Episode 3: The Victorian Sewer That Built Modern London

0:02Lucy Tobin: Here I am in East London, very close to the Olympic Stadium. This is Abbey Mills. I'm here to step back in time and learn how London's sewage system was designed. For more than 150 years, what happens here has helped shape the health of the River Thames. I'm going to meet Dina Gillespie, who's spent years working at Abbey Mills and knows this place inside out.

0:32welcome to abby mills bumping station lucy otherwise known as poo palace come in thank you

0:48Lucy Tobin: this is thames unfiltered from the standard in association with thames water i'm your host Lucy Tobin, business journalist and author. Across the series, we're asking how healthy the Thames really is, who shapes it, who's responsible for it, and what needs to happen to safeguard its future. Much of London's sewage network is hidden under our feet, but there are a few exceptions. And for this episode, I've been given a rare opportunity to explore one of the jewels in the sewer's crown, the Grade II listed Abbey Mills Pumping Station. Built in 1868 as part of the sewage system designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette, it's still in operation over 150 years later, pushing Londoners' bodily waste along from low-level sewers up to Becton Sewage Treatment Works.

1:44Lucy Tobin: Constructed in the shape of a cross with a central dome that's almost 35 metres high, I'm here to find out why a building created to push along poo was built festooned with Victorian bling. Because it's just impossible to ignore. And so is Dina, my enthusiastic guide. Look at this fantastic door. Yeah, I'm not sure it's the average workplace door. Yes. It's about, what, four metres high? It is wooden, but with brass and copper florets, really ornate and giving a Celtic design. And is this where the workers would have come in and out every day? Absolutely, yes. Yeah, something quite church-like.

2:31Very church-like. And it also reminds me, you know, every year they open up Parliament, was it Black Rod or something goes and bangs on the... Yeah, this is our equivalent. and, yeah.

2:46Lucy Tobin: I think you could feel a sense of pride at walking through that door into this building. Absolutely.

2:54Lucy Tobin: With a background in social housing, Dina joined Thames Water in 2012. After four years in other departments, she finally found her true calling, managing the waste of nine million Londoners. I love sewage, right? What do you love about it? I love the fact that when my family flushed a toilet, two things. A, they don't have to think about where it goes. And B, I'm the one pumping it to the right place. I know it sounds... Put that on a birthday card. Thank you for pumping my poop. Yeah. At Abbey Mills, the great trunk sewers of North London and the new Tideway Tunnel meet up. Here, the pumps lift the sewage 12 metres up to the northern outfall sewer, which flows 4.2 miles east to Becton Treatment Works.

3:42Lucy Tobin: It's basically a giant lift for poo.

3:50When the station was first built, it was run on coal and steam.

3:55Lucy Tobin: So it would have been a lot dirtier and smellier and noisier. Absolutely, yes. and the coal used to be brought in on canal boats on the Channel C creek, just right next door to Abbey Mills. So all I can hear, I think, is a distant beeping sound, but certainly no people, no cacophony of noise, which I assume there would have been back in the day. This pump hall would have been full of people, everybody with their own job, operating, cleaning, wiping, monitoring. There was 300 people working here, looking after this pumping station when this was built. Today there's two. Is that because of automation or need?

4:37Yes, in the main, yes. A lot of automation, yeah.

4:40Lucy Tobin: Are those two here 24 hours a day? No, it's Monday to Friday, yeah. And then there's people monitoring the station from Becton on screens. I'm struck by this huge metal Dalek-like structures. What are these for? So it's interesting you call them that because that's what everybody says when they see them. They say they look like Daleks. So this is part of the pump. At the top is the motor, the electrical part. And right at the bottom, so there's a shaft, right at the bottom is the actual pump impeller that spins around, the mechanical bit. The steam engines were replaced with these electric turbines in the 1930s, which explains one reason why there's a curious lack of odour to this pumping station.

