The Victorian City Page 23
Much of London’s physical topography too was created by rivers, which carved out great valleys that were still visible in the nineteenth century but are less so today as infill has been used to minimize the difficulties created by the steep gradients. The main one in London was the Fleet Valley, ‘once almost a ravine’. Although the ground level has risen over thirteen feet since the nineteenth century, part of the hill from King’s Cross still has a gradient of 1 in 17. ‘Fleet’, deriving from the Anglo-Saxon for ‘inlet’, indicates that this river was originally large enough to be navigable at its mouth. The Fleet has two sources: the ponds on the west side of Hampstead Heath (today’s mixed-bathing ponds), from where it runs down Fleet Road to Camden Town; and the ponds in the grounds of Kenwood and those on the east side of the Heath (today’s men’s and women’s bathing), whose waters run down Highgate Road. The two sources meet north of Camden, at Kentish Town Road – and such is the volume of water here, that when the Fleet flooded it created a pool sixty feet across. The river then runs under the Regent’s Canal, past St Pancras Church, to Battle Bridge (now King’s Cross), where it was channelled into a brick conduit, to become the Fleet sewer. This runs almost exactly parallel to Farringdon Road, which was built at the same time as the sewer, and then along the valley that bears its name, spanned by Holborn Viaduct, before it ultimately reaches the Thames as a tidal inlet at Blackfriars.
The Tyburn runs from Hampstead, too, from Shepherd’s Well, through Swiss Cottage and down to Regent’s Park, where it meets a tributary running from Belsize Park. It is carried by aqueduct at Regent’s Canal and then reappears as the boating lake on the southern side of the park. Marylebone Lane was originally the left bank of the stream, which explains its meandering path. After the Tyburn crosses Oxford Street, it runs under Grosvenor and Berkeley Squares, under Piccadilly and then towards Green Park, where it gets lost on the marshy lands heading for the river. (Tyburn, now Marble Arch, was not actually near the River Tyburn at all; it was built beside a tributary of the Westbourne known as Tyburn Brook, the brook taking its name in this instance from the gallows it ran past.)
Only slightly smaller than the Fleet, the River Westbourne also rises up on Hampstead Heath but then heads south-west, meeting more tributaries near Kilburn and running towards Bayswater Road, into Hyde Park, where it bubbles up into Londoners’ consciousness as the Serpentine, where the river had been dammed in the previous century. After that, it leaves the park via Knightsbridge and can be seen in outline once again at Sloane Square tube station, where a metal culvert carrying the river runs over the District and Circle line platforms. From there it is diverted to a reservoir for the Chelsea Waterworks and debouches as the Ranelagh Sewer, which as late as the 1960s was still visible in the Thames at low tide. Until 1834, the Ranelagh sewer discharged its effluent into the Westbourne. At that point a collateral sewer was built to divert the waste away from the Serpentine, but ‘a communication’ was left between the two. By the mid-1840s, the ‘effluvia from under the arches’ of the Serpentine’s bridge ‘were so offensive’ that they had to be closed off, while the Serpentine itself was said to be ‘nine feet of mud’ under a mere ‘eighteen inches of water’, and ‘not mud of an ordinary description, but a compound of decayed animal and vegetable refuse’ – that is, sewage. ‘The Serpentine has been, in fact, transformed into a vast metropolitan laboratory of cholera.’ Despite this, as late as the end of the 1840s the Serpentine was piped as drinking water to many Londoners, including the inhabitants of Kensington Barracks, Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey.
One of the effects of the watery nature of the capital was frequently visible, as well as oppressive. There had always been fogs in London, but as the population increased and coal fires spread, so a pall of dark smoke, by the early 1830s estimated at nearly thirty miles across, regularly hung over the city. By the 1860s, the 2 million residents, the animals, the gasworks, the industry and the home fires combined to make London two to three degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside. We take it for granted today that this is what happens in dense population centres; then it was a new phenomenon.
