A river is always a great temptation to persons to get rid of things they want to get rid of, particularly when the things are nasty and otherwise not easily disposed of. Londoners only followed the general practice when they constructed their sewers so that they discharged their contents direct into the Thames. The majority of these sewers emptied themselves only at the time of low water; for as the tide rose the outlets of the sewers were closed, and the sewage was dammed back and became stagnant. When the tide had receded sufficiently to afford a vent for the pent-up sewage, it flowed out and deposited itself along the banks of the river, evolving gases of a foul and offensive character. And then the sewage was not only carried up the river by the rising tide, but it was brought back again into the heart of the metropolis, there to mix with each day’s fresh supply of sewage; the result being that “the portion of the river within the metropolitan district became scarcely less impure and offensive than the foulest of the sewers themselves.”
This was bad enough, but there were miles of sewers which, through defects of construction or disrepair, did not even carry off the sewage from the houses and streets to the river, but had become “similar to elongated cesspools,” and, as such, actual sources and creators of disease.
Incredible almost were the stupidities perpetrated by these Commissioners in regard to the construction of the sewers. At even so late a date as 1845 no survey had been made of the metropolis for the purposes of drainage; there was a different level in each of the districts, and no attempt was made to conform the works of the several districts to one general plan. Large sewers were made to discharge into smaller sewers. Some were higher than the cesspools which they were supposed to drain, whilst others had been so constructed that to be of any use the sewage would have had to flow uphill!
It might reasonably have been expected that in the nineteenth century, at least, the twenty parishes which formed the district of the Westminster Commissioners of Sewers would have been equal to producing an enlightened and capable body as Commissioners, but the Westminster Court of Sewers was certainly not such. Even their own chief surveyor, in 1847, stigmatised it as a body “totally incompetent to manage the great and important works committed to their care and control.”
Upon it were builders, surveyors, architects, and district surveyors—a class of persons whose opinions “might certainly be biassed with relation to particular lines of drains and sewers.”
Of another of the courts—namely, the Finsbury Court of Sewers—one of the Commission had been outlawed; another was a bankrupt.
It was stated at the time that “jobbery and favouritism and incompetence were rampant,” and that the system was “radically wrong and rotten to the core.” Certain it is that these bodies failed completely to cope with the requirements of the time. London was spreading out in all directions, and the increase of houses and population was very rapid. Practically no effort, however—certainly no adequate effort—was made by the various bodies of Commissioners to provide these new and growing districts with the means of getting rid of their sewage. And then, inasmuch as the sewage had somehow or other to be got rid of, and some substitute for sewers devised, the surface drains, and millstreams, and ditches were appropriated to use and converted into open sewers or “stagnant ponds of pestilential sewage.”
London was “seamed with open ditches.”
According to contemporary reports there were in Lambeth numerous open ditches of the most horrible description. Bermondsey was intersected by ditches of a similar character, and abounded with fever nests. Rotherhithe was the same. Hackney Brook, formerly “a pure stream,” had become “a foul open sewer.”[9] In St. Saviour’s Union the sewers were in a dreadful condition … “the receptacle of all kinds of refuse, such as putrid fish, dead dogs, cats, &c. Greenwich was not drained or sewered.”