Joseph Bazalgette

• 1. Introduction

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  Joseph Bazalgette built something most Londoners have never seen, yet walk over every day. In the summer of 1858, the River Thames had become so foul that Parliament itself was forced to hang curtains soaked in disinfectant just to continue its business. The stench was so overwhelming that it had a name: the Great Stink. It was that crisis that finally forced the city to act, and it was Bazalgette who answered the call. The questions worth asking are not simply what he built, but how a Victorian engineer transformed a city that was killing its own people, and why the system he devised still works today.

• 2. A Family of Migrants and Makers

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  Bazalgette was born on the 28th of March 1819 at Hill Lodge, Clay Hill, Enfield. His father, Joseph William Bazalgette, was a retired Royal Navy captain. But it was his grandfather, Louis Bazalgette, who had made the family's fortune in England. Louis had emigrated from Ispagnac in Lozère, France, working first as a tailor and financier before rising to become principal tailor to the Prince of Wales, the future George IV. That ascent set the tone: the Bazalgettes were a Huguenot family who built themselves a place in British life through craft and ambition. In 1827, when young Joseph was eight, the family moved into a newly built house at Hamilton Terrace in St John's Wood. He trained under Sir John Macneill, a noted engineer, gaining experience on railway projects, in China, and in Ireland, where he worked on land drainage. By 1842, he had enough standing to open his own consulting practice in London. Three years later, in 1845, he married Maria Kough from County Kilkenny. He was working so relentlessly on the expanding railway network that in 1847, he suffered a nervous breakdown. It was during his recovery that London's fate, and his own, took a decisive turn.

• 3. The City That Poisoned Itself

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  In 1847, while Bazalgette was still recovering his health, London's Metropolitan Commission of Sewers made a decision that would kill thousands. It ordered all cesspits closed and required house drains to connect directly to sewers that emptied into the Thames. A cholera epidemic followed almost immediately, killing 14,137 Londoners in 1849. Medical opinion at the time held that cholera was caused by foul air, the so-called miasma theory. Physician John Snow had advanced a different explanation, that cholera spread through contaminated water, but his view was not yet accepted. Bazalgette was appointed Assistant Surveyor to the Commission in 1849 and took over as Engineer in 1852, after his predecessor died of what the records described as "harassing fatigues and anxieties." Within months, another cholera epidemic struck in 1853, killing 10,738 people. Fellow engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel championed Bazalgette's promotion to Chief Engineer of the Commission's successor body, the Metropolitan Board of Works, in 1856. When Parliament passed an Enabling Act in 1858 in response to the Great Stink, Bazalgette's proposals to transform the sewerage system finally had the legal backing they needed. The premise behind the project was wrong, cholera came from water, not air, but the outcome would save lives anyway.

• 4. 82 Miles Underground

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  At the time Bazalgette began his great work, the Thames was little more than an open sewer, empty of fish and wildlife. His solution drew on a proposal made by the painter John Martin some 25 years earlier: build a network of enclosed underground brick sewers to intercept the raw sewage flowing freely through London's streets. The final scheme comprised 82 miles of main sewers and 1,100 miles of street sewers. Portland cement, used innovatively throughout, kept the tunnels sound for 150 years. Major pumping stations were built at Deptford in 1864, at Crossness on the Erith marshes in 1865, at Abbey Mills in the River Lea valley in 1868, and on the Chelsea Embankment close to Grosvenor Bridge in 1875. Sewage was carried downstream to two large outfall systems, the Northern and Southern Outfall Sewers, where it was collected in balancing tanks at Beckton and Crossness and released untreated into the Thames at high tide. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, opened the system in 1865, though the full project took another ten years to complete. Partly as a result of the Princess Alice disaster, the balancing tanks at Beckton and Crossness were replaced with proper sewage treatment facilities in 1900. The biological treatment of sewage had already been pioneered in 1885 by William Dibdin, chief chemist for the Metropolitan Board of Works, building on a proposal by Edward Frankland.

• 5. The Man Behind the Plans

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  Bazalgette's capacity for work was, by any measure, extraordinary. Every connection to the sewerage system by the various Vestry Councils had to be approved, and he checked them himself. The records contain thousands of linen plans with handwritten notes in Indian ink, bearing his initials: "Approved JWB" and, where he disagreed, "I do not like 6\" used here and 9\" should be used. JWB". The BBC later described him as someone who "drove himself to the limits in realising his subterranean dream." The Guardian called the resulting system "a wonder of the industrial world." He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1875 and elected President of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1883. His grant of arms, differenced from the ancestral family arms, was taken up by several of his sons, grandsons, and descendants. He and Maria had eleven children. He moved to Morden in 1845 and then to Arthur Road, Wimbledon in 1873, where he died on the 15th of March 1891, and was buried at nearby St Mary's Church.

• 6. Beyond the Sewers

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  The sewer network was Bazalgette's defining work, but the list of projects he oversaw for the Metropolitan Board of Works is striking in its range. He designed the Albert Embankment, completed in 1869, and the Victoria Embankment, completed in 1870. The Chelsea Embankment followed in 1874. He oversaw Putney Bridge in 1886 and designed the second and current Hammersmith Bridge, which opened in 1887. Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road are among the streets he laid out. He drew early plans for the Blackwall Tunnel, submitted in 1897. He also made modifications to Albert Bridge in 1884 and completed Battersea Bridge in 1890. Among the projects attributed to him is a proposal for what later became Tower Bridge. His descendants carried his name forward in unexpected directions: his great-great-grandson Will Bazalgette was a Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve pilot awarded the Victoria Cross, and another great-great-grandson, Sir Peter Bazalgette, became a television producer. A Greater London Council blue plaque marks 17 Hamilton Terrace in St John's Wood, where he grew up. In July 2020, the City of London Corporation announced that a new public space west of Blackfriars Bridge, created following construction of the Thames Tideway Scheme, would be named the Bazalgette Embankment.