The fogs were seasonal, arriving in late autumn, persisting through the worst of the winter and lifting somewhat in the spring. But most contemporary accounts portray them as omnipresent, and the fogs became a part of almost every description of London, by visitor or resident, from the start of the century. As early as 1805, the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon saw London’s ‘smoke’ as a ‘sublime canopy that shrouds the City of the world’, but he also wrote that it ‘drifted’, so it appears that at this date it remained a relatively gentle component of the weather. By the 1820s, it was permanent enough for Byron to think of it as architectural: a ‘huge, dun Cupola’. A visitor in the same decade confirms this: London, he wrote, was covered with a dense cloud of smoke ‘as usual’.
Yet the fog was still not the smothering menace of later years. Dickens may have backdated his memories in some of his fiction. A Christmas Carol, set in the 1820s, was written in 1843, and in Scrooge’s counting house ‘it had not been light all day...The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense...that...the houses opposite were mere phantoms.’ In Bleak House, which Dickens started to write in 1852 but which was set during the 1830s, fog also epitomizes the city. When Esther arrives in London from Reading, she asks ‘whether there was a great fire anywhere? For the streets were so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen.’ But no, she is told, it is just ‘a London particular’.65
The fog in turn created a city of black buildings. The Portland stone façade of St Paul’s was not well suited to the London atmosphere, but then, ‘it is difficult to conceive of any colour except black, which can long preserve its identity, in an atmosphere perpetually charged with coal-smoke, which would speedily tarnish a palace of gold.’ Dickens described the cause as well as the effect of this blackening, as he watched ‘Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.’
From the late 1830s, it was the colour of the fog rather than the buildings that fascinated and disturbed. It was most commonly the same shade as coal smoke, and smelt of coal smoke too, but then suddenly it changed, becoming bottle-green, or ‘a dilution of yellow peas-pudding’. In Our Mutual Friend, in the 1860s, Dickens was even more precise: in the countryside the fog was grey, at the edges of the suburbs it became dark yellow, ‘and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City...it was rusty black’. The American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, however, described it as ‘very black indeed, more like a distillation of mud than anything else; the ghost of mud, – the spiritualized medium of departed mud, through which the dead citizens of London probably tread’. In 1858, Dickens took an Italian friend to the Crystal Palace: ‘I asked him to try to imagine the Sun shining down through the glass, and making broad lights and shadows. He said he tried very hard, but he couldn’t imagine the sun shining within fifty miles of London under any circumstances.’
Even after gas lighting arrived in the streets (see pp. 53-55), the fog physically swallowed up most of the illumination, by depleting the oxygen and causing the gas to ‘burn on dim, yellow and sulkily’, while candles gave ‘a haggard and unwilling’ light. The smothering lack of oxygen, too, made breathing difficult, and many more deaths among those with respiratory illnesses were registered during periods of extreme fog. Even the young and healthy found it troublesome: ‘Dear me, you’re choking!’ says Mr Grewgious to Edwin Drood in the novel of the same name: ‘It’s this fog...it makes my eyes smart, like Cayenne pepper.’
For those like the comfortably-off Mr Grewgious, who stayed at home and had his supper delivered to his chambers, the fog was a nuisance, no more. The real problem was for those who had to navigate the streets, whether commuting to work, or working in the streets themselves. In Ble
ak House, Dickens described ‘Implacable November weather’ with ‘Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners’. As the fog thickened, street conditions worsened: ‘You step gingerly along, feeling your way beside the walls, windows, and doors, whatever you can, until at least you tumble headlong into some cellar,’ or run against some ‘respectable old gentleman, with whom you have a roll or two in the gutter, thankful that you did not fall on the other side, and stave in the shop-front...Porters with heavy burdens, women and men with fish, watercresses, &c., you run against every few minutes...As for your watch...you saw the fellow’s arm that dragged it out of your pocket, and that was all; it was a jerk amid the deep fog...you might as well hunt for a needle in a bottle of hay, as attempt to follow the thief in that dusky, woolly, and deceptive light.’ Meanwhile, on the river, the boats could not run, while ‘Many lives have been lost through foot-passengers mistaking the steps at the foot of some of the bridges for the...bridge itself, and...rolling head-foremost into the river.’ Ultimately, there was nothing to be done but make a joke of it: many Londoners swore that in a fog the quickest way of getting to Temple Bar from Charing Cross, a twenty-minute walk eastwards in normal circumstances, was to set off due south and ‘walk...without once turning your head. In three hours or so, ‘you would be pretty sure of reaching the point aimed at, should you not be run over’.
