At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

After the Great Stink it became clear that London’s sewage system needed to be rebuilt, and Bazalgette was handed the job. The challenge was formidable. Bazalgette had to insert into an immensely busy city some twelve hundred miles of tunnels, which would last indefinitely, carry away every particle of waste generated by three million people, and be able to handle future growth of unknowable dimensions. He would have to acquire land, negotiate rights of way, procure and distribute materials, and direct hordes of laborers. The scale of every aspect of the job was exhausting merely to contemplate. The tunnels required 318 million bricks and necessitated the digging up and redistributing of 3.5 million cubic yards of earth. All this was to be done on a budget of just £3 million. Bazalgette brilliantly exceeded every expectation. In the process of building the new sewer system he transformed three and a half miles of riverfront through the creation of the Chelsea, Albert, and Victoria embankments (which is where a lot of that displaced earth went). These new embankments not only provided space for a mighty intercepting sewer—a kind of sewer superhighway—but also left ample room for a new Underground line and ducts for gas and other utilities below and a new relief road above. Altogether he reclaimed fifty-two acres of land, over which he scattered parks and promenades. An incidental feature of the embankments was that they narrowed the river and made it flow faster, improving ...