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| Barrow Hoist at the building of Southern High Level sewer at Peckham. (From Subterranean Southwark) |
No longer would open sewer channels stink up the neighbourhood or the Thames cause a 'Great Stink'. Instead of the flushings of thousands of homes and the waste from local industry running across the streets, the five big sewers that Bazalgette had built across London, take the messiness far, far away to Barking Creek and Crossness.
In turn, miles and miles of main sewers were constructed locally to e fed from hundreds of local small scale sewers fed from drainage culverts fed from thousands of toilets and sinks! Mostly, the large and deeper down interceptory sewers run from West to East following the line of the Thames. In South London, the smaller main sewers tend to run South to North following the geographical curve down of the London Basin enabling gravity to direct the waste and water into the intercepting sewer. Pumping stations then do the job of pushing the sewerage from West to East.
The two vast interceptory sewers south of the river, running from Putney in Deptford, known as the Southern Low Level Sewer, and from Balham to Deptford, the Southern High Level Sewer, were constructed from 1859 to 1868.
When all the Southern waste arrives at Deptford, a pumping station lifts the sewerage to run along the long Southern Outfall Sewer, the effluence finally reaching the massive Crossness Works on Erith Marshes. Initially the sewerage was dumped untreated into the Thames. Within 20 years the waste came to chemically treated, and since 1998 all Southern waste is incinerated at Crossness before dumping.
From: Subterranean Southwark, by Christopher Jones (Past Tense Publications, 2003).
To obtain a copy send a cheque for £3.50 plus £1 postage to:
Christopher Jones
c/o 56a Infoshop
56 Crampton St.
London SE17 3AE.
15 Aug 2003