Bazalgette's Sewers: The Forgotten Tunnels That Built London

This is the story of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the slight, softly spoken Victorian engineer who answered the Great Stink of 1858 in London by building the largest sewer system in the world. It is a story of cholera and miasma theory, of John Snow and the Broad Street pump, of three hundred and eighteen million bricks and eighty-two miles of tunnel, and of a man who reshaped the banks of the Thames and then all but vanished from the history books. The city you walk through still runs, quite literally, through the tunnels one Victorian civil servant built to get rid of a bad smell.

#london #londonhistory