Eel-catchers ended up in London's mire

The bulk of Londoners have probably never even heard of Canvey, and think that Vange is something that gets you thrown out of the Kennel Club.

Yet the landscape of Canvey Island and the spread of marshes and creeks around it has one huge significance for the capital city. It represents the biggest rubbish tip in, or rather out of, town.

Not perhaps, south Essex's finest boast. Yet there is history attached even to rubbish tips, and the story of how our garbage dumps saved London is a fascinating and surprisingly momentous one.

It's told, almost incidentally, in a new book, The Great Stink of London, by Stephen Halliday.

The book is primarily the tale of the construction of the London sewer system by a remarkable, visionary and dogged Victorian engineer, Joseph Bazalgette. South Essex, however, plays a humble but vital supporting role.

In the summer of 1858, London became virtually uninhabitable. The city had exploded in size and population, but its medieval sewage system hadn't expanded with it.

The situation was actually made worse by the invention of the Bramah WC. Advertised by the memorable slogan "a certain flush with every pull," the WC rapidly became the biggest status symbol in town.

By 1857 there were an estimated 200,000 in operation in central London. The efficient if smelly system of domestic cesspools was curtailed as proud London householders sluiced their new devices direct into the Thames.

As filth of every description found its way to the Thames, the river became a slurry pit of black slime. MPs staggered from Parliament, clutching handkerchiefs to their lofty noses.

The ultimate solution was Bazalgette's magnificent system of "intercepting sewers", which continue to purge London to this day. Yet the human digestive system was only part of the problem.

Factory waste, ash from railways, chemical by-products and, for the first time ever, large amounts of waste paper from offices, were also contributing to the foul state of London, described by its very prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, as "a Stygian pit."

So the river that lay at the heart of the problem was roped into service to solve it. In 1886 two entrepreneurs, Colonel A S Jones and J Bailey Denton launched a scheme to carry rubbish downriver.

Six specially designed "sludge-boats" were ordered. A new dock was constructed for them, close to the modern Victoria Station (the dock is still visible from the high rails).

Instead of being dumped in the river, London's rubbish was now carried downstream to Hole Haven.

The adjoining population of Canvey, described as "a spattering of lowly eel-catchers and a few excisemen", was too small to create any hullabaloo. Besides, the land, at Hole Haven, had already been purchased in advance by Col Jones and Bailey Denton.

So began the Canvey area's career as London's rubbish tip. London's gain was the island's loss. It can have come as little comfort that the upmarket Pall Mall Gazette reported that "Canvey island may claim whatever credit belongs to it to the fact that it is clearly designed for the treatment of London sewage...by Providence."

It was not just the stink and the disease of the sewage problem that enraged the thinking population, but the waste. No less a person than the railway pioneer George Stephenson had said "the soil of England, if properly treated, will produce four times the amount of food that it yields under the present system."

Somebody else calculated that London's human waste, properly deployed under a sound accounting system, could halve the national debt!

All that sewage could be turned into wonderful fertiliser to improve the soil - only not, of course, in London itself. Several schemes emerged to pipe the unmentionable substances out into the countryside for purification, and the lucky winner in the location stakes was Rawreth, the small village between Wickford and Rayleigh.

The plan, delivered to the Metropolitan Board of Works, envisaged a 44 mile culvert to a giant pan in Rawreth. The nutrient-cake scooped from here would then be spread on the heavy Essex clay fields on either side of the Crouch, from Laindon Common to the sea.

It could also be used to reclaim the Maplin Sands, turning that great sandbank off Southend into wheatfields and meadows.

The plan was greeted with huge enthusiasm. Property prices in the area shot up. Londoners might want to offload their stink on somebody else, but Essex folk, just as much as Yorkshiremen, recognised that where there's muck there's brass.

An experimental scheme was carried out on a farm in Romford. The "slush" (the Victorian euphemism now being used for fertiliser made from sewage) produced such magnificent strawberries and celery that a whole new scheme was floated.

Incredible as it seems, the Rawreth sewage-farm was envisaged as a sort of health resort. Lieutenant-Colonel William Hope VC, the instigator of the scheme, proposed that: 'London beauties might come out to recruit their wasted energies at the close of the season..perhaps at times listen to a lecture on agriculture from the farmer himself, while drinking his cream and luxuriating in the health-restoring breeze."

The thought of the cream of high society womanhood luxuriating by a giant cesspit, admiring the smell from the lagoon and squinting through lorgnettes at the view of Basildon is irresistible. Alas, it never came to happen.

Construction actually started in Rawreth at the suitably magnificent sounding Trundelhayes Lodge. Then a financial crisis in the City put paid to the source of finance.

By the time funds came on tap again, a shameful thing had happened. The estimated market value of honest London sewage was undercut by imported guano, the miserable droppings of Caribbean birds.

Memories would be interested to know whether any brickwork or other visible remains of the Rawreth slush-pan survive today.

(Right) Grim - a cartoonist's view of Old Father Thames

Pics courtesy of Thames Water

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.