JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
In order ot have an Industrial Revolution, you need people, and the people (given the times) needed to live close to where they would work. Large number of people all living in close proximity to work means that they need to live close together; close together means that there needs to be essential services, like water. And of course with water you need a place for it all to "go"--and perhaps the "goingest" of water in the city would be for waste. So, if you can't get rid of waste, then you have no Industrial Revolution. Or something along those lines.
In any event that leads me into this fantastic map of the "other" London underground, the sewer system, the alternative outflowing lifeblood of the great city.
The map appears in the Report of the Results of an Examination Made in 1880 of Several Sewerage Works in Europe, by Rudolph Hering, in the Annual Report of the National Board of Health 1881 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1882), pp. 99-223.
- The original version of this map is offered for sale at the blog bookstore, here.
And a detail:
There were still vast problems with the sanitation conditions in London by 1880, but they had at least improved from the dreariness of The Great Stink of earlier Victorian times, as seen here in Dicken's David Copperfield (chapter 46)
"The neighbourhood was a dreary one at that time; as oppressive, sad, and solitary by night, as any about London. There were neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy waste of road near the great blank Prison. A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcases of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some speculator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which — having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet weather — they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves. The clash and glare of sundry fiery Works upon the river-side, arose by night to disturb everything except the heavy and unbroken smoke that poured out of their chimneys. Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like green hair, and the rags of last year's handbills offering rewards for drowned men fluttering above high-water mark, led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb-tide. There was a story that one of the pits dug for the dead in the time of the Great Plague was hereabout; and a blighting influence seemed to have proceeded from it over the whole place. Or else it looked as if it had gradually decomposed into that nightmare condition, out of the overflowings of the polluted stream."
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