REVOLOOTION

How cholera epidemics drove public sanitation from Victorian tunnels to today's super sewer

- BY SIOBHAN MCNALLY

Poo now travels under London in a sewer tunnel so wide, you could fit three buses side-by-side in it. But before the new super sewer opened this year, Londoners were flushing their waste down 1,300 miles of brick-built Victorian sewage system, with ornate cathedral-sized pumping stations.

When the Public Health Act of 1875 received royal assent, the drainage system built by civil engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette in the city was the super sewer of its time.

It was created after the horror of The Great Stink of 1858. That summer the Thames became so noxious that the smell shut the Houses of Parliament.

Night soil workers, or gong men, carted away the city's filth from 200,000 cesspits and outdoor privies, to be used as fertiliser.

"There was no integrated sewerage network system so all the dung heaps had to be dug out by gong men," says Dr Dave Musgrove, content director of BBC History Magazine and the HistoryExtra podcast.

"It was an unpleasant job but reasonably well-paid, because the excrement was valuable. If you weren't rich, you had your pit.

you dug it out, and it was taken away in carts and used for manuring fields." The 17th century diarist Samuel Pepys wrote extensively about his chamber pot and whether it had been emptied into the cesspit beneath the house by his servant "He also used to relieve himself in the fireplace," says Dr Musgrove.

"But he tells a story where he goes down into his basement and is very disappointed to step into a great heap of turds, because his neighbour hasn't emptied his pit and it has leaked into his."

A 19th century population explosion meant the night soil men were suddenly unable to keep up with the volume of fecal matter, and piles of untreated human waste either leaked or were dumped on the shores of the Thames, turning it into an open sewer.

Along with human corpses and rotting vegetation in the waterways, this was a toxic disaster waiting to happen.