Photos joseph bazalgette quotes
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London’s sewers
Joseph Bazalgette’s subterranean network did more than prevent epidemics and reduce the city stink – it fundamentally altered the relationship between the individual and the modern metropolis
This article was first published in Icon’s July 2014 issue: Underground. Buy old issues or subscribe to the magazine for more like this
It is 155 years since construction began on a main drainage system for London. Often described as the biggest technical achievement of the Victorian age, and still in use today, few people deny the importance of London’s sewers.
But in this “flush and forget” age, it is almost impossible to comprehend how radically sewerage altered the environment, social order, and human subjectivity. When first introduced, it single-handedly reshaped the experience of modernity.
The outlines of its history are well known. bygd the mid-19th century, London had well over 2.5 million inhabitants and therefor
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Our only Open House Festival visit this year was to the Abbey Mills Pumping Station. Before you get to see my photos of the pumping station is worth knowing a little of its history,
It was built between 1865 and 1868 as part of Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s system to solve London’s sewage problem, known as the ‘Great Stink’, where London’s sewage flowed untreated into the River Thames.
Bazalgette’s solution to the Great Stink was a system of very large west-to-east intercepting sewers, running parallel to the Thames, where sewage would be disposed of at the Becton Sewage Treatment Works near Barking. One of a number of such pumping stations, Abbey Mills lifted sewage from lower-lying sewers to a height of 13 metres to enter and the northern outfall and then onto Becton.
The pumping station now operates in standby status, and is only used to pump sewage when it rains very heavily and the water in the sewer rises significan
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If you stroll down the River Thames in central London and look almost directly south from the Embankment tube station, you’ll see a monument to Sir Joseph Bazalgette ‘engineer of the London main drainage system and of this embankment.’ Above the bronze bust set into a classical façade, a Latin inscription reads: FLVMINI VINCVLA POSVIT, or ‘he put the river in chains.’ In doing so, the great 19th century civil engineer transformed the health prospects of London’s rapidly expanding population of 2.5 million. Bazalgette is known today as the man who built the city’s first modern interconnected sewer network that was to do more than any other public project to wipe out cholera in London and is still in use today.
The memorial was unveiled in 1901, the last year of Victoria’s reign and a decade after Bazalgette’s death. As Chief Engineer of London’s Metropolitan Board of Works he had created a sewer system supporting most of the capital, that had improved public health to the degree