The Conservative chancellor, Disraeli, denounced the ‘Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors’, and launched the construction of London’s magnificent sewers by a visionary engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, who created 82 miles of brick-lined sewers and 1,100 miles of street sewers with pumping stations as splendid as palaces. It took twenty years but it ended the stink and reduced cholera too.