5:28Lucy Tobin: I'd expected to come home reeking. In fact, it's just all a bit musty. Today though, these pumps are only switched on when needed. Most of the big jobs are now done by a new pumping station on the same site which opened in 1997. For me, there's a big contrast as I walk into this amazing building with the kind of things we're building today, which feels very focused on costs and being utilitarian. Here we've got a cathedral to waste. I think there's incredible pride when this was built. It took three years to build and it cost£200 ,000 at the time. I don't know what the equivalent is now, but it would be a lot of money.

6:11The decor around with all of the different symbols, whether it's sort of corn or strawberries or some sort of leaves the tiles, the paint, the colour of the paint really deep maroon, deep gold.

6:29Lucy Tobin: It's difficult to overstate how intricate all of this ironwork is and painted gold and red and green and flowers and embellishments. London was the largest city in the world at the time with a population of three million. Abbey Mills was a magnet for anyone who wanted to take in a vision of the future, including its cutting-edge pumping stations. Look at this incredible visitor's book. From 1869, when the pump hall first opened, people from all over the world came to see this pumping station. We've got engineers, merchant, architect from America. Trinidad. France, Berlin. Germany, yeah, all over the world.

7:11Lucy Tobin: You can see just the international interests and expertise coming from all over the world. Dina shows me some period photos of the pumping station dating back to when it was built. And I realise that something is missing. Two somethings, in fact. Chimneys that were made to look like the minarets of a mosque. There were two chimneys, east-west side chimneys that were built. And they were about 200 feet high. and the design was a bit Moorish. The whole thing looks like you're in Morocco. Yes. Particularly the trees, it looks like a holiday destination. And because of this design and the marshes, Abbey Mills was also known as Mosque in the Marshes back then and there was nothing around of any significance back in those days and Abbey Mills could be seen from miles around.

8:00Lucy Tobin: But with the arrival of electricity in the 30s, the chimneys were no longer needed. And when Germany began bombing London during World War II, it used the Thames as a guide. Close to the river, and based in the industrial heartland of East London, Abbey Mills' giant chimneys made it an especially visible target from the air. People were afraid they would be used as targets and that the station would get hit. So these two chimneys were dismantled. The mosque became a church. Nothing at Abbey Mills is purely for display, despite its ornate appearance. This was built as a sort of monument to what was happening below ground and to show people that this was what we were doing, how we were improving the Londoners' health.

8:50Lucy Tobin: Walking around the majestic 19th century pump room has transported me back to a very different time. I'm curious to know what drove all this elaborate and expensive construction It all goes back to the creator of London Sewage Network, Sir Joseph Bazalgette But what problem was he trying to solve and did it work?

9:23London sewage was flowing directly into the Thames and it flowed so slowly back and forth as a tidal river that the effluent of London did not escape the river and it got more and more polluted, more and more disgusting.

9:36Lucy Tobin: This is Sir Peter Bazalgette, the great-great-grandson of Sir Joseph and famous in his own right as the media mogul behind reality TV hits including Big Brother. Fortunately, Peter's not talking about the Thames today, but the mid-1800s, when an incredibly useful new invention called the water closet was going down a storm. Just like modern flushing toilets, these WCs sent Londoners' waste away from their houses. But back then, it had nowhere to go, apart from the River Thames. Worse than that, some of the water companies were drawing their water out of the Thames. People were drinking their own effluent.

10:19Lucy Tobin: Outbreaks of cholera in the late 1840s and early 1850s killed thousands of mostly poor Londoners. But it was until 1858, a year now known as the Great Stink, that the British government finally decided to act. 1858 was a very, very hot summer. The stink was unbelievable. They say if you ever want politicians to do something, you should affect their safety directly, personally. And the stench coming through the windows of the House of Commons really worried the MPs. So MPs, in the end, finally did something about it. Benjamin Disraeli was the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the Prime Minister of the Earl of Derby, and he allowed my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Bazalgette, to borrow£3 million to put in his revolutionary metropolitan sewage system.

