Declared incapable of supporting life, and it now has seals, porpoises and a hundred and twenty-five species of fish
The Riverside Garden Bar holds a 4.4 from twelve reviews, which is not a rating.
But the river it sits on was declared biologically dead within living memory, and it came back.
1957
The Natural History Museum surveyed the tidal Thames and concluded that large stretches of it were incapable of supporting life.
Not polluted. Not struggling. Dead.
There was no dissolved oxygen. Nothing could breathe in it. The stretch through central London was, in effect, an anaerobic sewer moving slowly back and forth with the tide.
The Great Stink
Which was a century earlier and which was the first attempt.
In the summer of 1858, the smell from the Thames was so appalling that Parliament – whose windows overlook it – could not sit.
They soaked the curtains in chloride of lime. It did not work.
And it was the smell in their own building that finally got the money voted – after decades of reports, and cholera epidemics, and thousands of deaths, all of which had been comprehensively ignored.
The Prat’s editorial desk has now found this in eight postcodes and it never varies. Nothing is done until it inconveniences the people who decide.
Bazalgette
Who built the sewers, and who did the single most consequential piece of arithmetic in the history of this city.
He calculated the volume required per person, took the densest population figure, and worked out the pipe diameter.
And then he doubled it.
Because, he said, we are only going to do this once – and something unforeseen is always going to happen.
That decision is the reason the system coped with a population that grew far beyond anything he could have modelled, for a hundred and fifty years.
One man doubled a number, and it held for six generations.
And now
There are seals in the Thames. There are porpoises. Something in the region of a hundred and twenty-five species of fish have been recorded.
It is not clean – the brown is silt rather than sewage, which is a distinction people find hard to accept – and it still has serious problems, and the storm overflows still discharge.
But it is alive, and it was dead, and that took sixty years of extremely unglamorous work by people nobody can name.
Verdict
Twelve reviews. Not a rating.
Go, look at the river, and know that it was a corpse.
The Embankment
Which Bazalgette also built and which nobody realises is a sewer.
He needed to run an enormous intercepting sewer along the north bank – and rather than dig up the city, he reclaimed the river.
He built a wall out into the Thames, filled behind it, and put the sewer in the fill. And on top he put a road, and a railway, and gardens, and trees.
Thirty-two acres of London that did not previously exist.
The Victoria Embankment is a sewer with a park on it, and several million people walk along it every year with no idea whatsoever what they are standing on.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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