"The idea," says Sir Dieter Helm, an Oxford economist and one of the country's leading experts on its infrastructure, "was that we needed a massive investment in water from 1990 onwards and the government wasn't going to pay for it - therefore the private sector should borrow the money to invest to renew the infrastructure for water. ![]() By the 1980s, England was perilously close to failing a set of European directives on water quality and sewerage systems (one of which outlawed dumping sludge into the sea, which we still did up until the late 1990s). First, governments cut back on public investment in the late 1970s and 1980s (a reaction in part to Britain's International Monetary Fund bailout and in part a choice of Margaret Thatcher's government). But unfortunately it's just the start of it, because, that fateful choice has been compounded by decades of underinvestment. Pic: Thames Waterīut if that were the only problem then it would, perhaps, be forgivable. Image: Storm relief worker inside Charlton sewer, southeast London. The first big problem is, well, the system. Today there are more than 60 days a year.Īnd that's the most important thing you need to know about Britain's sewage system. And as the population has grown and the square mileage of Britain's cities expanded, with ever more concrete and asphalt surfaces channelling ever more rain into the drains, those discharges have become more and more frequent.īack in Bazalgette's lifetime London's system was supposed to discharge for around 12 days a year, during the heaviest rain storms. ![]() It is a marvel.īut it is nonetheless a combined system, designed from the start to discharge sewage into the river in the event of heavy rainfall. His system, designed when the city had a population of around two million, is now being used by a population of nearly nine million. London's sewage still passes through the same brick and concrete tunnels laid down by Bazalgette and his engineers more than a century and a half ago. Moreover, they have stood the test of time. By helping channel muck out of the city, they prevented future cholera outbreaks. Now, Bazalgette's sewers, and the other public works he helped build, are rightly recognised as extraordinary achievements. Bazalgette's fateful decision, to choose the combined system and ignore the protestations of people like Chadwick, changed the world forever. Every other major town and city in the country introduced similar combined sewage systems - not to mention many cities and regions in Europe and North America. So was born the sewage systems most of us use today.Īnd where London led, everyone else followed. London's home pipes and drains - carrying both sewage and rainwater - would all empty into a series of sewers running along the embankment next to the Thames and taking them east of the city, where the waste would collect before being emptied into the Thames, to flow out in the tide to the North Sea. His solution to the Great Stink, which became so unbearable that in 1858 the Houses of Parliament had to be abandoned, was the sewage system we have today. Pic: Thames Waterīazalgette was a civil engineer who had been appointed chief engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works. Image: Sewer construction in southwest London. But in the event, the commissioners ended up choosing a different design - the one advocated by Sir Joseph Bazalgette. Indeed, Chadwick was hardly the only person advocating it: other engineers came forward with detailed plans to create separate pipes for sewage and others for rainwater. Eventually that sewage would be processed and turned into manure, which could be used as a fertiliser.Īnd so, for a brief period in the mid-19th century there was a tantalising moment when it looked as if London would end up with a separate sewage system. His vision for London's sewage system was not dissimilar from that separate system people are still fantasising about today: sewage would go down one pipe while rainwater went down another. And the more sewage went into the river, the more it stank and, even more importantly, the more people got sick - because most households' drinking water came from the very same river.Įventually the authorities convened a series of inquiries, the first of which was led by Chadwick. ![]() In practice, ever-increasing amounts of sewage were being flushed into the Thames and its tributaries. ![]() There was no conception of sewage treatment as we'd see it today. Image: Beckton's construction in the 1800s.
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