The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian London (review)

The Thames Embankment is a massive civil engineering structure running for miles through the heart of London. Londoners and visitors can walk the embankment without realizing that at any point along it 150 years earlier they would have been standing in the muddy river. They may hear the trains rumbling by beneath their feet but not appreciate that the twin-track underground railway and the city's main intercepting sewer are contained within the infilling behind the massive embankment wall that marks the present edge of the river.

According to the Technology and Environment series preface, this book springs from public awareness of and concern about the effects of technology on the environment; the series editors aim to publish informative and provocative work emerging from research and reflection that will place these issues in historical context. This book is certainly informative, but it cannot be described as provocative, even though the embankment proposals (there were many) generated much controversy in their time.

The main embankment was built by the Metropolitan Board of Works, a public authority created by legislation in 1855 and representing the city corporation and all the London boroughs. Construction of the five and a half miles of brick and concrete wall from Chelsea in the west to Blackfriars Bridge began in the autumn of 1863. The thirty-foot-high wall, ten feet thick at its base, encloses over fifty acres of reclaimed ground and the final section of London's main drainage. Porter writes that there was nothing about the project that could not have been done a century earlier, and he comments that “During construction, engineers experimented with a new type of retaining wall, introduced steam-powered cranes, and learned how to use poured concrete in place of brick.” Porter's main interest is not in the technology, however, and he does not tell us much about it. The heart of this book is a study of the many parties with an interest in the embankment project. It affected the landowners whose property abutted the wider, unembanked river. It affected the many who made a business along the foreshore, those concerned with maintaining navigation in the river, and those responsible for the bridges, whose piers could be adversely affected by the scouring effect of the faster moving river. Engineers and contracting firms based in London found a major construction project on their doorstep. Porter discusses these various interest groups, and their influence on the embankment we now have. For politicians serving on bodies with grand titles such as the Metropolitan Commissioners of Sewers, the work was clearly desirable, but the great issue was who should pay for it. In the event, certain taxes that had long been charged on wine and coal brought into London, and used for building bridges, were available for this.

For ordinary Londoners at the end of the nineteenth century, the most significant thing about the embankment was that it marked the completion of the main drainage system. The mud flats at low tide were no longer polluted with sewage, the air by the river was better, and the river itself was perceived to be so much cleaner that swimming baths were installed at Charing Cross. The low-level intercepting sewer collected the waste that formerly polluted the river and carried it down to treatment works below the city. Since the cholera epidemics of 1832, 1848, and 1853 there had been agitation for the improvement of living conditions. Probably the improved water supplies were even more beneficial than the new drainage, but in the eyes—and noses—of many the reduction in deaths from infectious diseases (which halved between 1850 and 1900) was chiefly due to the drainage.

This book will help anyone interested in the evolution of modern cities to understand the many factors that influence the development of city infrastructure.