SEWER RATS

Ian Thomson catches

a glimpse of life down a manhole

PUBLIC visits to the sewers of London are, rare: the clammy atmosphere can cause breathing problems, and their confined nature 'has been known to induce claus- trophobic fears or distress in inexperienced persons', to quote the Thames Water Visitor's Permit. This not very encouraging document continues: 'The sewers may also be deep and poorly lit; to enter, traverse and vacate them may require agility and fitness.' So you have to be in pretty good shape, for a start.

And there is always the danger, albeit remote, of catching leptospirosis from the urine of London's thriving rodent popula- tion. If this isn't enough, the speed at which the sewage flows is roughly four miles per hour, which is faster than one might think: falling in the foetid ooze is a distinct possibility. What should one do in such a situation? I later asked a Thames Water employee. 'You just remember one thing,' he said. 'Keep yer bleedin' mouth shut.' Well, there's logic for you.

I was met by a Thames Water Engineer and Supervisor outside Unilever House on Blackfriars Bridge at 9.30 a.m. Both were kitted out in dungarees, waders, rubber gauntlets and safety helmets with torches attached, such as coal miners wear. This is the required sewer-uniform, and I was told to climb into it.

The engineer cordoned off a manhole by Blackfriars tube station, and prised it open; hearing the distant rumble of rushing water I remembered Orson Welles as the penicillin racketeer Harry Lime, fleeing Trevor Howard down the Viennese sewers in The Third Man: 'Harry, I'm going to shine the torch. Play fair and come out. You haven't got a chance.' The engineer lowered a Davy lamp into the bowels of London on a length of twine. This was to test for explosive gases such as methane or the vapours of petrol or diesel spilt by watercraft on the Thames.

The lamp was hauled up: its paraffin- flame had not risen, and the strips of test paper attached by means of a tiny wire cage had not turned black, indicating no traces of hydrogen sulphide. This gas, released by decomposing excrement, is not particularly noxious in small amounts, but it will aggravate the nostrils and irritate the eyes.

As we descended through the manhole, the sound of the traffic above grew fainter rung by rung, until we came to a vast iron walkway leading to the Fleet Main Line a major sewer running five miles from Blackfriars bridge to Hampstead. There was nothing but darkness; I stooped for fear of hitting my head.

With eyes growing accustomed to the gloom, I saw a great runnel of rapidly- moving sewage effluent could be seen about 20 feet below, throwing up a thin, murky film of spray. Some London sewers are larger than a Tube tunnel: the Fleet appeared about half the size, but awesome nonetheless, as though I had descended from Blackfriars Bridge into some dank and cavernous catacomb. An average of 100 litres of filth passes under this rusty walkway per second, which is an awful lot of liquid. Still, at 10 a.m. the Fleet is fairly well behaved: much more dramatic are the early hours of the morning, for obvious reasons.

There was remarkably little smell, the current being too swift for a significant build-up of hydrogen sulphide. Things have mercifully changed since Samuel Pepys described the River Thames as an uncovered sewer of the most outrageous filthiness, 'so full of stink and darkness'. A Thames Water sewerage engineer, Ben- jamin Nithsdale, whose encyclopaedic knowledge of drainage maintenance is matched only by the wonderful enthusiasm with which he imparts it, tells me the Thames was used as a convenient recep- tacle for excrement right up until 1858, know as the 'Year of the Great Stink'. This was when Sir Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works, began to construct a network of cnss-crossing watercourses running from west to east London which intercept and pick up the flow from the main sewers on either side of the Thames, so preventing it from being discharged wholesale into the river. Mr Nithsdale informed me that there are 12,500 miles of sewers in Greater London: roughly the distance of a return trip to San Francisco.

The next point of interest on the tour was a 'penstock'. Seemingly rusted into desuetude, this great pile of late Victorian cogs and winches is still used to divert the flow of a subsidiary sewer into the Fleet. Operated by hand like much of the equip- ment in the London sewers, the machine is never likely to see the light of day: replace- ment would mean excavating the road above. As we passed a bricked-in section of the District Line underground, I felt something scurrying about my waders: a genuine London sewer rat! The rodent appeared large to me, but the supervisor scoffed. 'Sometimes you get 'em this big,' he boasted, indicating a good foot and a half. The thing scampered off, and the engineer assured me that rats are found only rarely down the Fleet: most of them prefer the West End, where there are plenty of take-aways.

Wading through the Fleet, we felt the current alarmingly swift, and the pestifer- ous bilge at one point swirled about my midriff. We switched on the lamps atop our helmets and trudged on in single file like climbers. 'Funny what people put down their toilets,' said the supervisor, pointing to a pink plastic necklace as it bobbed by on the skin of the current . . . .

However, you can find better than plas- tic down the Fleet; Mr Nithsdale told me the men hired by Thames Water to periodi- cally clean the sewers, known as flushers, will actually 'pan the muck for jewellery.' Times have changed little, it would seem, as Henry Mayhew wrote about a similar type of desperado in his books on the Victorian underworld: toshers, he called them.

The Victorian brickwork down here is quite remarkable: 'the best in the world', according to Mr Nithsdale. I don't doubt him; although hard to detect in the dam- pish half-light, the dark brown, glazed bricks are cut to geometric perfection. Most aesthetically gratifying is the way they have been 'turned in arches' (as they say in bricklayer's parlance) where the walls of the tunnel curve to meet at the roof.

The final part of our tour took us to a series of 'storm relief chambers' — tribut- ary sewers designed to take off any excess effluent from the Fleet in the aftermath of a heavy rainfall. The smell in these was pretty unpleasant, as it had recently rained very little: the sludge squelched horribly underfoot, giving off small amounts of hydrogen sulphide. The gas caught at the back of one's throat; I could feel the gall rising, and I was looking forward to a breath of fresh air.

I emerged from a manhole in New Bridge Street amid busy traffic, blinking in the unfamiliar daylight. My dungarees were bespattered with a feculent, brownish mud, and it didn't smell like roses either. But this shouldn't put one off. The Fleet Main Line is well worth a visit, rats and rotten eggs notwithstanding. As Graham Greene wrote in The Third Man: 'What a strange world unknown to most of us lies under our feet: we live above a cavernous land of waterfalls and rushing rivers, where tides ebb and flow as in the world above . . . ' . But the last word on sewers must go to Victor Hugo, from Les Miserables: `When one has spent one's time on earth suffering the windy outpourings which call themselves statesmanship, political wis- dom, human justice, professional probity, the robes of incorruptibility, it is soothing to go into a sewer and see the mire which is appropriate to all this.'