London's Labyrinth

The World Beneath the City's Streets

Fiona Rule

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780750989978
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750990332
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Do you know what's under your feet? The London Underground was the very first underground railway – but it wasn't the first time Londoners had ventured below ground, nor would it be the last. People seem to be drawn to subterranean London: it hides unsightly (yet magnificent) sewers, protects its people from war, and hosts its politicians in times of crisis. But the underground can also be an underworld, and celebrated London historian Fiona Rule has tracked down the darker stories too – from the gangs that roamed below looking for easy prey, to an attempted murder–suicide on the platform of Charing Cross. Underneath London is another world; one with shadows of war, crime and triumph. London's Labyrinth is a book that no London aficionado should be without.

Chapter 1

The Great Stink

The earliest days of June 1858 brought balmy summer weather to London. The city basked under clear skies, interrupted only by occasional brief night-time thunderstorms. However, as mid-month approached, the weather suddenly turned more sultry and oppressive. Temperatures soared to well over 80°F and, as Londoners went about their business along the sun-baked city streets, those closest to the Thames began to notice how the great river’s waters were becoming somehow thicker, darker and distinctly fouler smelling.

On Saturday 12 June, a young man who set out from Westminster pier in a small rowing boat, destined for the Crabtree Inn at Putney Reach, was so overcome by the foul-smelling river he was almost compelled to turn back. Further east, lightermen delivering cargo to the tall sailing ships berthed at the docks found the stench so bad in places that they were forced to rush to the side of their boats, where they became repeatedly and violently sick.

As the heatwave continued unabated, the whole city surrounding the Thames became shrouded in a stinking miasma. Work became almost impossible as Londoners deliberated over which was the lesser of two evils – the heat or the smell. ‘T.S.’, a lawyer whose offices were in the Temple, wrote, ‘The stench … today is sickening and nauseous in the extreme … If I open my windows in rushes the stench; if I close them the heat is so great that I am almost suffocated.’

The lawyer’s dilemma was shared by thousands of other Londoners, including Members of Parliament whose meeting rooms at the Palace of Westminster overlooked the river. As temperatures reached a stifling 93°F on Wednesday 16 June, MPs at the House of Commons reeled from the stench permeating the rooms closest to the river. The Times reported, ‘A few members, indeed, bent upon investigating the subject at its very depth, ventured into the library, but they were instantaneously driven to retreat, each man with a handkerchief to his nose.’

Determined to seek out and identify the cause, Parliament’s ‘Inspector for Ventilation’, Mr Goldsworthy Gurney, was dispatched in a boat to investigate the situation on the Thames. During his unpleasant journey, Gurney noticed that the cloudy, reeking water stretched along the entire central section of the river, from Woolwich in the east to Putney in the west. He also saw that this foul-smelling soup primarily comprised sewage. In his subsequent report to the House of Commons, Gurney concluded:

The water that comes into the Thames no doubt goes to the sea and carries some of the sewage with it, but a very large proportion still remains sufficient to settle on the banks of the river and to produce a nuisance. The black water is deposited on the flats or banks on the sides nearly the whole way.

The fact that the city’s sewage was disgorged into the Thames had been a cause for concern for years. However, the stinking fumes from the river had been at their worst while Parliament was on its summer recess and, consequently, very little had been done to address the problem. The fact that the government was now experiencing the disgusting odour at first hand was wholeheartedly welcomed by the press. On 18 June The Times wrote:

We are heartily glad of it … It is their fault that the river Thames has not … been purified … On Wednesday, when the heat was overpowering, they began to imagine that there was something in the popular outcry. Conviction rose with the quicksilver of the thermometer.

During the early decades of the nineteenth century, it had been a popularly held belief that although the odour periodically emanating from the Thames was hugely unpleasant, it was in no way harmful. However, in the 1850s opinion began to change and many London doctors were increasingly concerned that the water may indeed have been carrying a hazard to health.

During the Great Stink of 1858, Bermondsey’s chief medical officer, Dr John Challice, wrote:

I have daily persons consulting me who have been seized with nausea, sickness and diarrhoea, by them attributed to the effects of the effluvia from the river. Some have complained that the peculiar taste remained on their palate for days.

William Ord, surgical registrar of St Thomas’s Hospital, investigated the effects of the stench on river workers and noted:

They described themselves as experiencing, at first languor, and soon afterwards, nausea and pain, beginning most commonly at the temples and spreading over the head. After a time followed giddiness, and in many of them temporary loss or impairment of sight, the presence of black spots before their eyes and often utter mental confusion … In a considerable number the throat was swollen and red, causing much ‘soreness’ and intense thirst.

The river workers struggled through the physical discomforts caused by its dirty waters, totally unaware that they had fallen prey to one of the most dangerous diseases of the nineteenth century – cholera.

