Show Notes
Our second episode focuses on something most of us never think about until something goes wrong: sewers. In specific, we’ll be learning about the construction of London’s Interceptor Sewers, and the 318 million bricks that went into this monument.
Sanitation in 1850s Victorian era London was a little different than our standards today. Despite the widespread use of the Victorian equivalent to a modern bathroom, the water closet, indoor plumbing as we know it today was still many years away and the vast majority of waste and sewage was going straight into the River Thames. A cholera outbreak in 1853 that killed roughly 15,000 people, the eventual fermentation of the river in 1858 known as The Great Stink, and a relocation of Parliament within smelling distance would finally lead to the hiring of Sir Joseph William Bazalgette to rectify the problem.
Bazalgette’s work would revolutionize sewers and create many of the standards we continue to use toady, including innovations such as egg-shaped sewer pipes and the use of Portland cement, which is still the most commonly used variety of cement today. As with modern engineering projects waste was a huge topic of discussion, but not in the way you’d expect. Unlike our modern concerns of waste and inefficiency contributing to environmental impact, the primary concern was wasting the sewage that could have instead been collected and sold as fertilizer in rural areas.
As a true monument to future proofing, the work completed by Bazalgette would last over 100 years, with a project beginning in 2007 to finally expand the capacity of the sewers. Today the biggest risk to sewers in London and across the world are fat bergs, congealed masses of materials such as wet wipes and cooking grease, or as John puts it, “all the stuff we get told not to flush down the toilet but we do anyway because you press flush, they go!”
What is Measured in Metric?
Civilization and the world around us, from the monuments that astound us to the mundane infrastructure that serve us, we rarely think about how it all came together. Welcome to Measured in Metric, where we dive into the stories of the builders, the visionaries, and the influencers that have shaped the world we live in.