping was in some
places absolutely necessary. Another difficulty
which had to be met was the varying quantities of
sewage and " storm" water to be dealt with. Four
times as much sewage passed down the sewers at
midday as at midnight, the maximum flow being
about equal to a rainfall of a quarter of an Lech in
24 hours, and the sewers were quite large enough
to carry off this rain together in with the maximum
quantity of sewage. But this quantity was greatly
exceeded about 24 days in the year by heavy
storms, which added more than a hnndred times to
the quantity the sewers could carry off at once ;
and as it would have been almost impossible to con-
struct sewers large enough to carry off these flood
waters, the existing main sewers were made to act
as storm overflows, so that when the intercepting
main sewers were full the surplus storm waters
should pass through the storm overflows into the
Thames ; and it was to these storm outfalls on the
north and south sides of the river, that the visit of
Saturday was paid.
The party embarked on a steamer at the Speaker's
Stairs, and proceeded down the river to Crossness
Point in Erith Marshes. While on the voyage down
we may venture on giving our readers the general
features of this great Main Drainage plan—a work
of such magnitude as no city in the world but this
would require, and certainly one of such cost as few
cities in the world but this could afford to pay for.
The subject of sewage is not a clean one, nor one
adapted for the literature of the dog days ; but after
inhaling dirt and drinking dirt for so many years
we may well afford to read about it, and to look
statistically into that foulest of all our great
sewers, the river Thames. Until the adoption of
the present scheme the object of all London drainage
%vas to make the Thames the great main sewer of the
metropolis—an object which we shall see was
realise
to the fullest possible extent. Al. the sewers in Lon-
don, on both sides of the river, run due north and
south, discharging themselves into the Thames
within a length of some five or eix miles. At the
very fiat glance this arrangement seems bad enough,
thour;h it i 3 infinitely worse when we come to exa-
mine how it was arranged to work. On both sides
of the river the beaks are very little above high-
water mark, while the average level of the ground
immediately behind them is much below it; half
Lambeth, Bermondsey,and Rotherhithe being Eft.
below high-water
the level of the level. Of course, when this is
ground the sewers are much lower
still, and their outlets
so completely tide-locked that
it is only at dead low water that they can empty
themselves at all. Thus, for nearly 18 hours out of
the 24 the sewage on both
be , andnffits
is still
miasmato
into an sides of London used to
immense extent, pent up, giv-
ingevery street and house. As
we have said, it could
tidenly escape at dead low
g
water, when the returnin immediately churned
it up the river, keeping all
e its. abominable " flotsam
bridge and jetsam" above
finding 200,000 or 300,000 taillilethe tide ebbed ,
out
ope-
rated upon in a similar mannerg ofns . filth to be
was the arrangement 12 years
an its return. This
entirely so ; but, even bad agsoL. andis
almost
capable of being made worse, and worts was,
it was
it was made. In 1849 most of the houses
enaccordingly
don had cesspools attached to them, oesd in
Lon-
don very
large proportion were without any drainsn at all.
The alarming nature of this evil showed itself
slowly but surely in the Bills of Mortality, and
the then Commissioners of Sewers, who were feebly
battling with the evils of the drainage BBy te
set to work to mitigate the cesspool -
danger by
drainage, making the Thames, as usual, the general
receptacle. From that time to the present some
700 or 800 miles of new drains have been made,
and all cesspools made to drain at once into the
river. By this " improved" drainage some 200,000
additional gallons of sewage were daily added to
the Thames at low water, containing no less than
300 tons of " organic matter" which in this case is
the scientific term for filth. Nor was the Thames
the only sufferer. Wherever a stream could be
found, no matter how clear its waters or how bene-
ficial its course, drains were at once made into it.
I fackney Brook, onco well-known to anglers as one
of the clearest and prettiest of streams that wound
from the north of Loudon into the river Lea, was
made to vie with the Thames in filth and stench ;
and even the Serpentine was brought into requisi-
tion, and the Ranelagh sewer (one of the largest in
London) daily discharged itself into that much-
prized piece of ornamental water. The Thames,
however, as the largest claimant, always got the
preference of dirt, and the great mass of corruption
which has flowed into it year after year has at last
made it the largest and dirtiest open sewer in
Iluro p-°
. ILe result, as a matter of course, has been
that in the summer months the stench from the