Part 109
First, then, as to the ramifications of the great and ancient Fleet outlet. From its mouth, so to speak, near Blackfriars Bridge, its course is not parallel with any public way, but, running somewhat obliquely, it crosses below Tudor-street into Bridge-street, Blackfriars, then occupies the centre of Farringdon-street, and that street’s prolongation or intended prolongation into the New Victoria-street (the houses in this locality having been pulled down long ago, and the spot being now popularly known as “the ruins”), and continues until the City portion of the Fleet Sewer meets the Metropolitan jurisdiction between Saffron and Mutton hills, the junction, so to call it, being “under the houses”[65] (a common phrase among flushermen). A little farther on it connects itself with an open part of the Fleet Ditch, running at the back of Turnmill-street, Clerkenwell. In its City course, the sewer receives the issue from 150 public ways (including streets, alleys, courts, lanes, &c.), which are emptied into it from the second, third, or smaller class sewers, from Ludgate-hill and its proximate streets, the St. Paul’s locality, Fleet-street and its adjacent communications in public ways, with a series of sewers running down from parts of Smithfield, &c. The _greatest_ accession of sewage, however, which the Fleet receives from _one_ issue, is a few yards beyond where the City has merged into the Metropolitan jurisdiction; this accession is from a first-class sewer, known as “the Whitecross-street sewer,” because running from that street, and carrying into the Fleet the contributions of 60 crowded streets.
After the junction of the covered City sewer with the uncovered ditch in Clerkenwell, the Fleet-river sewer (again covered) skirts round Cold Bath Fields Prison (the Middlesex House of Correction), runs through Clerkenwell-green into the Bagnigge Wells-road, so on to Battle-bridge and King’s-cross; then along the Old Saint Pancras-road, and thence to the King’s-road (a name now almost extinct), where the St. Pancras Workhouse stands close by the turnpike-gate. Along Upper College-street (Camden-town) is then the direction of this great sewer, and running _under_ the canal at the higher part of Camden-town, near the bridge by the terminus of the Great North Western Railway, it branches into the highways and thoroughfares of Kentish-town, of Highgate, and of Hampstead, respectively, and then, at what one informant described as “the outside” of those places, receives the open ditches, which form the further sewerage, under the control of the Commissioners, who cause them to be cleansed regularly.
In order to show more consecutively the direction, from place to place, in straight, devious, or angular course, of this the most remarkable sewer of the world, considering the extent of the drainage into it, I have refrained from giving beyond the Whitecross-street connection with the Fleet, an account of the number of streets sewered into this old civic stream. I now proceed to supply the deficiency.
From a large outlet at Clerkenwell-green (a very thickly-built neighbourhood) flows the connected sewage of 100 streets. At Maiden-lane, beyond King’s-cross, a district which is now being built upon for the purposes of the Great Northern Railway, the sewage of 10 streets is poured into it. In the course of this sewer along Camden-town, it receives the issue of some 20 branches, or 40 streets, &c. About 15 other issues are received before the open ditches of Kentish-town, Highgate, and Hampstead are encountered.
It is not, however, merely the sewage collected in the precincts of the City proper, which is “outletted” (as I heard a flusherman call it) into the Thames. Other districts are drained into the large City outlets nearing the river. “Many of your works,” says Mr. Haywood, the City surveyor, in a report addressed to the City Commissioners, Oct. 23, 1849, “have been beneficially felt by districts some miles distant from the City. Twenty-nine outlets have been provided by you for the sewage of the County of Middlesex; the high land of and about Hampstead, drains through the Fleet sewer; Holloway and a portion of Islington can now be drained by the London Bridge sewer; Norton Folgate and the densely-populated districts adjacent are also relieved by it.”
On the other hand, the Irongate sewer (one of the most important), which has its outlet in the Tower Hamlets, drains a portion of the City.
