The great man of the behind

Sometimes we overlook what flows beneath our feet. Often because it smells. However, this monument on London's Embankment is a reminder of one of the men who saved the city from its own by-product.


Sir Joseph Bazalgette was one of the greatest Victorian civil engineers, an era hardly short of engineering giants. He created a sewer network for central London, which helped relieve the city from the otherwise inevitable rise of cholera epidemics, and began the clean-up of the River Thames, which had reached a nadir with The Great Stink of 1858. Today there are men fishing from this embankment, so either it's worked, or optimism has some peculiar outlets in old London town...

James