At Home - Bill Bryson [198]
Happily, another heroic figure was about to stride onto the scene—Joseph Bazalgette. By chance, Bazalgette worked in offices around the corner from Snow, though the two men never met as far as is known. Bazalgette was a very small man, short and featherlight, but compensated for his jockeylike stature with a spectacular curling mustache that reached literally from ear to ear. Like that other great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Bazalgette’s antecedents were French, though the family had been settled in England for thirty-five years by the time Joseph was born in 1819. His father was a Royal Naval commander, and Bazalgette grew up in an atmosphere of privilege, educated by private tutors and given every advantage in life.
Disqualified from a military career by his elfin stature, he trained as a railway engineer, but in 1849, aged thirty, he joined the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, where he soon rose to the position of chief engineer. Sanitation has never had a greater champion. Nothing concerning sewage and waste disposal escaped his scrutiny. Troubled that there were almost no public lavatories in London, he devised a plan to place public toilets at critical spots throughout the city. By collecting urine and selling it as an industrial product (stale urine was vital to the processing of alum, for one thing), he calculated that each urinal could produce £48 of income a year, a very handsome return. That plan was never adopted, but it did instill the general conviction that where sewers were concerned Joseph Bazalgette was the man to turn to.
After the Great Stink it became clear that London’s sewage system needed to be rebuilt, and Bazalgette was handed the job. The challenge was formidable. Bazalgette had to insert into an immensely busy city some twelve hundred miles of tunnels, which would last indefinitely, carry away every particle of waste generated by three million people, and be able to handle future growth of unknowable dimensions. He would have to acquire land, negotiate rights of way, procure and distribute materials, and direct hordes of laborers. The scale of every aspect of the job was exhausting merely to contemplate. The tunnels required 318 million bricks and necessitated the digging up and redistributing of 3.5 million cubic yards of earth. All this was to be done on a budget of just £3 million.
Bazalgette brilliantly exceeded every expectation. In the process of building the new sewer system he transformed three and a half miles of riverfront through the creation of the Chelsea, Albert, and Victoria embankments (which is where a lot of that displaced earth went). These new embankments not only provided space for a mighty intercepting sewer—a kind of sewer superhighway—but also left ample room for a new Underground line and ducts for gas and other utilities below and a new relief road above. Altogether he reclaimed fifty-two acres of land, over which he scattered parks and promenades. An incidental feature of the embankments was that they narrowed the river and made it flow faster, improving its ability to cleanse itself. It would be hard to name an engineering project anywhere that offered a wider array of improvements—to public health, transportation, traffic management, recreation, river management—with a single scheme. This is the system that still drains London. Outside of the city’s parks, the embankments remain among the most agreeable environments in the city.
Because of the limits on his funds, Bazalgette could afford to take the sewage only as far as the eastern edge of the metropolis, to a place called Barking Reach. There mighty outfall pipes disgorged 150 million gallons of raw, lumpy, potently malodorous sewage into the Thames each day. Barking was still twenty miles from the open sea, as the dismayed and unfortunate people all along those twenty miles never stopped pointing out, but the tides were vigorous enough to haul most of the discharge safely (if not always odorlessly) out to sea, and ensured