The reader must bear in mind, also, that were he to traverse the Fleet sewer in the direction described--for all the men I conversed with on the subject, if asked to show the course of sewerage with which they were familiar, began _from_ the outlet into the Thames--the reader, I say, must remember that he would be advancing all the way _against_ the stream, in a direction in which he would find the sewage flowing onward to its mouth, while his course would be towards its sources.
On the left-hand side (for the account before given refers only to the right-hand side) proceeding in the same direction, after passing the underground precincts of the City proper, there is another addition near Saffron-hill, of the sewage of 30 streets; then at Gray’s-inn-road is added the sewage of 100 streets; New-road (at King’s-cross), 20 more streets; from the whole of Somers-town, a populous locality, the sewerage concentrating all the busy and crowded places round about “the Brill,” &c., the sewage of 120 streets is received; and at Pratt-street, Camden-town, 12 other streets.
Thus into this sewage-current, directed to one final outlet, are drained the refuse of 517 streets, including, of course, a variety of minor thoroughfares, courts, alleys, &c., &c., as in the neighbourhoods of Gray’s-inn-road, in Clerkenwell, Somers-town, &c. Some of these tributaries to the efflux of the sewage are “barrel-drains,” but perform the function of sewers along small courts, where there is “no thoroughfare” either _upon_, or _below_ the surface.
The London Bridge sewer runs up King William-street to Moorgate-street, along Finsbury-square into the City-road, diverging near the Wharf-road, which it crosses _under_ the canal near the Wenlock basin, and thence along the Lower-road, Islington, by Cock-lane, through Highbury-vale; after this, at the extremity of Holloway, the open ditches, as in the former instance, carry on the conveyance of sewage from the outer suburbs.
The King’s Scholars’ Pond Sewer--which seems to have given the Commissioners more trouble than any other, in its connection with Buckingham Palace, St. James’s Park, and the new Houses of Parliament--runs from Chelsea-bridge past Cubitt’s workshops, and along the King’s-road to Eaton-square, the whole of which is drained into it; then “turning round,” as one man described it, it approaches Buckingham Palace, which, with its grounds, as well as a portion of St. James’s and the Green parks, is drained into this sewer; then branching away for the reception of the sewage from the houses and gardens of Chelsea, it drains Sloane-street, and, crossing the Knightsbridge-road, runs through or across Hyde-park to the Swan at Bayswater, whence its course is by the Westbourne District and under the canal, along Paddington, until it attains the open country, or rather the grounds, in that quarter, which have been very extensively and are now still being built over, and where new sewers are constructed simultaneously with new streets.
Thus in the “reach,” as I heard it happily enough designated, of each of these great sewers, the reader will see from a map the extent of the subterranean metropolis traversed, alike along crowded streets ringing with the sounds of traffic, among palatial and aristocratic domains, and along the parks which adorn London, as well as winding their ramifying course among the courts, alleys, and teeming streets, the resorts of misery, poverty, and vice.
Estimating, then, the number of sewers from the number of their river outlets, and regarding all the rest as the branches, or tributaries, to each of these superior streams, we have, adopting the area before specified as being drained by the metropolitan sewers, viz., 58 square miles, the following results:--
Each of the 60 sewers having an outlet into the Thames drains 618 statute acres.
And assuming the number of houses included within these 58 square miles to be 200,000, and the population to amount to 1,500,000, or two-thirds of the houses and people included in the Registrar-General’s Metropolis, we may say that each of the 60 sewers would carry into the Thames the refuse from 25,000 individuals and 3333 inhabited houses. This, however, is partly prevented by the cesspoolage system, which supplies receptacles for a proportion of the refuse that, were London to be rebuilt according to the provisions of the present Building and Sanitary Acts, would _all_ be carried, without any interception, into the river Thames by the media of the sewers.
In my account of cesspoolage I shall endeavour to show the extent of fæcal refuse, &c., contained in places not communicating with the sewers, and to be removed by the labour of men and horses, as well as the amount of fæcal refuse carried into the sewerage.
OF THE QUALITIES, ETC., OF THE SEWAGE.
