The Strand boasted of being “one of the best sewered districts in the metropolis,” which, however, was not saying much for it. And in St. Giles’ the sewerage was stated to be good, and “much above the average of the town.”
But such reports were quite exceptional. In Hackney, the principal sewer was the former Hackney Brook, which, from the increase of the population, and the drainage from other sewers, houses, cemeteries, and cattle-market, had become a foul open ditch—with very trifling exception wholly uncovered—and “emitting pestiferous noxious effluvia.”
In St. Marylebone, the sewers, themselves insufficient for the requirements of a growing population (1858), were, in many cases, so shallow as to cause rather than remove evil, for in certain places they flooded the basements, and in more than one house was witnessed the curious spectacle of the daily use of pumps to remove the foul liquids, as in leaking ships.
In Paddington (1857–8), “the principles of good town drainage were completely ignored. The sewers were those which had been constructed at intervals, previous to 1846, in a piecemeal and unsatisfactory manner, as the thoroughfares were formed, without any regard to the requirements of the adjoining streets.” The general direction of these sewers was “extremely defective. Numbers of them have a fall towards the summit or highest level of the street through which they pass; the bottoms are very irregular, running up and down and forming successions of hills and hollows.”
In Fulham, there existed scarcely the trace of a main sewer, open sewers and filthy ditches, conveying some part of the sewage to the river, the rest remaining in the cesspools.
In Hammersmith, not only were sewers and ditches in a most fearful state of nuisance, but there was also “a morass of several acres in extent, having no outlet, which received the sewage from a large area, the noxious emanations from which must be regarded as highly detrimental to health.”
On the south side of the river matters were still worse. The greater number of the southern districts were situate nearly on the same level as high-water mark, if not indeed below it, and they differed from the other districts of London in their marshy character, their low level, and in the want of proper drainage dependent on that low level. The whole district suffered under the effects of a tide-locked, pent-up system of sewerage.
In Greenwich, a very large number of streets were without main sewers.
In St. Mary, Newington, “the great fact meeting us at every turn has been the large number of streets without main sewers therein.”
Rotherhithe, which lay from four to seven feet below high water, was exceptionally bad. The largest portion of the parish had no drainage whatever. There were about fifteen miles of open ditches which had been converted into open sewers, called in some official documents “Stygian pools,” and serving “the double debt to pay of watercourse and cesspool.” Among the ditches “one of the foulest in the whole neighbourhood of London” was the King’s Mills stream, about one and a half miles long, which had not been cleansed for ten years. The sewer in Paradise Row was “in reality not a sewer,” but “an elongated cesspool a mile in length,” and during twenty hours daily it was waterlogged. The very boundary line of the parish for a long distance was “a wide, filthy, black, open sewer.”