Build the sewers

The river at Westminster, July 1858build the sewers

When Benjamin Disraeli rose in the House of Commons on 15 July 1858, the Thames had already supplied much of his argument (Hansard, 1858; London Museum, n.d.-a). A summer of exceptional heat had rendered the river offensive even by the accommodating standards of a capital accustomed to emptying itself into it. At Westminster, the difficulty could no longer be treated as belonging to some other district. The legislators had become its neighbours.

Disraeli called the Thames “a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors”, then turned to the more serviceable language of borrowing and repayment. The Metropolitan Board of Works was to be given the means to undertake London’s main drainage, with Treasury backing for its loans and a charge upon the capital’s ratepayers to meet the debt. Members questioned the expense, the duration of the charge and the proper procedure for introducing the financial provisions. The proceedings retain a certain dignity. An assembly confronted by an intolerable smell was nevertheless determined to establish whose account it belonged on (Hansard, 1858).

Within eighteen days, the bill had become law. The speed is memorable because so much of the preceding history had been slow. Proposals for improvement had long stalled, chiefly for want of money. In the summer of 1858, matters previously available for further consideration acquired a deadline (London Museum, n.d.-a).

London had already endured repeated outbreaks of cholera. In 1849 alone, the disease had killed more than fourteen thousand people. That earlier suffering gives the legislative sprint its troubling significance: the need for action had not begun when Parliament found the river intolerable (Farr, 1852).

Fig. 1The wait and the sprint

Nine years1849 to July 1858, one square per year

184918501851185218531854185518561857

18 days15 July to 2 August 1858, one square per day

151617181920212223242526272829303112

Hover or tap a square. Counted in days, the wait was roughly 180 times the sprint.

It would be satisfying to conclude that Parliament discovered public health when it became unpleasant to sit beside the river. Satisfying, and insufficient. The legislation depended upon work already undertaken by engineers, administrators and sanitary reformers. Personal discomfort did not produce that knowledge. Nor can a parliamentary debate disclose every motive behind a vote. Yet acknowledging these complications should not obscure what remains uncomfortable about the episode. A condition long endured by the city became harder to defer when it interfered with the conduct of government itself.

A condition long endured by the city became harder to defer when it interfered with the conduct of government itself.

The question is how suffering becomes a claim upon public action. Its severity does not settle the matter. Whether it prompts a response often depends on where it becomes visible, whose account is believed and which institutions are obliged to act. The Great Stink brought the consequences of London’s drainage arrangements into the immediate experience of those who could change them.

I have chosen to begin The Transmission with this history because it places a familiar account of progress under an unfamiliar light. We know how to admire the achievement that followed. We are less accustomed to examining the arrangements that made it possible, or the years during which those arrangements failed to materialise.

By 1858, Joseph Bazalgette was developing the drainage scheme, and the Metropolitan Board of Works, established three years earlier (Metropolis Management Act, 1855), provided an authority through which work could be undertaken across the capital. The problem was no longer simply whether an engineer could conceive an adequate system. It was whether London could authorise, finance and sustain its construction.

These are sometimes treated as the circumstances surrounding a technical achievement, secondary to the achievement itself. In practice, they determine whether a drawing remains a drawing. A sewer crossing administrative boundaries requires agreement among people whose responsibilities stop at different points. A project whose benefits will extend over decades requires money before those benefits can be enjoyed. Someone must employ the workers, acquire the necessary rights, accept the obligations and remain answerable when the original sponsors have departed.

The legislation helped give these requirements a workable form. Borrowing brought future revenues into the service of present construction; the charge upon ratepayers provided a means of repayment. That settlement was open to dispute, as any settlement distributing a public expense ought to be. Necessity did not make the burden equal, and a collective benefit did not ensure that every household could afford its share with equal ease. Nevertheless, the city had acquired a way to proceed. It could argue about the terms of an undertaking that was becoming possible.

Fig. 2What a drawing needs before it is a sewer

1Design2Authority3Finance4Delivery

Tap a step. A drawing needs only the first; a sewer needs all four.

Bazalgette’s system intercepted sewage and carried it towards outfalls farther east. Major works opened in 1865, while construction continued until 1875. Those dates deserve a little of the attention usually reserved for the eighteen days in Parliament. Urgency secured a decision; the improvement itself required years of labour beneath streets whose inhabitants had other business to attend to (Collinson, n.d.).