The question of the value, the uses, and the best means of collecting for use, the great mass of the sewage of the metropolis, seems to have become complicated by the statements which have been of late years put forth by rival projectors and rival companies. In our smaller country towns, the neighbourhood of many being remarkable for fertility and for a green beauty of meadow-land and pasturage, the refuse of the towns, whether sewage or cesspoolage (if not washed into a current, stream, or river), is purchased by the farmers, and carted by them to spread upon the land.
By _sewage_, I mean the contents of the _sewerage_, or of the series of sewers; which neither at present nor, I believe, at any former period, has been applied to any useful or profitable purpose by the metropolitan authorities. The readiest mode to get rid of it, without any care about ultimate consequences, has always been resorted to, and that mode has been to convey it into the Thames, and leave the rest to the current of the stream. But the Thames has its ebbs as well as its flow, and the consequence is the sewage is _never_ got rid of.
The most eminent of our engineers have agreed that it is a very important consideration how this sewage should be not only innocuously but profitably disposed of; and if not profitably, in an immediate money return, to those who may be considered its owners (the municipal authorities of the kingdom), at least profitably in a national point of view, by its use in the restoration or enrichment of the fertility of the soil, and the consequent increase of the food of man and beast.
Sir George Staunton has pronounced some of the tea-growing parts of China to be as blooming as an English nobleman’s flower-garden. Every jot of manure, human ordure, and all else, is minutely collected, even by the poorest.
I have already given a popular account of the composition of the metropolitan sewage, &c. (under the head of Wet Refuse), and I now give its scientific analysis.
In some districts the sewage is more or less liquid--in what proportion has not been ascertained--and I give, in the first place, an analysis of the sewage of the King’s Scholars’ Pond Sewer, Westminster, the result having been laid before a Committee of the House of Commons. As the contents of the great majority of sewers _must_ be the same, because resulting from the same natural or universally domestic causes (as in the refuse of cookery, washing, surface-water, &c.), the analysis of the sewage of the King’s Scholars’ Pond Sewer may be accepted as one of sewer-matter generally.
Evidence was given before the committee as to the proportion of “land-drainage _water_” to what was really _manure_, in the matter derived from the sewer in question. A produce of 140 grains of manure was derived from a gallon of sewer-water. Messrs. Brande and Cooper, the analyzers, also state that one gallon (10 lbs.?) of the liquid portion of the sewage, evaporated to dryness, gave 85·3 grains of solid matter, 74·8 grains of which was again soluble, and contained--
Ammonia 3·29 Sulphuric acid 0·62 Phosphate of lime 0·29 Lime 6·25 Chlorine 10·00
“and potass and soda, with a large quantity of soluble and vegetable matter, and 10·54 insoluble.”
This insoluble portion consisted of
Phosphate of lime 2·32 Carbonate of lime 1·94 Silica 6·28 ----- 10·54
The deposit from another gallon weighed 55 grains, of which 21·22 were combustible, being composed of animal matter “rich in nitrogen,” some vegetable matter, and a quantity of fat. Of this matter 33·75 grains consisted of
Phosphate of lime 6·81 Oxide of iron 2·01 Carbonate of lime 1·75 Sulphate of lime 1·53 Earthy matter and sand 21·65 ----- 33·75
Other Reports and other evidence show that what is described as “earthy matter and sand” is the mac, mud, and the mortar or concrete used in pavement, washed from the surface of the streets into the sewers by heavy rains; otherwise for the most part the proper load of the scavager’s cart.
Further analyses might be adduced, but with merely such variation in the result as is inevitable from the state of the weather when the sewage is drawn forth for examination; whether the day on which this is done happens to be dry or wet[66].
It has been ascertained, but the exact proportion is not, and perhaps cannot be, given, that the extent of covered to uncovered surface in the district drained by the King’s Scholars’ Pond Sewer was as 3 to 1, while that of the Ranelagh Sewer, not far distant, was as 1 to 3, at the time of the inquiry (1848).