11:08Lucy Tobin: Joseph William Bazalgette was only 29 years old when he was entrusted with one of the largest and most complicated civil engineering projects in British history. Championed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Bazalgette had a lot resting on his shoulders. He was quite serious, he was extremely methodical, and he worked, I was going to say all the hours that God gives, he worked some of the hours that God didn't give as well. He had an extraordinary, almost fetishistic eye for detail. So if you look at his plans for each of the bits of the scheme, you will find he specified everything down to small nuts and bolts.

11:50He was a man of massive vision and ambition. Otherwise, who else could have come up with the idea of digging up the major capital city of the world at the time to put in this extraordinary scheme.

12:03Lucy Tobin: Basil Jett personally oversaw the construction of 82 miles of main trunk sewers and a staggering 1 ,100 miles of subsidiary sewers. To do that required 318 million bricks and thousands of labourers. They were in such high demand that they were able to negotiate a 20 % pay rise. I mean, he dug up the whole of London, So, I mean, he had to put the sewers under canals, over canals, under roads, along roads and so on. He was going at one time to put the main low-level sewer along the Strand, but that was considered too disruptive even for him. So that's why he ended up building the low-level sewer along the Thames and creating the Victoria Embankment.

12:45Lucy Tobin: You might not know this when taking a cruise down the river or a boat commute to work, but anyone travelling along the Thames in central London is just a few metres from one of Bazalgette's main trunk sewers. It was an ambitious piece of land reclamation and it gave Londoners a grand and showy new riverside thoroughfare. It also significantly narrowed the Thames and made it flow faster. And that's how we got the embankments around the river today, the faster flowing river, and it's how we also got some of the gardens that he put on top. One major drawback was the landscape of London itself. The Thames Basin, along which the city was built, slopes very gently from the west down to sea level.

13:31Lucy Tobin: Too gently, in fact, for the sewer's design. Because on that kind of slope, the sludge wouldn't budge. The question was, how do you get London's effluent to flow? and the way he did it was to get the sewers just to go down a bit every mile. In other words, he used gravity to propel London's poo to its eventual destination. Every mile, Baseljet's sewers fell two feet down, putting gravity to work. But solving one problem only caused another. By the time the sewers got to East London, they were far deeper than sea level. That's why pumping stations were needed. For south of the river, Crossness in Bexley was built.

14:17Lucy Tobin: And for the north, you've guessed it, Abbey Mills. He built the largest rotative steam beam engines ever built in the history of the Industrial Revolution. And those machines, their job was to lift the sewage from the low point it had gone using gravity up to the surface to release it into the Thames when the tide was flowing in the right direction out to the sea. Those four steam engines at Crossness in particular were named after the members of the royal family. So proud were they of their public works that they named them Prince Consort, that was Prince Albert, Victoria, Edward or Bertie, Albert the son, and then one of the daughters.

15:03So just think, four machines whose job was to pump s*** were given names of the royal family, and that's because they were so proud of public works.

15:12Lucy Tobin: London was now a world leader, not just in civil infrastructure, but in disease prevention too. There were outbreaks of cholera in other cities in Britain, which did not have modern sewage systems. But after Bazalgette's system was fully commissioned in 1865, there were no more serious outbreaks of cholera in London, which if you think about it is an astonishing achievement. Funded through taxation, the project ended up costing£4.2 million, almost 50 % more than planned, which is a familiar tale in modern politics. But for that money, Basil Jett did something impressive. He future-proofed the sewer for a much larger city.

15:54He secretly spec'd it for a population of£4.5 million because he understood that London would continue to grow. He may have even understood that the very act of making a city better to live in means it does grow, that infrastructure, in other words, stimulates an economy and allows a city to grow and deliver more economic value.

