Do you sigh with relief when you flush your pee and poo down the toilet? Or do you take it for granted? I urge you to think! Every time we hear the comforting sound of whooshing water, we should give thanks to the civil engineers who designed the sewerage systems that take our waste away.
“Heroes and Traitors” is set in the early modern era, when, in the towns, human waste was excreted into pots and thrown into the streets. Just imagine it for a bit – dealing with the smell of your own stuff in the house, and when you go out the front door – everyone else’s. Are you gagging yet?
In the book, the new government of Kimalloa has organised teams of night soil workers to collect the muck from the streets of the capital city, Nasrin, and take it to the orchards of the south bank to fertilise the fruit trees, but this only barely protects the population of the capital city from waste-borne diseases. However, it is a start.
In real life, in London, the soilmen were still at work in the 19th century, when the population was booming and depositing a massive amount of slimy, smelly, dangerous waste.
There were cholera outbreaks in 1832, 1849, and 1855 which killed many thousands of people. Imagine that for a bit – family members, friends and neighbours dying from a horrible disease which just starts without warning, and leaves no hope. At the time, it was believed that cholera had something to do with the “foul miasma” of bad air. But there was no expectation that anything would be done about it. Until, in the hot summer of 1858, the Thames was a steaming mass of stinking excrement. The stench seeped into the Houses of Parliament, sickening the speaking and sleeping occupants, and suddenly, the politicians were interested.
A doctor called John Snow had proven in 1854 that cholera was spread by infected water, but decisions were still made based on the “bad air” theory. Although that premise was misplaced, the solution was sound – waste had to be enclosed and carried far away from the capital. Treatment works were added later. The outcome of the installation of the London sewage system was an environmental revolution and resulted in the virtual elimination of cholera, typhus and typhoid in the capital.
Joseph Bazalgette was the chief engineer for the Metropolitan Board of Works, one of London’s local government bodies. He was appointed to design a system for the safe removal of waste from London’s streets. This was a poisoned chalice, in more ways than one, but Joseph Bazalgette saw it as an opportunity, and a duty, and he was prepared to be accountable. Bazalgette had to choose from dozens of possible designs, and manage a huge team to implement the project. Well, it was his job, wasn’t it? He went further. He was deeply committed to the project and worked long hours on it for years. Every connection in the system had to be checked, and he did it personally.
A network of over eighty miles of underground main sewers and over one thousand miles of street sewers was dug – mostly by the hard manual work of thousands of men. The Albert, Victoria and Chelsea Embankments were built to enclose and protect the main sewer and reclaim ground from the Thames’ tidal mud. Over three hundred million bricks were used on the whole system. This was a colossal project which costs millions of pounds. But, as we know, the Victorians were ambitious when it came to infrastructure. We still rely on their legacy.
In 2018, The Institution of Civil Engineers in the UK made Joseph Bazalgette an ICE Invisible Superhero called Captain Sanitation, for the work that he did to save the people of London from their own poo. And we should, every time we flush, remember all that we owe to sewage engineers. They save lives just as surely as doctors, and they save us from harm just as surely as soldiers.
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Photo: Privy hole at Skipton Castle, Yorkshire