“It could not be expected, therefore,” says the Report, “that the Ranelagh Sewer (which, moreover, is open to the admission of the tide at its mouth), in the quantity or quality of the manure produced, could bear any proportion to the King’s Scholars’ Pond Sewer.”
Mr. Smith, of Deanston, stated in evidence, that the average quantity of rain falling into King’s Scholars’ Pond Sewer was 139,934,586 cubic feet in a year, and he assumes 6,000,000 tons as the amount of average minimum quantity of drainage (yearly), yielding 4 cwt. of solid matter in each 100 tons = 1 in 500.
Dr. Granville said, on the same inquiry, that he should be sorry to receive on his land 500 tons of diluted sewer water (such as that from the uncovered Ranelagh Sewer) for 1 ton of really fertilizing sewage, such as that to be derived from the King’s Scholars’ Pond Sewer.
I could easily multiply these analyses, and give further parliamentary or official statements, but, as the results are the same, I will merely give some extracts from the evidence of Dr. Arthur Hassall, as to the microscopic constituents of sewage-water:--
“I have examined,” he said, “the sewer-water of several of the principal sewers of London. I found in it, amongst many other things, much decomposing vegetable matter, portions of the husks and the hairs of the down of wheat, the cells of the potato, cabbage, and other vegetables, while I detected but few forms of animal life, those encountered for the most part being a kind of worm or anælid, and a certain species of animalcule of the genus monas.”
“How do you account,” the Doctor was asked, “for the comparative absence of animal life in the water of most sewers?” “It is, doubtless, to be attributed,” he replied, “in a great measure, to the large quantity of sulphuretted hydrogen contained in sewer-water, and which is continually being evolved by the decomposing substances included in it.”
“Have you any evidence to show that sewer-water does contain sulphuretted hydrogen in such large quantity as to be prejudicial and even fatal to animal life?” “With a view of determining this question, I made the following experiments:--A given quantity of Thames water, known to contain living infusoria, was added to an equal quantity of sewer-water; examined a few minutes afterwards, the animalculæ were found to be either dead or deprived of locomotive power and in a dying state. A small fish, placed in a wine glass of sewer-water, immediately gave signs of distress, and, after struggling violently, floated on its side, and would have perished in a few seconds, had it not been removed and placed in fresh water. A bird placed in a glass bell-jar, into which the gas evolved by the sewer-water was allowed to pass, after struggling a good deal, and showing other symptoms of the action of the gas, suddenly fell on its side, and, although immediately removed into fresh air, was found to be dead. These experiments were made, in the first instance, with the sewer water of the Friar-street sewer (near the Blackfriars-road); they were afterwards repeated with the water of six other sewers on the Middlesex side, and with the same result, as respects the animalculæ and fish, but not the bird; this, although evidently much affected by the noxious emanations of the sewer-water, yet survived the experiment.”
“Would you infer from these experiments that sewer-water, as contained in the Thames near to London, is prejudicial to health?” “I would, most decidedly; and regard the Thames in the neighbourhood of the metropolis as nothing less than diluted sewer-water.”
“You have just stated that you found sewer-water to contain much vegetable matter, and but few forms of animal life; the vegetable matter you recognised, I presume, by the character of the cells composing the several vegetable tissues?” “Yes, as also by the action of iodine on the starch of the vegetable matter.”
“In what way do you suppose these various vegetable cells, the husks of wheat, &c., reach the sewers?” “They doubtless proceed from the fæcal matter contained in sewage, and not in general from the ordinary refuse of the kitchen, which usually finds its way into the dust-bin.”
“Sewer-water, then, although containing but few forms of animal life, yet contains, in large quantities, the food upon which most animalculæ feed?” “Yes; and it is this circumstance which explains the vast abundance of infusorial life in the water of the Thames within a few miles of London.”
The same gentleman (a fellow of the Linnæan Society, and the author of “A History of the British Fresh-water Algæ,” or water-weeds considered popularly), in answer to the following inquiries in connection with this subject, also said:--
“What species of infusoria represent the _highest_ degree of impurity in water?” “The several species of the genera _Oxytricha_ and _Paramecium_.”