London experienced its first cholera epidemic in 1832. By the end of that year, it had killed over 6,000 inhabitants. A second epidemic broke out in 1848, killing around 14,000, and the disease would strike again just four years later. As more and more people succumbed to the sickness, a physician named John Snow vowed to stop it in its tracks by proving his theory that cholera was not caused by bad smells – as most people believed – but by contaminated water. He identified a small area of Soho, between Regent Street and Wardour Street, which had been badly affected by the epidemic, and questioned local residents about where they obtained their water. To his excitement, a huge proportion of households affected by the disease used a specific pump in Broad Street (today’s Broadwick Street). Snow petitioned the local parish council and, after telling them of his findings, persuaded them to remove the pump handle to stop anyone accessing the contents of the well beneath. Once this had been done, the cholera outbreak began to subside.

With the cause now identified, Dr Snow analysed the pump water and investigated the condition of the well. Although the samples yielded nothing conclusive, he was intrigued to discover how the well was situated very close to an old, leaky cesspit. It suddenly became clear that cholera epidemics were not only waterborne but were effectively created by contaminated sewage. Armed with this new information, he turned his attentions to the greatest water source in London – the Thames. His most significant realisation was that riverside companies were systematically poisoning their customers by supplying them with disease-ridden water.

John Snow’s discoveries were among the most important scientific advances of the era. However, like many trailblazers before him, he failed to convince the government. His detractors argued that he relied too heavily on circumstantial evidence rather than scientific fact, and further, that by the time the pump handle in Broad Street had been removed, the cholera epidemic was already in decline. This, coupled with the prohibitive expense that a countrywide investigation into levels of water pollution would entail, prompted the authorities to disregard Dr Snow’s hypothesis.

Although Snow was largely ignored by those in power, ordinary Londoners were not surprised by his findings. For decades, people living close to the Thames had found its water so unpalatable that they opted to give their children beer, or even gin, to drink. In his book Town Swamps and Social Bridges, published a year after the Great Stink, the writer George Godwin noted:

Fifteen or sixteen years ago, the Thames water was not so bad, and persons on the river did not hesitate at dipping in a vessel and drinking the contents. Such a thing now would be an act of insanity; and yet we are told, on good authority, that in a part of Rotherhithe a number of poor persons, who have no proper water supply, are obliged to use, for drinking and other purposes, the Thames water in its present abominable condition, unfiltered.’

It seems incredible now that London, then the richest and most influential city in the world, had allowed the river at its heart to become so horrendously polluted. However, the poisoning of the Thames had been a very gradual intermittent process, with its roots in the medieval period. Several centuries earlier, a network of rivers had run through London into the Thames from sources high in the surrounding hills. These rivers provided the obvious means to dispose of both sewage and industrial waste, which slowly turned them from pleasant waterways into filthy open drains. Keen to obscure these unsightly, foul-smelling watercourses from view, residents began to cover them over, and thus London acquired its first underground tunnel network. Over the centuries, these rivers would be diverted deeper underground – still flowing silently beneath our feet to this day.

The London landscape looked very different before the rivers were closed off from view. Close to the River Lea, the forbiddingly named Black Ditch flowed through east London into the Thames at Limehouse. The sacred Walbrook ran through the centre of the Roman city of Londinium, where the occupying soldiers worshipped at the Temple of Mithras. The Fleet and the Tyburn rose at rural Hampstead and streamed past the villages that surrounded the northern and western edges of the metropolis. The River Westbourne provided a pleasant place for travellers to rest their livestock at Bayard’s Watering Place (modern Bayswater) before flowing into Hyde Park, where Queen Caroline dammed its waters in 1730 to create the Serpentine. Further west, Counter’s Creek and Stamford Brook provided water for the inhabitants of the ancient settlements we now know as Chelsea and Hammersmith.

South of the Thames, the Falcon meandered through the common land of Wandsworth and Clapham while the Effra’s course led from Norwood, through the villages of Dulwich and Brixton, down to the Thames at Vauxhall. Today, the Imperial War Museum conceals the source of the River Neckinger, which flowed through south-east London (possibly joined by two tributaries – Earl’s Sluice and the Peck) before forking into two rivulets that formed a watery boundary to the notorious rookery of Jacob’s Island.

London’s rivers had become dangerously contaminated by the Middle Ages. As early as 1290, the prior of a Carmelite monastery in Whitefriars complained of how members of the brethren had succumbed to miasmas rising from the Fleet. In addition, the Walbrook was constantly choked by refuse thrown into its waters by the numerous skinners practising their craft on its banks. The Common Council endeavoured to rectify the problem, making leaseholders of land surrounding the riverbanks responsible for keeping the waterways clear of filth.

Nevertheless, the Fleet and the Walbrook grew more choked and foul-smelling with every year that passed. In order to obscure the revolting sight of the fetid waters flowing through their midst, landowners began to pave over parts of the rivers. In his Survey of London published in 1603, John Stow wrote of the Walbrook:

This water course having diverse Bridges, was afterwards vaulted over with bricke and paved levell with the Streetes and Lanes where through it passed, and since then also houses have been builded thereon, so that the course of the Walbroke is now hidden under ground, and thereby hardly knowne.

It was the first of London’s rivers to vanish from view.