As the quality of air deteriorated through the century, so did the water, a process that began at the beginning of the century, from a combination of factory waste, contamination from gasworks, the dockyards releasing ‘copper and other ingredients’, and dozens of other industries flushing out their own chemical brews into the Thames. As early as 1821, an inquiry presided over by the Lord Mayor looked at river water near the gasworks. Live fish were put into buckets of locally collected water: the flounders died within a minute of immersion, while eels lasted four minutes.
The problem of industrial waste was dwarfed by the problem of human waste. Too many people living in one place were all discharging their effluent into the Thames. By 1828, nearly 150 sewers were disgorging into the Thames between Vauxhall Bridge and Limehouse alone, and by the 1850s the city’s central sixty sewers daily flushed 260 tons of raw sewage directly into the river. And because the Thames is tidal, this pollution was being washed right back twice a day: as the tide ebbed, shorelines of ‘mud’ 125 yards wide were revealed, ‘mud’ that was raw sewage.
Summoning the political will to deal with the problem took decades, long after the increase in population had overwhelmed the civic infrastructure. The Bill of Sewers legislation – defining sewers purely as conduits for rainwater and entirely prohibiting their connection to house drains – had passed three centuries earlier and was still in force. According to the law, cesspools, not sewers, were for sewage. For centuries, therefore, cesspools under houses had been where all human waste was disposed. Even if cesspools were cleaned regularly, in densely populated districts they were still offensive; when they were not cleaned regularly, they were almost beyond imagining. The latter was often the norm: cesspools were expensive to clean and the process was unpleasant. To minimize the disruption, by the middle of the century emptying cesspools was confined to the hours between midnight and 5 a.m. Five night-men were usually required to clean one cesspool. A holeman descended to fill the tubs lowered by the ropeman; two tubmen then carried the tubs back and forth out to the street, where the fifth man emptied the loads into an open cart. (In most London houses, few of which had rear access, these tubs were carried one by one through the interior.) Until 1848, this waste was taken to nightsoil yards, where it was mixed with exhausted (used) hops, bought cheaply from the breweries, and spread out to dry, wafting its scent across the neighbourhood until it was in a condition to be sold as fertilizer.
Those with less money, or those in rental properties whose landlords wanted to scrimp, had their cesspools cleaned infrequently; the poor, or those with bad landlords (which was often the same thing), never had them cleaned at all. By the late 1840s, there were so many cesspools under even the most expensive housing in the West End, that the walls between them frequently collapsed, and so fashionable London was perched on top of what one sanitary reformer called not cesspools but ‘cess-lakes’. These noxious lakes filled up and overflowed, the liquids soaking into the ground and ultimately contaminating the water, while the solids slowly seeped into neighbouring cellars and streets, oozing up through the bricks every time it rained. In St Giles, ‘whole areas of the cellars were full of nightsoil to the depth of three feet’ and yards were ‘covered in nightsoil...to the depth of nearly six inches’.
The number of animals in the city added to the filth. Many city dairies kept cows, often in cellars, where they were fed through hatches, with their waste removed the same way. In 1829, the student Hékékyan Bey went to look at lodgings in Parliament Street: on finding that half the courtyard was given over to four dairy cows he declined, but such arrangements were not unusual.66 By 1837, a guidebook suggested there might have been as many as 10,000 cows in London dairies, fed not on hay but on spent mash from the breweries. A decade later, this figure had doubled; many animals were kept under the newly built railway arches by the Thames, forty or fifty cows per arch, and fed on market sweepings. At mid-century, Westminster, near one of the slums around St James’s, was home to ‘14 cow-sheds, 2 slaughter houses, 3 boiling houses [most likely boiling horses for glue], 7 bone stores, [and] 1 zincing establishment’.