“What species is most abundant in the Thames from Kew Bridge to Woolwich?” “The _Paramecium Chrysalis_ of Ehrenberg; this occurs in all seasons of the year, and in all conditions of the river, in vast and incalculable numbers; so much so, that a quart bottle of Thames water, obtained in any condition of the tide, is sure to be found, on examination with the microscope, to contain these creatures in great quantity.”
“Do you find that the infusorium of which you have spoken varies in number in the different parts of the river between Kew Bridge and Woolwich?” “I find that it is most abundant in the neighbourhood of the bridges.” [Where the outlet of the sewers is common.]
“Then the order of impurity of Thames water, in your view, would be the order in which it approaches the centre of London?” “Yes.”
“You find then, in Thames water, about the bridges, things decidedly connected with the _sewer water_, as vegetable and animal matter in a state of decomposition?” “I do; about the bridges, and in the neighbourhood of London, there is very little living vegetable matter on which animalculæ could live; the only source of supply which they have is _the organic matter contained in sewer-water_, and which is to be regarded as the food of these creatures. Where infusoria abound, under circumstances _not_ connected with sewage, vegetable matter in a living condition is certain to be met with.”
Respecting the _uses of the sewage_, I may add the following brief observations. Without wishing in any way to prejudice the question (indeed the reader will bear in mind that I have all along spoken reprovingly of the waste of sewage), I am bound to say that the opinions I heard during my inquiry from gentlemen scientifically and, in some instances, practically familiar with the subject, concurred in the conclusion that the _sewage_ of the metropolis cannot, with all the applications of scientific skill and apparatus, be made either sufficiently portable or efficacious for the purposes of manure to assure a proper pecuniary return. In this matter, perhaps, speculators have not traced a sufficient distinction between the liquid manure of the sewers and the “_poudrette_,” or dry manure, manufactured from the more solid excrementitious matter of the cesspools, not only in Paris, but, until lately, even in London, where the business was chiefly in the hands of Frenchmen. The staple of the French “_poudrette_” is _not_ “_sewage_,” that is, the outpourings of the sewers--for this is carried into the Seine, and washed away with little inconvenience, as the tide hardly affects that river in Paris; but it is altogether “_cesspoolage_,” that is, the deposit of the cesspools, collected in fixed and moveable utensils, regulated by the “universal” police of Paris, and conveyed by Government labourers to the Voirées, which are huge reservoirs of nightsoil at Montfauçon, about five miles, and in the Forest of Bondy, about ten miles, from the centre of Paris. The London-made manure also was all of cesspoolage; the contents of the nightman’s cart being “shot” in the manufacturer’s yard; and when so manufactured was, I believe, without exception, sent to the sugar-growing colonies, the farmers in the provinces pronouncing it “too hot” for the ground. The same complaint, I may observe, has been made of the French manufactured cesspool manure. I heard, on the other hand, opinions from scientific and practical gentlemen, that the sewer-water of London was so diluted, it was not profitably serviceable for the irrigation of land. All, however, agreed that the sewage of the metropolis ought not to be wasted, as it was certain that perseverance in experiment (and perhaps a large outlay) were certain to make sewage of value.
The following results, which the Board of Health have just issued in a Report, containing “Minutes of Information attested on the Application of Sewer-water and Town Manures to Agricultural Production,” supply the latest information on this subject. The Report says first, that “to be told that the average yield of a county is 30 bushels of wheat per acre, or that the average weight of the turnip crop is 15 tons per acre, means very little, and there is little to be learned from such intelligence; but if it is shown that a certain farm under the usual mode of culture yielded certain weights per acre, and that the same land, by improved applications of the same manure, by the use of machinery, and by _employing double the number of hands, at increased wages_, is made to yield _four fold_ the weight of crop and of _better quality_ than was previously obtained, a lesson is set before us worth learning.”
It then proceeds to cite the following statements, on the authority of the Hon. Dudley Fortescue, as to the efficiency of sewage-water as a liquid manure applied to land.