Late great engineers: Joseph Bazalgette - London’s engineer

If you stroll down the River Thames in central London and look almost directly south from the Embankment tube station, you’ll see a monument to Sir Joseph Bazalgette ‘engineer of the London main drainage system and of this embankment.’ Above the bronze bust set into a classical façade, a Latin inscription reads: FLVMINI VINCVLA POSVIT, or ‘he put the river in chains.’ In doing so, the great 19^th century civil engineer transformed the health prospects of London’s rapidly expanding population of 2.5 million. Bazalgette is known today as the man who built the city’s first modern interconnected sewer network that was to do more than any other public project to wipe out cholera in London and is still in use today.

The memorial was unveiled in 1901, the last year of Victoria’s reign and a decade after Bazalgette’s death. As Chief Engineer of London’s Metropolitan Board of Works he had created a sewer system supporting most of the capital, that had improved public health to the degree that, according to the City of Westminster archives: “the Thames finally lost its reputation as the most polluted river in the world. Today, it is considered one of the cleanest metropolitan rivers and cases of cholera have not been reported in London since the late 1860s.” While perhaps not so well known to the public as other British engineers such as Brunel, Stephenson or Telford, Bazalgette deserves his place in the upper echelons.