Fig. 3The scale of the answer

2.5m+Londoners, twice the 1800 figure

1,100miles of street sewers

82miles of new brick-lined main sewers

318mbricks

Schematic, not to scale. Street sewers (thin) feed the main sewers (thick) on each bank; the flow runs east to outfalls below the city.

1858the Bill1865major works opened1875construction ends 7 years10 more

There is an imbalance in the way such achievements enter public memory. The engineer acquires a biography, the pumping station becomes a monument, and the legislative emergency supplies the anecdote. The institution that borrowed, commissioned and persisted is more difficult to commemorate. Its contribution was partly to remain in existence long enough for the work to be done.

The history also resists the completeness we might wish to give it. In his speech, Disraeli acknowledged that Parliament had earlier directed sewage into the Thames in pursuit of public health, despite warnings about the consequences. Public authority had helped shape the system it was now being asked to repair. The lesson therefore concerns the revision of policy as much as the speed of its arrival (Hansard, 1858, col. 1508).

Knowledge of disease was itself contested. John Snow’s investigation of the Broad Street outbreak in 1854 (London Museum, n.d.-b) had strengthened the case that cholera spread through contaminated water, but the belief that foul air caused disease retained considerable authority. The case for action could become politically compelling while its medical explanation remained disputed (The Gazette, 2016).

Nor did conveying sewage downstream dispose of it in any final sense. The works altered where waste accumulated and whom it affected. Treatment remained a further task. To recognise the scale of the achievement is therefore to inherit a question about its limits: how far did the protection extend, and what happened beyond it?

That question has an awkward habit of surviving improvements. A system may work admirably within the boundary used to assess it while imposing costs outside that boundary. Those costs are no less material because they appear in another district, another budget or another generation. They are merely easier to omit from the account.

This is one reason the promise to address consequences later deserves scrutiny. Later is rarely an empty interval. Investment continues, employment gathers around it, public services come to rely upon it, and everyday habits accommodate themselves to what is available. By the time a defect is widely recognised, correcting it may threaten livelihoods and services that did not exist when the original decisions were made.

Later is rarely an empty interval.

David Collingridge (1980) gave this difficulty a durable formulation in The Social Control of Technology. Early in a technology’s development, its wider effects are difficult to anticipate; as experience makes those effects clearer, the technology becomes more firmly established and harder to alter. Subsequent scholarship has drawn from his argument a concern with preserving the capacity for correction throughout development. The difficulty concerns knowledge, but also the interests and dependencies that accumulate while knowledge is being acquired (Genus & Stirling, 2018).

Fig. 4The dilemma of control (illustrative sketch)

Move along the life of a technology

12%what we know of its effects

95%how easily it can be changed

There are sound reasons for caution here. Public authorities can misunderstand a risk, entrench a favoured supplier or devise remedies whose burdens fall upon those least able to bear them. The case for earlier attention cannot depend upon imagining government to be more prescient or disinterested than it is. It can, however, ask that uncertainty be accompanied by arrangements for learning, and that those arrangements possess some power to affect the outcome.

Otherwise, the people asked to wait for better evidence may discover that better evidence arrives with an explanation of why change is now impracticable.

Ozone protection offers a useful interruption to this account. Governments adopted the Vienna Convention in March 1985, before the Antarctic ozone-hole findings were published that May. The convention established a framework for scientific cooperation. The Montreal Protocol followed in 1987, creating controls that could be strengthened through subsequent decisions. Institutional action developed alongside scientific understanding, rather than awaiting its completion (British Antarctic Survey, 2025; UNEP Ozone Secretariat, n.d.-a; UNEP Ozone Secretariat, n.d.-b).

The obligations also acquired financial support. Established in 1991, the Multilateral Fund helped developing countries comply through investment, technical assistance and institutional capacity. An international agreement had recognised something easily lost in the language of commitment: accepting a responsibility does not furnish the equipment, expertise or money required to discharge it (Multilateral Fund, n.d.).

Fig. 5Institutions moved while the science was still arriving

1986

1987

1988

1989

1990

1991

Vienna
Mar 1985

Findings published
May 1985

Montreal Protocol
1987

Multilateral Fund
1991

Drawn to scale: March 1985 to December 1991. Tap an event for detail.