The River Fleet remained above ground for some years more, although it was generally perceived as a blight on the city. By the 1600s it was referred to by Londoners as a ‘ditch’ rather than a river, its central section impassable due to use as a dump for butchers’ refuse. Numerous clean-up attempts were made throughout the century, but each time the Fleet quickly refilled with rotting viscera and sewage. Its muddy banks became treacherous to pedestrians and rumours abounded of unwary individuals slipping into the slurry. One particularly grisly story related the fate of a barber from Bromley, Kent, who, after a drunken night out at a City hostelry, fell into the Fleet. He was found the next day standing upright in the mud, frozen to death.

By the early 1700s the authorities had admitted defeat and attempts to clean up the Fleet were abandoned. Respectable families living close to its banks fled to more salubrious climes and the once pleasant riverside properties degenerated into slums. The area surrounding the Fleet Ditch at Clerkenwell became one of London’s worst rookeries, packed with dilapidated lodging houses occupied by thieves and other undesirables. According to local legend, the worst of these lodging houses stood at the corner of Brewhouse Yard. Commonly referred to as ‘Jonathan Wild’s House’, after the notorious thief-taker, it contained myriad hiding places and escape routes for villains on the run. Trapdoors were concealed in cupboards and behind curtains, through which felons could disappear into the murky depths of the Fleet. The ditch also provided a handy place to dispose of incriminating evidence, which quickly sank into the mud.

The Fleet became nothing more than an open sewer and the decision was made to henceforth conceal it from view. In 1735, the section running from Ludgate Hill to Holborn Bridge was covered over and a marketplace was laid out on the new land. A quarter of a century later, work began to cover the remaining part of the Fleet that lay within the city boundaries. By 1768, virtually the entire river – from Holborn to the Thames – had been forced underground.

Despite the problems caused by the dreadful state of the Fleet and the Walbrook, London’s waste still had to be disposed of. The rivers’ convenient habit of carrying deposits to the Thames, where they were dragged out to sea by the tide, meant that they remained the favoured method of refuse removal. All manner of rubbish found its way into the city’s waterways, but the most revolting was undoubtedly human waste. Originally, Londoners had dealt with the disposal of sewage themselves, quietly spreading it on their gardens or surreptitiously dropping it into the nearest drain. However, by the 1300s, the sheer volume meant it was impossible to dispose of it personally. As a result, men were employed as ‘rakers’: freelance workers who removed the contents of household cesspits. The first recorded mention of a raker dates from 1327, while thirty years later a civic document declared, ‘The dung that is found in the streets … shall be carried … out of the City … by the Rakyers.’

However, the onerous task of emptying the cesspits was often left to the householders. In 1535, London physician Thomas Vicary wrote, ‘The Raker … shall have a horne, & blowe at every mannes doore … to lay owt theyre offal.’ Some rakers were willing to do the job themselves for more pay, most notably the unfortunate ‘Richard le Rakyere’ who, in 1326, fell into a cesspit he was emptying and drowned.

Once the raker had filled his cart he would drive out to the countryside, where his unsavoury product was sold to farmers who found it to be excellent manure for their crops (particularly those of the root vegetable variety). In 1816, Solomon Baxter, owner of Potteral’s Farm in North Mimms, Hertfordshire, took out advertisements in the newspapers extolling the benefits of human excrement for turnips, which apparently ‘came up very luxuriantly, and continue uncommonly strong and healthy’.

Due to the nature of their business, London’s rakers were increasingly obliged to carry out their work after dark to avoid complaints from neighbours. By the mid 1700s they became known as ‘night soil men’, with local bylaws passed to ensure their business was conducted in a discreet and sanitary manner. The night soil men were forbidden to offload the contents of their carts in built-up areas and had to adhere to strict rules as to when collections could be carried out. For example, in the parish of St Clement Danes, fines of up to £5 could be issued to any night soil men caught ‘beginning to empty any bog-house, or taking away night soil, at any time, except between 12 at night and five in the morning’.

For centuries, the valuable (if nauseating) work of the rakers or night soil men ensured London’s rivers remained relatively free of household sewage. However, by the 1700s the whole idea of domestic cesspits was being questioned. Traditionally, even the smartest houses had privies close to their backdoors for ease of use, particularly in the cold winter months. Some homes even had indoor facilities with cesspits dug underneath their ground floor. Almost without exception, these pits were not enclosed and so, consequently, the effluent leaked into the surrounding soil, producing an aroma that pervaded the house, particularly on hot summer days. As London’s streets became more densely p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Great Stink
• 2 The Underground Visionary
• 3 Charles Pearson and the Subterranean Railway
• 4 The Subterranean City Expands
• 5 The Transport Boom
• 6 Wartime Underground
• 7 The Underground Underworld
• 8 Danger Underground
• 9 Terror On The Underground
• 10 The Post-War Underground
• 11 Abandoned Underground
• 12 Ghost Stations
• 13 Tracking London’s Lost Rivers
• 14 Into Tomorrow
• Postscript: Tyburn River Walk
• Select Bibliography