The King’s Scholars’ Pond Sewer—which seems to have given the Commissioners more trouble than any other, in its connection with Buckingham Palace, St. James’s Park, and the new Houses of Parliament—runs from Chelsea-bridge past Cubitt’s workshops, and along the King’s-road to Eaton-square, the whole of which is drained into it; then “turning round,” as one man described it, it approaches Buckingham Palace, which, with its grounds, as well as a portion of St. James’s and the Green parks, is drained into this sewer; then branching away for the reception of the sewage from the houses and gardens of Chelsea, it drains Sloane-street, and, crossing the Knightsbridge-road, runs through or across Hyde-park to the Swan at Bayswater, whence its course is by the Westbourne District and under the canal, along Paddington, until it attains the open country, or rather the grounds, in that quarter, which have been very extensively and are now still being built over, and where new sewers are constructed simultaneously with new streets.
Thus in the “reach,” as I heard it happily enough designated, of each of these great sewers, the reader will see from a map the extent of the subterranean metropolis traversed, alike along crowded streets ringing with the sounds of traffic, among palatial and aristocratic domains, and along the parks which adorn London, as well as winding their ramifying course among the courts, alleys, and teeming streets, the resorts of misery, poverty, and vice.
Estimating, then, the number of sewers from the number of their river outlets, and regarding all the rest as the branches, or tributaries, to each of these superior streams, we have, adopting the area before specified as being drained by the metropolitan sewers, viz., 58 square miles, the following results:—
Each of the 60 sewers having an outlet into the Thames drains 618 statute acres.
And assuming the number of houses included within these 58 square miles to be 200,000, and the population to amount to 1,500,000, or two-thirds of the houses and people included in the Registrar-General’s Metropolis, we may say that each of the 60 sewers would carry into the Thames the refuse from 25,000 individuals and 3333 inhabited houses. This, however, is partly prevented by the cesspoolage system, which supplies receptacles for a proportion of the refuse that, were London to be rebuilt according to the provisions of the present Building and Sanitary Acts, would all be carried, without any interception, into the river Thames by the media of the sewers.
In my account of cesspoolage I shall endeavour to show the extent of fæcal refuse, &c., contained in places not communicating with the sewers, and to be removed by the labour of men and horses, as well as the amount of fæcal refuse carried into the sewerage.
Of the Qualities, etc., of the Sewage.
The question of the value, the uses, and the best means of collecting for use, the great mass of the sewage of the metropolis, seems to have become complicated by the statements which have been of late years put forth by rival projectors and rival companies. In our smaller country towns, the neighbourhood of many being remarkable for fertility and for a green beauty of meadow-land and pasturage, the refuse of the towns, whether sewage or cesspoolage (if not washed into a current, stream, or river), is purchased by the farmers, and carted by them to spread upon the land.
By sewage, I mean the contents of the sewerage, or of the series of sewers; which neither at present nor, I believe, at any former period, has been applied to any useful or profitable purpose by the metropolitan authorities. The readiest mode to get rid of it, without any care about ultimate consequences, has always been resorted to, and that mode has been to convey it into the Thames, and leave the rest to the current of the stream. But the Thames has its ebbs as well as its flow, and the consequence is the sewage is never got rid of.
The most eminent of our engineers have agreed that it is a very important consideration how this sewage should be not only innocuously but profitably disposed of; and if not profitably, in an immediate money return, to those who may be considered its owners (the municipal authorities of the kingdom), at least profitably in a national point of view, by its use in the restoration or enrichment of the fertility of the soil, and the consequent increase of the food of man and beast.