Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (40 page)

If Crossness Pumping Station were a dog, it would be a mongrel of very mixed breeding. A large rectangular edifice on a barren stretch of the Thames by Thamesmead, it is fashioned chiefly from pale brownish brick with a queasy yellow tinge, with details picked out in red. Style-wise, the building’s round-arched windows, carved column capitals and dog-tooth string coursing all hint at the Romanesque, while its no-nonsense massing and beefy structural piers are pure Train Shed. Round the back, the architectural signals become even more confusing. In place of the expected derelict goods yard, there is a formal garden straight out of the Italian Renaissance, complete with symmetrical flower beds, gravel paths, a cedar tree, and pedimented pavilions at either end.

So far, so weird. But it is only on entering the building that one is well and truly flummoxed. Part cathedral, part machine room, the space is filled with an ethereal light, filtering down from clerestory windows through an ironwork grid two storeys above one’s head. Every element of the room is decorated in some way: patterned brickwork and fancy tiles cover the walls and floor, while screens, grilles, stairs and balustrades compete with yards of elaborate ironwork, their red, yellow and green floral motifs overlapping in a visual cacophony of colour. In the centre of the room, a large octagonal opening (the cathedral crossing) punches through the ironwork grid above, each of its angled faces a writhing mass of emerald leaves from which the Metropolitan Board of Works monogram MBW peeps out in red. Perhaps because of all this ferrous foliage, it can take a while to clock the really serious pieces of ironwork in the room, but once noticed, they command all one’s attention. Four looming, mostly rusting metal giants stand one to each corner, their mute power obvious even at rest. At the sight of them, all
the building’s visual clutter falls away, like excited chatter at a party when someone famous enters the room. Meet Victoria, Prince Consort, Alexandra and Albert Edward: the four largest rotatative beam engines in the world.
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A rotatative beam engine, in case you were wondering, is an engine that applies force at one end of a pivoted beam in order to do work at the other, using a flywheel to regulate the motion. It is essentially a powered seesaw, whose vertical rocking motion will be familiar to devotees of
Dallas
from the ‘nodding donkeys’ seen pumping oil out of the Texan desert in the series’ opening credits. Sucking up large volumes of fluid from underground is what beam engines do best, and in the case of the royal quartet at Crossness, those volumes were once very large indeed. In their nineteenth-century heyday, their 43-foot, 47-ton rocking beams were each capable of lifting six tons of liquid at a single stroke, at a rate of 11 strokes per minute. However, it was not oil they were lifting, but something that once threatened to bring the world’s greatest city to a stuttering, stinking standstill – its sewage.

London at the start of Queen Victoria’s reign was capital of the largest, most powerful empire the world had ever seen. The city’s dominion encompassed over a fifth of the world’s land surface and a quarter of its population. But great global metropolis though it was, London had a serious domestic problem. The city had never adopted what might be called an integrated policy on waste, and its two and a half million inhabitants were still being served by a sewage system best described as medieval, essentially comprising the River Thames, its stinking tributaries, and around 200,000 overflowing cesspits.
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London’s failure to deal with its ordure was far from unique. Most pre-industrial cities adopted a reactive, rather than a proactive, approach towards waste. Unlike the food supply, to which even a day’s disruption caused chaos, rubbish could be allowed to pile up for years, even centuries, before it created a real nuisance. Part of the reason for this was that most waste in the pre-industrial world was organic. Although it was messy, it was also seen as a valuable resource. In what the historian Donald Reid called the ‘golden age of urban ecology’, very little went to waste – indeed, the more a city stank, the richer it was deemed to be.
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Leftover food was gobbled up by pigs; human and
animal faeces were collected to be used as manure; urine and fermented dung were vital to a variety of artisanal processes such as dyeing and paper-making. What little rubbish could not be used was either thrown straight into rivers, or taken to dumps on the city outskirts. That was the theory, anyway. In practice, most people simply chucked their waste out into the street – a habit that, in smaller cities at least, was not quite as antisocial as it sounds, since much of what was thrown away could be collected and put to good use.

