The Big Necessity Read Online Free PDF

gets only mockery and disregard from the public. The jokes are revenge. The writer Sukhdev Sandhu met a flusher who “remembers the night he emerged from a sewer at Leicester Square dripping of filth and shit only to find a young woman tourist peering at him. He held out his hand. ‘Smell that. That’s Canal No. 5, that is.’”
    Humor helps because the work is hard. The pay isn’t great, there are shampoo bills, and then there are the daily grievances, like Q-tips. “They are the bane of our lives,” says Smith. “If someone had searched for something that could clean your ear and also stick perfectly in the six-millimeter holes of a sieve [filter], they couldn’t have done better.” He shines his light on a pipe mouth to one side, encased with something I can’t recognize, dripped solid like stalactites. “Concrete. Unbelievable. Someone’s just poured liquid concrete down a drain.” The liquid has now hardened, embracing and defeating the black pipe it arrived down, a sign of shortsighted selfishness.
    The men stop to shine light at roof bricks, searching for cracks. While they look at the bricks with a purpose, I just look at the bricks. Smith is proud of them. “If you had a garden brick wall,” he says, “think of the condition it would be in after fifty years. These are over one hundred years old, and they have sewage flowing through them constantly.” He gives them his considered engineer’s opinion. They are “in pretty good nick.”
    A century in age makes this sewer relatively young. The core of London’s sewer network was built between 1858 and 1866 by a man whose name is now venerated only among flushers and historians,though he was probably the greatest of the famed Victorian engineers, such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, bridge builder, or the locomotive-designing Stephensons. The man who built London’s sewers, though, is as obscure as the network he constructed.
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    Since its beginnings as a trading center on a useful river, London dealt with its excrement as other settlements did, with what is known today as “on-site sanitation.” In short, this meant that its citizens generally did their business in a designated, confined place. It was a private matter unregulated by any authority and done mostly in a privy, from the French word
privé
(private). Privies were used alongside cesspools and middens (dungheaps). The cesspools were designed to leach their liquids into the soil, leaving the solids to be collected by “gong fermors” (a corruption of “gunge farmers”) and sold to farmers as manure. It was a sensible system with much to admire. Nothing was wasted; everything was recycled. The nutrients ingested by humans in food were taken from their cesspools and placed back into land that would grow more food, which would be consumed by more humans, who would in turn produce more useful “waste.” It was a harmonious recycling loop that also managed to be lucrative. It satisfied the demands of nature and of capitalism. But it did not work perfectly.
    The private matter of excretion spilled into public life in many ways. There were unemptied, overflowing cesspools, like the one into which Samuel Pepys trod in 1660, when he ventured into his cellar to find it filled with the contents of his neighbor’s privy. There was the common practice of slopping out, when chamber pot contents were flung from windows in the early morning, which made for unpleasant streets, especially since pavements were not common. There is a theory that the popularity of high heels dates from this time, something that might amuse Yahoo!’s sewer-footwear fetish group, as would the fact that the uppers of Parisian sewer waders were popular with boot makers. They valued the leather—hardened by contact with fats and acids in sewage—and turned it into ankle boots for fashionable ladies who remained