1. Mar 1985Vienna Convention
2. May 1985Ozone-hole findings published
3. 1987Montreal Protocol
4. 1991Multilateral Fund

The comparison should not be pressed into a formula. Replacing particular ozone-depleting substances and transforming the energy systems of entire economies present different material and political problems. What the ozone regime establishes is the possibility of organising a response that can act, learn and become more demanding over time. It qualifies the consoling fatalism according to which societies must suffer the full consequences of their choices before they can govern them.

There is nothing inevitable about acquiring that capacity. Institutions can be underfunded, overruled or made attentive chiefly to the interests they were intended to oversee. Their existence on paper may offer reassurance quite out of proportion to their practical means. Their strength becomes clearer when we examine their budgets, the decisions they can enforce and the people entitled to challenge them.

For aeons, this belongs within the meaning of the long transition. Our technical capabilities develop through economic and social arrangements, and their value depends upon what those arrangements allow people to do and to endure. A society may become more productive while leaving the costs of its productivity concentrated among people with little authority over it. It may possess extraordinary instruments and inadequate means of deciding how they should be used.

Taking those failures seriously requires an ambition for institutions comparable to the ambition we bring to invention. We should be willing to examine ownership, public provision and the distribution of risk with the same care we devote to performance. The question of capacity carries a further question of legitimacy: to whom should these institutions answer? Our position is that those who bear a consequence should have a credible means of entering the decisions that produce it. Otherwise, responsibility remains contingent upon the attention of people who may have little reason to notice.

Every fourteen days, The Transmission will follow one part of this work: a technology, an institution or a material system through which the future is already being made. Its purpose is to make the choices within these systems more intelligible, including the choices concealed by the suggestion that there is no alternative to their present form. The evidence will not always support the most pleasing argument. It should be allowed to interrupt us.

London’s achievement gives us both an example and a reproach. The city eventually assembled the engineering, authority and finance to undertake work that had long been necessary. What followed was an accomplishment of public organisation as well as construction. Yet the history leaves us with a question about the distribution of urgency: why did a problem long endured across London become so much harder to postpone during the summer it overwhelmed Westminster?

We can admire what was built while asking why so many people had to live without it for so long. That is a reasonable beginning for a publication about progress, and a reasonable demand to make of progress itself.

References

1. British Antarctic Survey. (2025, May 13). Marking 40 years since the discovery of the ozone hole. https://www.bas.ac.uk/news/marking-40-years-since-the-discovery-of-the-ozone-hole/
2. Collingridge, D. (1980). The social control of technology. Frances Pinter.
3. Collinson, A. (n.d.). How Bazalgette built London’s first super-sewer. London Museum. https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/london-stories/how-bazalgette-built-londons-first-super-sewer/
4. Farr, W. (1852). Report on the mortality of cholera in England, 1848-49. Clowes and Sons. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Report_on_the_mortality_of_cholera_in_England%2C_1848-49_%28IA_b21516911%29.pdf
5. The Gazette. (2016, February 1). Cholera epidemics in Victorian London. https://www.thegazette.co.uk/all-notices/content/100519
6. Genus, A., & Stirling, A. (2018). Collingridge and the dilemma of control: Towards responsible and accountable innovation. Research Policy, 47(1), 61–69. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2017.09.012
7. Hansard. (1858, July 15). Metropolis Local Management Act Amendment Bill: Leave (Series 3, Vol. 151, cc. 1508–1540). UK Parliament. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1858/jul/15/first-reading
8. London Museum. (n.d.-a). The Great Stink of 1858. https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/london-stories/great-stink-of-1858/
9. London Museum. (n.d.-b). John Snow: Cholera & the Broad Street pump. https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/london-stories/john-snow-cholera-broad-street-pump/
10. Metropolis Management Act, 18 & 19 Vict., c. 120 (1855). https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/18-19/120/contents/enacted
11. Multilateral Fund. (n.d.). About us. https://www.multilateralfund.org/about
12. UNEP Ozone Secretariat. (n.d.-a). The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. https://ozone.unep.org/treaties/montreal-protocol
13. UNEP Ozone Secretariat. (n.d.-b). Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer. https://www.ozone.unep.org/treaties/vienna-convention