Stuart Jeffries

The poetry of sewers

Stuart Jeffries celebrates Joseph Bazalgette’s masterpiece of subterranean architecture

‘Welcome,’ says our guide Stuart Bellehewe, with an imperious sweep of his arm, ‘to the cathedral of shit.’ Before us rises Abbey Mills Pumping Station in all its grade II*-listed glory. It arose on east London’s marshes in 1868, giving Victorians a fecally fixated premonition of postmodernism’s fetish for mashing up architectural styles. Observe, urges Stuart, the Russian Orthodox-style cupola surmounting the cathedral, clearly quoting church design. Savour, he urges, the gothic Venetian design of the arched windows and of the corkscrew twist incorporated into the rainwater downpipes. The steeply pitched mansard roofs evoke Flemish designs; brass and copper florets on the doorways are derived from Celtic art.

Until 1940, there was more. Twin venting chimneys 212-feet high richly ornamented in Byzantine and Moorish styles and surmounted with minarets flanked the pumping station. They were demolished for fear that if the Luftwaffe bombed them they might collapse on to the pumping station.

This cathedral exists because in the 1850s Londoners were bathing in and drinking water that contained raw sewage. It flowed into the tidal section of the Thames and got stalled in a hellishly insanitary circulation system. London’s water had become unfit for purpose — and porpoise. Cholera abounded. But what catalysed change was the so-called Great Stink from the Thames that prompted MPs in Sir Charles Barry’s then new Houses of Parliament to adjourn proceedings in the summer of 1858. Soon after, they commissioned Sir Joseph Bazalgette to build what turned out to be 1,300 miles of sewers, river embankments and pumping stations. Abbey Mills’s role was to lift sewage from low-lying sewers in central London, send it 4.5 miles to Beckton and thence the North Sea.

Only ten years later, London dignitaries settled down for a sumptuous banquet at Abbey Mills to celebrate its opening. They appreciated the cathedral’s cruciform shape, Charles Driver’s wrought ironwork, the light and airy galleries.

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