London has always had a complicated relationship with the River Thames. Ebbing and flowing for over 200 miles, the river begins in the countryside of Gloucestershire and meets the North Sea near Kent. The tidal river has been a lifeblood of the city, but hasn’t always been treated well by London’s citizens. In fact, it is the treatment of the Thames that led to the development of the London sewer system and the building of Crossness Pumping Station.
The Thames by Moonlight with Southwark Bridge, London, 1884, by John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836–1893) (Source: City of London Corporation)
In the 18th century, the Thames’ brackish water was clean and home to several species of fish. Londoners used the water from the river to drink, clean and more. But as the city grew, the Thames and its many tributary rivers quickly became a dumping ground for the city’s overflowing waste. The waterways essentially became open sewers, full of dirty brown water, rubbish and other nasty bits of domestic and factory waste. By the mid-nineteenth century many Londoners described the Thames as a dead river, so foul that little seemed able to live in it.
In this Punch cartoon, Father Thames, introduces his children which represent various diseases to the fair maiden representing London. (Source: Punch, or the London Charivari; July 3, 1858)
As London grew, disease epidemics such as cholera and diphtheria emerged. In 1831, the first cholera epidemic hit; at the time, many believed in the ‘miasma theory’ – that bad smells carried disease through the air. And they blamed the stench of the sewage laden Thames as the source for many of the diseases. In 1854 John Snow showed that cholera was linked to contaminated drinking water, not (as many still believed) to bad smells alone.
A closeup of the river water under a microscope shows all types of beasts and creatures in this cartoon cleverly titled ‘Monster Soup’. (By WIlliam Heath, 1828. Source: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images)
Londoners started to put two and two together and recognised that the contaminated Thames was becoming a major issue for the city. Cartoonists documented the suffering of ‘Father Thames’ in magazines and newspapers, bringing light to the issue of the world’s most populous city. In 1852, action was taken with the Metropolis Water Act, which banned using water from the Thames for domestic use, but it still was not enough.
Published at the time of the Great Stink, this cartoon depicts death coming to collect from the River Thames. (Source: Punch Magazine, 1858).
It wasn’t until the fateful summer of 1858 that something would change. A heatwave descended on London, with temperatures reaching above 30 degrees Celsius. Nicknamed the ‘Great Stink’, Londoners were faced with pungent fumes throughout the city, and the Thames was the epicentre of that smell. Parliament authorised a major main-drainage scheme. The Metropolitan Board of Works (set up in 1855) drove construction of intercepting sewers and riverside pumping stations for London. Crossness Pumping Station was a critical part of that system: it lifted sewage collected from the southern sewers so it could be discharged into the Thames estuary on the ebb tide. Central London’s river front improved, even while pollution was moved downstream for many years.
Taken in the late 1940s or early 1950s, this aerial photograph shows the Crossness site, located right next to the River Thames. (Source: Crossness Pumping Station Archives)
Today, Crossness still sits next to the Thames as the Cathedral on the Marsh. The beam engines no longer pump sewage but welcome visitors to marvel at their engineering. And the river flows past, cleaner than the days of the past, still a lifeblood of the city of London.