However, as cities grew larger, their self-regulatory ecosystems began to break down. Fourteenth-century Coventry, for instance, had 10,000 inhabitants, making it the fourth-largest city in England, and to judge from the flurry of ordinances emanating from the city council, rubbish was becoming an issue. Although human and animal dung were valued for manure, the supply in larger cities often outstripped demand, leading to an insalubrious gloop that clogged the streets and blocked the drains. The council’s response in Coventry was to decree that ‘no person within this City shall from henceforth sweep their streets in any rain time, whereby to pester the river with filth and muck’.
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Similar ordinances prohibited the washing of entrails and other ‘filthy operations’ in the market, forbade butchers to slaughter cattle in the open, and banned the throwing of fish water into the street, except after dark (quite what this did to alleviate its stench remains unclear).

If the ‘filth and muck’ of fourteenth-century Coventry caused a nuisance, that of London, a city 10 times the size, can be readily imagined.
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Few houses in the capital had access to cesspits or back gardens, so the large amounts of waste thrown into the street included every sort of ‘muck’, from kitchen scraps to human ‘night soil’. The city was forced to employ hundreds of ‘muck-rakers’, professional street-sweepers, to collect the stuff and cart it off, either to ‘laystalls’ on the city fringes, where it was matured into manure, or to special wharves, where it was loaded on to barges and taken downriver to be dumped. The authorities’ battle against the rising mire was reflected, as in Coventry, by a stream of ordinances, of which the opening salvo of 1357, requiring citizens to ‘remove from the streets and lanes of the town all swine and all dirt, dung and filth … and cause the streets and lanes to be kept clean’, set the tone for the following centuries.
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Despite all the mayoral huffing and puffing, nothing approaching major sanitary reform was attempted in London, and slowly but surely the city simply clogged up. By 1661 things were so bad that the diarist John Evelyn was moved to write a diatribe,
Fumifugium
, in which he described the capital ‘burning in stench and dark clouds of smoke like Hell’. ‘The City of London,’ he wrote, ‘resembles the face rather of Mount Etna than an Assembly of Rational Creatures.’
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Five years after Evelyn’s outburst, his ‘Etna’ finally erupted, its timber houses and putrid filth helping to fuel a four-day-long funeral pyre. For Evelyn, the Great Fire was not so much a tragedy as an opportunity, and just three days after it died down, he visited Sir Christopher Wren, urging him to adopt his proposals to rebuild the smouldering city over a series of subterranean vaults that could both service its buildings and carry their waste away. But it was not to be. The urgent need to rebuild and get trading again, combined with complex patterns of land ownership in the city, put paid to any grand visions Evelyn, Wren or anyone else might have had for London. Within the space of a year, the capital had risen again from the ashes more or less as it had been, with just the occasional nod in the direction of what we would now call health and safety. Streets were a little wider, buildings made of brick rather than wood, the noxious Fleet was covered over – but as far as the city’s muck was concerned, it was back to business as usual.

Over the next two centuries, London got on with what it did best: making money. Although the city was soon choking on its own effluent again, the value of night soil and animal dung was still firmly engrained in people’s minds – particularly since seventeenth-century Londoners had discovered the pleasures of fruit and vegetables grown in their own manure. Indeed, demand for the latter had been so great in 1617 that the newly formed Gardeners’ Company felt able to claim that it had ‘cleared the city of all dung and noisomeness’; and although John Evelyn’s account of the capital a few decades later rather suggests otherwise, there is no doubt that commercial market gardening provided a viable alternative to waste disposal in London.
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The capital’s most famous horticultural enterprise, Neat House Gardens in Chelsea, enjoyed a special relationship with Covent Garden for over two centuries, exporting high-quality produce to the market and receiving
boatfuls of fresh dung in return. As John Strype noted in 1720, the arrangement was both efficient and highly profitable:

