London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 2

by Henry Mayhew

I was informed by a nightman, used to the cleansing of drains and to night-work generally, that when there was any escape from one of the tubular pipes the stench was more intense than any he had ever before experienced from any drains on the old system.

Of the London Street-Drains.

We have as yet dealt only with the means of removing the liquid refuse from the houses of the metropolis. This, as was pointed out at the commencement of the present subject, consists principally of the 19,000,000,000 gallons of water that are annually supplied to the London residences by mechanical means. But there still remain the 5,000,000,000 gallons of surface or rain-water to be carried off from the 1760 miles of streets, and the roofs and yards of the 300,000 houses which now form the British metropolis. If this immense volume of liquid were not immediately removed from our thoroughfares as fast as it fell, many of our streets would not only be transformed into canals at certain periods of the year, but perhaps at all times (except during drought) they would be, if not impassable, at least unpleasant and unhealthy, from the puddles or small pools of stagnant water that would be continually rotting them. Were such the case, the roads and streets that we now pride ourselves so highly upon would have their foundations soddened. “If the surface of a road be not kept clean so as to admit of its becoming dry between showers of rain,” said Lord Congleton, the great road authority, “it will be rapidly worn away.” Indeed the immediate removal of rain-water, so as to prevent its percolating through the surface of the road, and thereby impairing the foundation, appears to be one of the main essentials of road-making.

The means of removing this surface water, especially from the streets of a city where the rain falls at least every other day throughout the year, and reaches an aggregate depth of 24 feet in the course of the twelvemonth, is a matter of considerable moment. In Paris, and indeed almost all of the French towns, a channel is formed in the middle of each thoroughfare, and down this the water from the streets and houses is continually coursing, to the imminent peril of all pedestrians, for the wheels of every vehicle distribute, as it goes, a muddy shower on either side of the way.

We, however, have not only removed the channels from the middle to the sides of our streets, but instituted a distinct system of drainage for the conveyance of the wet refuse of our houses to the sewers—so that there are no longer (excepting in a very small portion of the suburbs) open sewers, meandering through our highways; the consequence is, the surface-water being carried off from our thoroughfares almost as fast as it falls, our streets are generally dry and clean. That there are exceptions to this rule, which are a glaring disgrace to us, it must be candidly admitted; but we must at the same time allow, when we think of the vast extent of the roadways of the metropolis (1760 miles!—nearly one-half the radius of the earth itself), the deluge of water that annually descends upon every inch of the ground which we call London (38,000,000,000 gallons!—a quantity which is almost sufficient for the formation of an American lake), and the vast amount of traffic, over the greater part of the capital—the 13,000 vehicles that daily cross London Bridge, the 11,000 conveyances that traverse Cheapside in the course of twelve hours, the 7700 that go through Temple Bar, and the 6900 that ascend and descend Holborn Hill between nine in the morning and nine at night, the 1500 omnibuses and the 3000 cabriolets that are continually hurrying from one part of the town to another, and the 10,000 private carriage, job, and cart horses that incessantly perviate the metropolis—when we reflect, I say, on this vast amount of traffic—this deluge of rain—and the wilderness of streets, it cannot but be allowed that the cleansing and draining of the London thoroughfares is most admirably conducted.

The mode of street drainage is by means of what is called a gully-hole and a gully-drain.

The Gully-hole[63] is the opening from the surface of the street (and is seen generally on each side of the way), into which all the fluid refuse of the public thoroughfares runs on its course to the sewer.

The Gully-drain is a drain generally of earthenware piping, curving from the side of the street to an opening in the top or side of the sewer, and is the means of communication between the sewer and the gully-hole.

The gully-hole is indicated by an iron grate being fitted into the surface of the side of a footpath, where the road slopes gradually from its centre to the edge of the footpath, and down this grate the water runs into the channel contrived for it in the construction of the streets. These gully-grates, the observant pedestrian—if there be a man in this hive of London who, without professional attraction to the matter, regards for a few minutes the peculiarities of the street (apart from the houses) which he is traversing—an observant pedestrian, I say, would be struck at the constantly-recurring grates in a given space in some streets, and their paucity in others. In Drury-lane there is no gully-grate, as you walk down from Holborn to where Drury-lane becomes Wych-street; whilst in some streets, not a tenth of the length of Drury-lane, there may be three, four, five, or six grates. The reason is this:—There is no sewer running down Drury-lane; a contiguous sewer, however, runs down Great Wyld-street, draining, where there are drains, the hundred courts and nooks of the poor, between Drury-lane and Lincoln’s-inn-fields, as well as the more open places leading down towards the proximity of Temple Bar. This Great Wyld-street sewer, moreover, in its course to Fleet Bridge, is made available for the drainage (very grievously deficient, according to some of the reports of the Board of Health) of Clare-market. Grates would of course be required in such a place as Drury-lane, only the street is thought to be sufficiently on the descent to convey the surface-water to the grate in Wych-street.

The parts in which the gully-grates will be found the most numerous are where the main streets are most intersected by other main streets, or by smaller off-streets, and indeed wherever the streets, of whatever size, continually intersect each other, as they do off nearly all the great street-thoroughfares in the City. Although the sewers may not be according to the plan of the streets, the gully-grates must nevertheless be found at the street intersections, whether the nearest point to the sewer or not, or else the water would not be quickly carried off, and would form a nuisance.