16:16Lucy Tobin: Sir Joseph Bazalgette was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1875. He died 16 years later, aged 71. At the time, he was talked about in the same breath as engineering giants like Brunel, Robert Stevenson and Thomas Telford. Then came decades of obscurity, but today his star is on the rise. A huge number of people have heard of him, and we celebrate history in Victorian engineering. And in terms of teaching history in schools, I mean, the lesson about poo is much more enjoyable for schoolchildren than anything else almost, so it's great fun for them too. There's even been a musical written about him that was performed, written by a schoolmaster, and I went along to it.

16:59It was performed in his own school by his children. I had to shake hands with Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who was a 12-year-old with a rather wonky moustache stuck on his upper lip.

17:19Lucy Tobin: I'm back with the Queen of Pooh Palace, Dina Gillespie, Thames Water's catchment manager for North East London. And after seeing the mint condition of Abbey Mill's pumping station, I'd like to know how the miles and miles of Victorian sewers are faring, without getting any closer to its contents. The whole of the sewage infrastructure is working well, even though it's over 150 years old, right? What is it like down there? Can you stand up? How is that process? There's different sizes, but yes, the majority of the trunk sewers, so the larger sewers you can stand up in, it is absolutely amazing.

17:57So architecturally, whilst not as ornate as above ground, the brickwork is immaculate. When you go in one of those sewers, you know that's Joseph Bazalgette designed that. It's amazing. And I think the impact on London's health since the Great Stink and the technology and what everybody does who works in the wastewater side of the business is incredible.

18:21Lucy Tobin: How much has it changed since the Victorians? That technology hasn't changed much. Just like, you know, wastewater treatment as well. It's a pretty basic technology that's been around for a long time. What has changed, Dina tells me, is that Londoners' waste now generates electricity. Quite a lot of it. Poo power can provide enough electricity to power the City of London for five days, thanks to anaerobic digesters. They're like big pressure cookers, basically, and that generates gas, and we use that to then generate electricity. That technology has improved a lot, but the actual treatment process has remained pretty basic.

19:01Lucy Tobin: The system, though, is extremely weather-dependent. The dry days of summer might provide welcome relief to the sewers, but other times of the year place enormous pressure on Bazalgette's design. The system does not have enough capacity when it rains because it's a combined system in this country. So when it rains, the rainfall combines with the sewage and we have to pump that and treat that. We get sewage here from West London, from Acton, right? And it can take 24 hours in normal weather conditions to get here. when it's raining we can get flows from Acton in two hours. The original system that Sir Joseph Bazalgette designed was designed for four million population.

19:47We're now over double that. So yeah there is a capacity infrastructure problem.

19:52Lucy Tobin: Can we keep relying on this Victorian infrastructure or do we need to start again? What do you think we need to do? We just have to continue trying to be as resilient as possible so continue to invest in infrastructure. The challenge in London is space, so it's not like we can build more sewage treatment works or bigger storage capacity, but it is about making what we currently have more resilient.

20:23Lucy Tobin: Dina's pride in Abbey Mills is obvious, and standing inside it, it's hard not to be impressed. This place is a monument to a moment when London chose to invest boldly in public health But it also leaves us with a more uncomfortable question Are we still living off that Victorian ambition without matching it today? London is growing, rainfall is becoming more intense And the old combined sewer system is under serious pressure Sir Joseph Bazalgette got us this far and the Tideway Tunnel is designed to carry part of that burden into the future. But what happens when the system he built can no longer carry the city above it?

21:06Lucy Tobin: That's next time on Thames Unfiltered. This podcast was produced by The Standard and Message Heard in association with Thames Water, with all content created under The Standard's editorial control. I'm your host, Lucy Tobin. From The Standard, Tori Frost is our executive producer and Vanessa Cutt is our Senior Project Manager. From Message Heard, Mark Kendrick is our Senior Producer, Will Aspinall is our Producer, Martha Tipper is our Assistant Producer, Lizzie Andrews and Alan Lear are our Audio Engineers and James Cox is our Production Coordinator.