Thread by @MuseumofLondon

#BornOnThisDay 200 years ago, Sir Joseph Bazalgette brought a lot to London: poo-free streets, super sewers and some epic moustache realness. In his honour, here's a Bazalthread:

Bazalgette lived in a time when the streets of London ran with human filth. The city's patchwork system of waste disposal, relied on night-soil collectors who emptied cesspits into rivers like the Fleet and Tyburn.
Long story, short: it was rank.

See here a 19th century Londoner taking a afternoon boat trip.

The increasing use of the flush loo didn't help either, allowing wealthy people to dump their 💩 straight into the river. Everything ended up in the Thames, a source of water for drinking and washing. You do the math!

Things did not improve. 1858 saw the "Great Stink" overwhelm London. You think last summer on the tube was bad? This 19th century scorch-athon exposed the rotting human effluent and industrial waste polluting the water of the Thames.

As if by magic, a new bill was rushed through Parliament and became law in just 18 days, to make a new sewer for London. @TheTimes claimed MPs had been "forced by pure stench".

Enter stage left: Joseph William Bazalgette, hired to take charge of the new sewers with a budget from Parliament of £2.5 million (somewhere between £240 million and over a billion pounds in today's values).

Bazalgette reviewed 137 different PPPs (poo problem proposals (not actual name)) and made a plan to build 1,100 miles of drains under London's streets to feed into new brick-lined sewers. They would funnel the waste far away from London, into the Thames Estuary at high tide.

Piping the poop up to the mouth of the Thames required pumping stations, with the biggest steam engines in the world. Thousands of labourers dug out the tunnels by hand and bricklayers' wages went up by 20%. Probably to do with the... 318 MILLION BRICKS THAT NEEDED LAYING.

The project completed in 1875 and could carry 2 million litres of waste every day. By the time Bazalgette died in 1891, there were over double the amount of people living (and defecating) in London as when he planned the sewers in 1850.

He had a few side hustles to say the least and designed some small unknowns in the world of engineering: Battersea Bridge, Albert Bridge, Putney Bridge and the early plans for the Blackwall Tunnel.

Few people have done more to change the River Thames or London than Sir Joseph Bazalgette but his designs weren't perfect. After the sewers were completed, disaster struck on the Thames…

In 1878, the Princess Alice crashed into a coal-carrying ship, with 600 people pitched into the Thames. Downstream, two of Bazalgette's pumping stations had release 75 million gallons of raw sewage into the Thames and many of the 130 survivors died after ingesting liquid waste.

The tragedy encouraged the development of sewage treatment plants, to help reduce the amount of pure effluent dumped into the Thames.

Bazalgette's Victorian brick-lined tunnels are still the basis of London's sewer system even today, thanks to his foresight. He insisted not only on large tunnels, but doubled their proposed size to accommodate the growth of the city's population.

And now? More people live in London than ever before. Major emissions from "combined sewer overflows" happen about 50 times a year. That's why a brand-new super-sewer, the Thames Tideway, is coming.

Seven metres wide and 25 kilometres long, it will intercept sewage that would otherwise pollute the river. Bazalgette would be proud. Read our full Bazalgette article here: bit.ly/2OtjuvX