A delightful piece about London’s sewers in today’s G, written by Blake Morrison. And I mean “delightful” as in a really well written piece, as opposed to a euphemistic delightful. Here’s a sample…
“Beyond the overflow point, the water slows, and the bottom of the sewer becomes sludgier – this wouldn’t be the place to lose your footing. (Pepys’s Diary, October 20 1660: “Going down to my cellar … I put my foot into a great heap of turds.”) There are odd niches and corridors off to both right and left, and you begin to grasp the scale of Bazalgette’s labyrinth, and to see how artful he was in diverting excrement away from our homes – unlike his great-great-grandson, Peter, producer of Big Brother and other reality TV shows, who, critics allege, has poured it back in.”
And you’ll never want to live in the new Thamesmead developments if you read to the end.
A sidenote: two rather good books for people interested in this amazing feat of engineering beneath London’s streets are Deborah Cadbury’s Seven Wonders of the Industrial World and Stephen Smith’s Underground London, both of which I’ve read and can recommend heartily.
I actually had a bit part in Underground London – or at least should have done. When describing his night in the tunnels of the Tube, he quietly ommitted the other journo (me) and the press officer that came along too. But then I’d have done the same.