A parcel of houses, most seated on the banks of the river Thames, and inhabited by Gardiners, for which it is of note, for the supplying of London and Westminster markets with asparagus, artichoaks, cauliflowers, musmelons and the like … which by reason of their keeping the ground so rich by dunging it (and through the nearness to London they have the soil cheap) doth make their crops very forward, to their great profit in coming to such good markets.
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By the start of the nineteenth century, London’s population had grown fourfold, and its market gardens, which now stretched as far as the River Lea, still received regular exports of manure from Dung Wharf, the city’s main waste depot at Blackfriars. But as increasing volumes of people and goods flowed into London, the city’s supplies of dung and muck began to seriously outstrip demand. Matters finally came to a head with the popular adoption of the latest must-have accessory, the flushing water-closet, first patented by Joseph Bramah in 1778.
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At the mere pull of a lever, centuries of emptying chamber pots and ducking at the shout of ‘gardy-loo’ were banished to the past. But if WCs relieved an age-old domestic problem, out in the city they were creating havoc. Vastly increased volumes of waste water began to enter the sewage system, causing ancient cesspits to overflow and street drains, designed to take rainwater only, to become blocked and polluted. Most loathsomely of all, swollen underground sewers began to seep through the floorboards of houses in low-lying districts.

From the 1830s onwards, London was hit by a series of cholera epidemics, which were linked, naturally enough, to the evil miasma that hung over the city.
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In 1842, the pioneering social reformer Edwin Chadwick published his
Inquiry into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain
, painting a gruesome picture of life at the start of Victoria’s reign. Having reviewed the appalling conditions in which the majority lived, Chadwick concluded that

… the various forms of epidemic, endemic, and other disease caused,
or aggravated, or propagated chiefly amongst the labouring classes by atmospheric impurities produced by decomposing animal and vegetable substances, by damp and filth, and close and overcrowded dwellings prevail amongst the population in every part of the kingdom … as they have been found to prevail in the lowest districts of the metropolis.
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The government responded in 1848 with the creation of the aptly named Consolidated Commission of Sewers, whose first move – encouraged by Chadwick – was to flush out every one of London’s existing 369 underground drains; a well-intentioned but disastrous act, since all it succeeded in doing was to disgorge several centuries’ worth of backed-up detritus into the Thames. Since many Londoners got their drinking water directly from the river, the operation, far from improving their health, actually made matters worse. Over the next few years, a series of even more destructive cholera epidemics resulted, killing up to 10,000 people a year. It was becoming clear that simply flushing out the city’s existing sewers was not going to work. A more radical solution was needed.

London’s crisis sparked an international debate; not just about the capital’s embarrassment, but about the issue of urban waste in general. Among those taking part was Justus von Liebig, the ‘father of fertiliser’ whose 1836 discovery of the importance of minerals in plant nutrition convinced him that it was vital that the nutrients contained in urban sewage were returned to the soil. Without them, he reasoned, a city’s hinterland would eventually be reduced to desert. Liebig drew his conclusion partly from studying that ultimate consumer city, Rome. Soon after its foundation in the sixth century
BC
, Rome (ever the exception to the rule) had begun constructing an elaborate series of underground drains that it continued to expand throughout its later development.
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This extraordinary piece of foresight (arguably as vital to the capital’s future as the aqueducts it began to construct three centuries later) was inherited from the neighbouring Etruscans, whose expertise in draining hills and marshland had long been applied to their own city-building.
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Pliny declared that Rome’s sewers matched the grandeur of the capital they served. Some were large enough for a
wagonload of hay to be driven through, and when Marcus Agrippa had the felicitous idea of flushing out the system with overflow from the aqueducts, he was able to inspect the results of his scheme by boat.
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But the system’s crowning glory (beloved of many a Latin-studying schoolboy) was the Cloaca Maxima, a great semicircular tufa-hewn tunnel up to five metres wide that collected all the waste from the entire network and flushed its contents into the Tiber.
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