Thames Walk
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The south bank of the river is a thriving hub of entertainment, showcasing innovative art and music. It is home to a glittering array of restaurants, trendy shops and converted wharves. Butler's Wharf is one such example of a luxury apartment complex, complete with up market shops, restaurants and its own funky design museum. This nineteenth century riverside wharf was once the largest tea-storage warehouse in the world.
However, in the nineteenth century, both the south and north banks of the river were covered in ramshackle slums or the lived world of the poor for which big cities like London were infamous. Jacob's Island, situated on the south bank is one such example. It first came to fame when it was immortalised in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist as the last refuge of the evil Bill Sikes. In reality, it was no nicer a place, having the worst overcrowding and the highest death rates. This low-lying slum lay among tidal ditches where latrines emptied out, leading straight into the Thames. Thus flowed human waste, freely along London's river carried onto the banks by the wind, leaving slums like Jacob's Island redolent and vulnerable to illness and disease.
Coincidentally, Jacob's Island was the centre of the smelly industries which were kept outside the official city walls. Until the 1880s, the area was a densely built-up industrial centre for factories, tanneries, warehouses and mills.
From the 1700s onwards, this eastside riverside community included among its residents Indian and Chinese sailors, Jewish, Irish and Scandinavian immigrants, as well as ex-slaves from the Caribbean. With the rise of the industrial age, lack of work in rural English villages also prompted large migrations to cities, mainly to areas like this, where families would have often lived eight or nine to a room beside their animals.
These grim living conditions fueled the spread of cholera, with five to six cases of it daily on Jacob's Island. England had been visited by the epidemic four times and by 1854, it had killed 30,000 people in London alone. At the time there was no cure for it and doctors were clueless about it. It was assumed that cholera was an air borne disease carried by the "night air". After the 1854 outbreak, a Doctor John Snow discovered that the disease was water borne. However, it was not until 1858 when an unbearable stench, popularly known as the great stink pervaded more affluent quarters of London, affecting Parliament itself, that action was taken and a great sewer-building project began. The new sewage system was the brainchild of the prominent engineer Joseph Bazelgette and it linked all the street sewers to much bigger sewers which ran parallel to the Thames and fed out into the open sea. This prevented all the excrement from "backing up" in the Thames, leading to far better sanitation and an end to the cholera outbreaks.
The sewage system was an engineering feat of its time and was adopted by city planners throughout Europe and the U.S. In fact, Britain still uses the old Victorian sewage pipes today. Although it had to be prompted by epidemic disease and crowded, pestilential slums, England became the leader in the sciences of urban planning and public health. Jacob's Island was a lot like today's third world shanty towns and its example is a testament to how society-wide developments like the sewage system can transform living conditions in no time. Jacob's Island went from being the capital of cholera to the disease being vanquished.
WORLDwrite's most recent documentary Flush it takes on the present day water worriers. The film interweaves concerns about local water shortages, global water scarcity and toilet history with aspirations for grand projects and excellent loos. Watery but never wet, this compelling documentary promises to put aspirations for Western levels of water provision and sanitation on the map for developing countries. Please click here to watch the trailer and find out more.
