The Sun.
London, England, 1861-10-09 00:00:00

271 E LONDON SETVERIGE.

It is 'not often that we can accuse London vestries
of hiding their light under a bushel. Their mem-
bers are gem erally considered to be noisy and vulgar,
with narrow views and a vast amount of self-asser-
tion. What little they do they parade before the
world, and are never so happy as when their ac-
tions, quarrels, and discussions are fully reported in
their parochial organs. Of these latter newspapers
the metropolis can now show between '2O and 30,
from the City Press to the Ts ingsland Advertiser.
The Metropolitan Board of Works, which we
shall not insult, we hope, when we call it a sifted
upper parish parliament, has been singularly free
from this desire fer publicity. It has now been in
existence for nearly six years, and yet during that
time it has never courted the attention of the Lon-
don press. It has carried on its weekly debates in
the council chamber of Guildhall, and its business
arrangements in an old house in Soho-square, while
something very like a palace has been preparing
for its reception in Spring-gardens. It has cut a
few new thoroughfares, altered the names of a few
streets for better or worse, issued its reports
from time to time, collected its special rates and
spent them, talked a good deal, as all repre-
sentative assemblies will do, and that is all_ Those
journals which thought proper to report its debates
were welcome to its benches ; but its great work—
the Metropolitan Main Drainage Scheme—which is
to immortalise a much respected engineer, and
laurels some /16 picked yes-
crown with everlasting
trymen, was largely kept in the background. For
some years it has been the custom of the board to
make an ,annual inspection of those vast under-
ground sewer-works in the outskirts of London,
which most ratepayers hear of through the tax-
collector, but seldom see or understand. At what
period these mysterious oineial visits were made to
the unsavoury regions of sewage, few people,
except cabmen and hotel-keepers were aware.
The work was a mystery, and the inspection was
made a mystery also. Some restless ratepayers
goaded on excitable vestrymen to declare in open
vestry that the unruly offspring of Lord Llanover
was a pernicious sham, and that there were no new
sewers being constructed anywhere except in the
imagination of a few deluding draughtsmen.
Whether the recent contest between Mr.
Thwaites and the Right Hon. W. Cowpor for the
management of the proposed Thames Embankment
has put the Metropolitan Board of Works upon its
mettle ; or whether some discreet friend has whis-
pered in the ears of the Sewer Lords that further
secrecy would be indecent and impolitic, it is im-
possible to say, but the annual inspection of the
great main drainage works yesterday was attended
by so many running historians in the shapo of
"special correspondents," that the public will no
longer be uninformed on a deeply interesting sub-
ject.

If the history of the Loudon sewerage system
was elaborately written, it would be necessary to
quote Magna Charta and the laws of Romney
Marsh. It dates back some five centuries, and
deals with a legislation whose aim was to preserve
the existing watercourses from any obstruction. As
houses became built over the metropolitan area, and
population increased, these watercourses, notwith=
standing the severe prohibitions against using them
as receptacles for sewage, became robbed of their
virgin purity. When they notoriously ceased to
flow as limpid streams and purling brooks, they
were slowly and unwillingly covered over by the
local authorities. From this moment they became
6c:was in every sense of the term, although it was
not until the beginning of the present century that
any miscellaneous discharge into them was made
legal. All the acts were very defective for house
drainage ; and most of the local acts enforced the
construction of cesspools. About 1810 there must
have been two thousand cesspools in London, and
their increase was only checked by mechanical im-
provements in connection with an enlarged water
supply.
The old downward, or Thames seeking main
sewers of London, at the present time, are about
170 miles long; and they run into the river at
various points, through about 180 outlets on the
north and south side. The district and private
sewers which join these main channels must be
1,600 miles long within the metropolitan boundary;
and the drain-pipes—those smaller veins which
again join the district arteries—must be 4,000 miles
long within the same limits. The district sewers,
as their title implies, are governed by district
boards, or committees elected by the various parish
vestries; while the main sewers are formally handed
over, in trust, to the Metropolitan Board of 'Works.
Some sewer engineers quarrel about the proper
definition of a main sewer, and hold that the
channel is only properly so called when it follows
the line of an ancient watercourse. In this case
London would have few main sewers except the
Fleet, the London-bridge sewer, which has usurped
the channel of the old Walbrook, and the King's
Scholars' Pond sewer, which is all that is left of
that ancient bourne or rivulet that meandered
pleasantly from Hampstead through Mayfair into
the Thames, and gave us the corrupted name of
Marylebone, or the brook of St. Mary. We may add
the great Ranelagh sewer to this list, which repre-
sents the Westbourne and the Effra, on the Surrey
side, and we shat' then have nearly all the main
sewers based upon old natural channels. The artifi-
cial main sewers which swell the trust property of
the Metropolitan Board of Works are only main
sewers by Act of Parliament.

All these great downward channels may be de-
scribed roughly as funnel-shaped—the narrow end
being at the source in the hills, the broad end being
in the valley where it discharges into the river.
The velocity of their currents varies from one to
three miles an hour. The most important of them
discharge, at certain periods of the day, in dry
weather, from 1,000 to 2,000 cubic feet of sewage per
minute, the greatest height being generally main-
tained during the hours between nine in the morn-
ing and five in the afternoon. At other periods of
the day the same sewers rarely discharge more than
one-fourth of this quantity. The sizes of these under-
ground tunnels at different points of their course are
constructed so that they may convey the waters
flowing through them with no prospect of floods
and consequent bursting, and yet with no unneces-
sary waste of tunnelling. Most of them are in a
very defective condition, especially at the roof and
the base; and some of them are still black un-
covered ditches. Mr. Bazalgette, the chief engineer
of the Metropolitan Board of Works, in a recent
report, estimates the cost of repairing these tribu-
tary sewers at half-a-million sterling.
A London population of nearly 3,000,000 daily
defiling the Thames through these more or less de-
fective tributary sewers, is the real creator of this
great main drainage scheme. The plan is chiefly
one of interception—that is to say, the new sewers
will stretch like a girdle round London, cutting
through these various downward sewers, at different
levels on the north and south side of the river, and
carrying the sewage into the Thames at a point be-
tween Barking and Plumsteafl. The plan has had
mu)? opponents, and 11a8 many still, but no scheme