Animals were found throughout the city. At Millbank prison, once surrounded by a moat, a cow was kept in the 1850s to crop the ditch’s grass; Westminster Abbey and Green and Hyde Parks all had sheep and cattle to keep the grass down. (Hyde Park leased its grazing rights to butchers, and the odd goat, too, was to be found there.) Throughout both town and suburbs, many people kept chickens and other fowl. As well as those owned by the watermen on cabstands, fowl routinely pecked and scratched outside the Old Bailey on Sundays, when there was less traffic, while Thomas Carlyle in Chelsea was tormented by the night-time crowing of a cockerel next door. Dickens placed chickens outside the fictional Newman Noggs’ Soho lodgings in Nicholas Nickleby, and David Copperfield’s aunt suspects all London chickens to be cellar-reared and exercised at the local hackney stands.
At least those who owned chickens annoyed their neighbours with nothing more than droppings with a powerful smell of ammonia. Many of the working-class population also raised pigs at their lodgings. Notting Dale was notorious for the smell of piggeries, while Jacob’s Island was just notorious for the smell. Here there was no way of dispersing the waste from the pigs, or even from the humans, for the privies were built over a huge ditch, ‘the colour of strong green tea’, into which the waste dropped, and from which the residents then drew their drinking water. They had begged the landlords for piped water, but for more than two decades the reply was that the lease was about to expire, so it wasn’t worth the expenditure.
Flush lavatories, which had at first appeared to be the solution for the problem of human, if not animal, waste, in actuality worsened the situation. By adding water to the waste as it was flushed, cesspools filled up ‘twenty or more times as fast’, and with liquids rather than solids, which made them more difficult to clean. In 1844, the Metropolitan Buildings Act reversed the prohibition on house drains being connected to the sewers: now such a connection was mandatory, to wash the waste from the city into the river, and from there out to sea. But all that happened was that ‘The Thames is now made a great cesspool instead of each person having one of his own.’ To compound the problem, by mid-century urban sprawl had pushed the market gardens that took the waste-turned-fertilizer ever further away and the economic returns of transporting it were diminishing. When in 1847, guano, concentrated bird excrement, began to be imported as fertilizer, the market for normal waste collap
sed, with prices halving. Soon farmers found they could refuse to pay for waste entirely, the nightsoil men being pleased to find anyone at all to take it.
Before flush lavatories could become commonplace, one thing was needed: running water. Until the 1870s, after Dickens’ death, a household’s water supply was a private contract, rather than a civic right. In 1847, of 270,000 houses in the City, 70,000 had no piped water. In less prosperous and more rural Fulham, in 1856, of 1,009 houses, only 147 paid for company water to be pumped into their houses. By then the Waterworks Clauses Act had been in force for a decade. It laid down that constant piped water had to be supplied to all dwellings in London, but that meant only that mains had to pass near by; it was up to individuals to connect their house to those mains. ‘Constant’, even for the mains supply, was a matter of interpretation: there was no mechanism for enforcing the legal requirement, so the water companies did as they pleased. In 1874, 0.3 per cent of Chelsea houses had running water twenty-four hours a day, and the average across the city was 10.3 per cent. It was not until the twentieth century that a citywide figure of 100 per cent was reached.
Throughout the century, therefore, street pumps were ubiquitous. In 1860, behind fashionable Bond Street, in Savile Row – then the location of prosperous doctors, as Harley Street is today – Dickens watched outside Albany, a stylish set of chambers, as the doctors’ menservants pumped up supplies for the maidservants of local tradesmen. In less prosperous neighbourhoods, those without servants to pump up water at the street pumps or collect it from the standpipes had to do it themselves. In 1854, one shopkeeper was found to have stolen his neighbours’ water. The mains passed through his shop, and he had bored a small hole in the pipe so that he no longer had to join the crowds ‘struggling and fighting’ for access to the pump in those hours when the water was running: ‘there being so many of them, and so little water’.