Jackson - Dirty old London: the Victorian fight against filth

Copyright 2014 Lee Jackson

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jackson, Lee, 1971
Dirty old London: the Victorian fight against filth/Lee Jackson.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-300-19205-6 (cl: alk. paper)

1. London (England)History19th century. 2. SanitationEnglandLondonHistory19th century. 3. London (England)Social conditions19th century. I. Title.
DA683.J17 2014
363.700942109034dc23

2014014234

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

C ONTENTS

1 Joseph Bazalgette (181991), who designed and built London's great network of intercepting sewers during the mid-nineteenth century, is memorialised on the Thames Embankment, with a bronze bust and the legend flumini vincula posuit (he placed chains on the river). The inscription refers to the building of the embankment itself containing both intercepting sewer and under- ground railway which reclaimed more than 30 acres of land.

2 From an 1831 broadside entitled Salus Populi Suprema Lex (The welfare of the people is the supreme law), this cartoon drawn by George Cruikshank shows the sewage of south London flowing into the Thames, whilst the chief of Southwark Water Co. (which drew drinking water from the foul river) poses mid-stream, like a filthy complacent Britannia.

3 Bazalgette submitted a plan for building public toilets, as part of his application for the post of Assistant Surveyor at the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers in 1849. Bazalgette's appealing classical conveniences (for men only) would have contained water closets and urinals, monitored by an attendant. Tanks beneath would have collected the urine, which would have been periodically pumped out and utilised as fertiliser. The toilets were never actually built. Nonetheless, Bazalgette found employment with the MCS which ultimately led to him designing London's new sewers.

4 Charles Cochrane (180755), founder of the National Philanthropic Association, exhausted his personal wealth promoting, amongst other projects, the street orderly system of continual road cleansing. He also established two soup kitchens (which included the first public toilets for the poor), publicised workhouse abuses and the state of slum accommodation in his radical illustrated magazine The Poor Man's Guardian, and supported George Walker's campaign to abolish interments in overcrowded urban graveyards. Cochrane styled himself The Agitator of the Metropolis and was criticised for his rabble-rousing, confrontational approach.

5 The scavengers who cleared mud off the streets were not terribly fastidious about their work, or its impact on the public. This 1820s print, entitled A London Nuisance, shows a well-dressed young man being spattered by mud, shovelled up by street-cleaners.

6 An 1860s photographic portrait of Edwin Chadwick (180090), the civil servant and public health reformer, father of the sanitary movement, author of An Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842). Chadwick persuaded the nation that improving sanitation was imperative. He was, however, a divisive figure, disliked by both commercial interests and representatives of local government for his tyrannical centralising agenda. Engineers and surveyors, likewise, resented his dogmatic certainties about sewers and sewerage. One of his many critics remarked: No one was to be clean except by Chadwick's patent soap.

7 An 1850 model plan for public baths and washhouses, costing 2,000, by Price Pritchard Baly. The plan was published (with alternatives costing 4,000 and 8,500) by the Committee for Promoting the Establishment of Baths and Washhouses. Note the typical features: separate entrances for men and women, and different classes of bathers; and a modestly sized plunge bath (as opposed to the grander swimming pool of the late-Victorian period).

8 Enon Chapel was opened as a burial speculation in the 1820s. The proprietor made money from funerals and interments in the vaults below the chapel building. Thousands were buried in a space which could barely hold a few hundred coffins. In fact, bodies were regularly cleared and dumped elsewhere. This lithograph was published in 1847, by which time the chapel had closed but was being used as a dancing saloon. The burial reformer George Walker proceeded to buy the lease and end the impious entertainments. He took the public on tours in the grim bone-ridden cellars, before paying for reburial of the remains at Norwood Cemetery.

9 London's commercial cemeteries of the 1830s and 1840s adopted various architectural styles and were not prescriptive about the design of individual monuments. Augustus Pugin (181252), the pioneer of Gothic Revival, mocks the result in this satirical sketch, which juxtaposes rather tasteless Egyptian-style gates (reminiscent of Abney Park Cemetery) and a classical chapel. There are also various other ill-matched details and nods to the vulgar nature of the enterprise. These include an unlikely advertising sign-board posted on the gates, which reads OBSERVE THE PRICES!!! FOR READY MONEY ONLY.

10 George Alfred Walker (180784), also known as Graveyard Walker, was convinced that miasma from full, badly-managed graveyards was a major factor in the ill-health of the poor. He launched a decade-long campaign to close metropolitan burial grounds, and supported Edwin Chadwick's scheme for government-run national cemeteries, beyond the boundaries of the capital. Chadwick's plans faltered, and parish vestries would retain control of burials. Walker, nonetheless, successfully made the case for burial reform. Following legislation in 1852, pestiferous ancient graveyards were closed by order of the Home Secretary, and spacious extramural parochial cemeteries became the norm.