Water, Super-Sewers and The Filth Threatening the River Thames
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network in Social
The River Thames Threatened by The Filth
"Wateris the giver of life," says the great-great-grandson of the engineer who revolutionisedLondon's sewerage system. "That's why people always ask if there's water on Mars to support life. But it is also bringer of death, as we saw in the 19th century."
Quite so. Before Sir Peter Bazalgette's great-great-grandfather Joseph built 1,300 miles of sewers and river embankments in London in the 1860s, raw sewage flowed into the tidal section of the Thames and got stalled in a hellishly insanitary circulation system. The stench of what politician Benjamin Disraeli in the mid-19th century called the "Stygian pool" was bad enough - referencing the River Styx of Greek mythology, which formed the boundary between Earth and the underworld - but, worse, Londoners bathed in and drank this water. "Before the great embankments were built, the Thames flowed more gently so the shit went up and down and people were drawing their own effluent," says Bazalgette. If you're eating your breakfast, apologies for that last sentence.
The filthy Thames of the Victorian era was a relatively new phenomenon. As late as 1800 it had been clean enough for salmon to be caught and for Lord Byron to swim by Westminster Bridge. By the early 1830s it was a very different river. In 1834, the English wit and cleric Sydney Smith told Lady Grey: "He who drinks a tumbler of London water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are Men, Women and Children on the face of the Globe."
The results were deaths from water-borne diseases such as cholera and typhoid. Liverpudlians were less prone to suffer than Londoners - argues David Green, professor of geography at King's College London - because of their fondness for tea imported through Liverpool's docks; they were more likely to boil their water. After cholera arrived from India, there were epidemics in London in 1832, 1848, 1849, 1854 and 1866, in which thousands died.
But it wasn't these deaths that prompted political action. Scientific orthodoxy at the time was that cholera was not carried in water but was "miasmatic" - ie airborne. "That misunderstanding was actually a great boon," says Bazalgette, "because it terrified the politicians and made them act." The stench from the Thames caused politicians in Sir Charles Barry's then-new Houses of Parliament to adjourn proceedings in the summer of 1858 - and, soon after this so-called Great Stink, parliament sanctioned one of the century's great engineering projects: a new sewer network for London. The connection between politics and water had never been so intimate.
Today, the water that Londoners consume is almost too good. "The stuff we use to water our garden is good enough to drink, which is ridiculous," says Bazalgette, TV producer andArts Councilchair. "It doesn't need filtering and those people who buy bottled water are making an expensive mistake," says Green. So rioters on the receiving end ofthe water cannon that London mayor Boris Johnson has just allowed the Metropolitan Police to orderwill be pleased to learn that the water used to hose them off the streets will be clean - though they're more likely to be concerned about the risks of being blinded,as was a man during a protest in Stuttgart in 2010.
This summer, London has been celebrating its watery heritage with a Thames-side festival at King's College and Somerset House, perched above the very embankments Bazalgette built. The 51 fountain jets have been dousing screaming kids in the Somerset House courtyard as usual, but alongside them have been water-themed film screenings (Finding Nemo, Swallows and Amazons), recitals of Old English poems on water themes, lectures on the politics of water, and - most enticingly of all - the arrival ofLondon's newest museum. Artist Amy Sharrocks invited visitors to consider their relationship with water by bringing precious samples, which included a melted snowman, droplets from a baby's bath and sacred draughts from an Indian river.
But if anybody donated a test tube of water recently drawn from the Thames, you'd hope they kept the cork in. Because the Thames, though cleaner than it was in 1858, still isn't really fit for purpose - or indeed porpoise. No life form, least of all human, should feel happy about swimming in the river.According to Thames Water, 55m tonnes of raw sewage was washed into the tidal Thames last year (the equivalent of 8bn toilets flushing into the Thames. Again, sorry about your breakfast).
As author Caitlin Davies points out inDownstream: a Social History of Swimming the River Thames, to be published next April, there is a rich heritage of swimming in the river. But could Londoners swim in the dirty old river again?Architecture firm Studio Octopi has come up with a concept for pools in the tidal waters of the Thames, offering bathers superb views of the capital's riverscape. It's a beautiful dream but, just for the moment, not many of us will be emulatingDavid Walliams' swim down the Thames to Westminster Bridge, let alone doing the backstroke around the Isle of Dogs.
How can this be? Didn't Joseph Bazalgette stop the Thames being a Victorian sewer by building tunnels that carried off human waste to the Romanesque pumping stations ofCrossnessandAbbey Mills?Well, yes he did, but Bazalgette's sewers were designed for 4 million people, not today's 8 million,nor the 10 million predicted to live in the capital by 2031. Nor did he consider how many Londoners would be showering, using dishwashers, still less how they would be deploying hoses to wash cars, perk up gardens or subdue rioters.
Green also points out that rainfall patterns have changed since Bazalgette's day: rain today is less steady and more prone to intense bursts that overwhelm the Victorian system. (Paris is different from London in this respect: in the French capital, human waste and rainwater run along different subterranean channels, while London opted to put them together.)
The result? London has a sewage overflow problem and resolving it is a great political issue that raises questions to do with private-public ownership and whether we should emulate our Victorian ancestors' fondness for grand engineering solutions.
What happens if we do nothing? "That's easy," says Green. "I remember kayaking near Crossness just after a major storm. I was kayaking on shit, if you'll excuse the phrase. That's what the rest of the Thames will be like if we do nothing."
To prevent this, Thames Water, the UK's largest water company, wants to build a £4.2bn, 16-mile (25km) sewer from Acton to Abbey Mills to stop raw sewage flooding into the Thames during heavy rains. It would cost as much as half the 2012 Olympics. It's controversial: Sir Ian Byatt, former director general of industry watchdog Ofwat, argues Thames Water's "big shiny monster" should be abandoned in favour of a cheaper alternative.
Green has a more modest proposal. "We seem to want to get water away into drains as quickly as possible," he says. "That's why we use smooth surfaces, and why car parks are floored in tarmac. We need to consider using rougher building materials that stop water running off so quickly. We should be investigating green engineering ideas like these."
In one sense, London's water has reverted to what it was in the 18th and early 19th century: it is privately owned. At that time, says Green, water supply and sewerage were run by different private companies. The Dukes of Westminster and Portland, who owned the great estates in Mayfair and Belgravia, were shareholders of the water companies that brought clean water to the posher districts; while in the East End there were standpipes in courtyards of rookeries (ie slums) whose supply was often drawn from the Thames. As London spread, water companies drew their water from beyond the capital; the New River Company, for example, supplied water from nearly 40 miles away in Hertfordshire to London's Islingtonalong a Jacobean water supply aqueduct, thus sparing its lucky customers the health hazards of Thames water.
In the late 19th century, London belatedly followed Glasgow and Birmingham in taking water supply and sewerage into public ownership. But now? Water and sewage have been privatised again, albeit it with one big difference: one huge private monopoly, Thames Water, owned by a consortium led by the European arm of an Australian bank, controls water supply and sewage treatment in the capital. For some, what was a public good until the Thatcherite 1980s has become a liquid asset coursing into the accounts of the company's shareholders. Last September Byatt reckoned that £2.2bn of dividends had been paid out in the last six years -a figure Thames Water disputes.
Bazalgette argues such ownership issues are not important: what matters is to build a new super-sewer with a view to serving the needs of future Londoners - just as his great-great-grandfather did. "We need massive investment in our infrastructure and there's no appetite to do that from general taxation. But these major public works need to be done. The Victorians knew that. We have to ask ourselves, are we preparing the city for our children and grandchildren?"
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