Free London Under by Peter Ackroyd Page A

sixteenth century many of them had been removed.

    The Cornhill conduit, 1800 (illustration credit Ill.20)
    Other sources ofwater were also deployed, most notably in theNew River built byHugh Middleton at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This flowed from Amwell andChadwell Springs in Hertfordshire into North London. A fountain playing at the corner ofRosebery Avenue andArlington Way, where onceThames Water had its headquarters and where Sadler’s Wells still stands, marks its final destination. The shape of a great reservoir can still clearly be seen close by inClaremont Square. This is a very watery part of London. But the new river, like its older companions, has gone beneath the earth. It has been driven underground.
    By the eighteenth century severalwater companies were laying pipes beneath the surface, with attendant problems of fierce competition and territorial struggle. Some London streets contained the pipes of three or four different companies vying for mastery. The companies joined together in 1811, but the subsequent monopoly did nothing to improve public health. Water flowed for very limited periods, sometimes as little as ten minutes each day, and there was no water on Sundays. Improvements were slow, gradual and random. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the creation of theMetropolitan Water Board, was the public supply ofwater guaranteed. A huge water main was built, 19 feet beneath the surface, in 1955. This was followed, at the end of the twentieth century, by the construction of a ring water main lying at a depth of 130 feet; it encompasses the city in a loop of 50 miles, its central tunnel being some 7½ feet wide. It provides half of London’s water, all of it moved by gravity alone. One of the great pumping stations that control the flow of water can be seen atShepherd’s Bush roundabout, where a toweringpump has been installed. Beneath the traffic island, at the bottom ofPark Lane, anotherpumping station has been built. You would never know that it was there.

    The London Water Ring Main (illustration credit Ill.21)
    Another visionary scheme, from an earlier era, consisted in the provision ofgas by means of pipes under the ground. The first of them was laid in the summer of 1805, when a newspaper described how “the inflammable gas, which is quite transparent or invisible, began to flow into the pipes soon after eight o’clock”; a lamplighter lit each lantern in turn, instigating “a clear, bright and colourless light” that would soon transform the streets of London. Shadow and darkness were banished from the main thoroughfares. “It would have been a sight worth seeing,”Charles Dickens wrote in his weekly magazine,
All the Year Round
, “the laying of the first gas pipe—and a picture worth drawing.” He believed that act to have been of more historical importance than the landing of Julius Caesar or the sealing of the Magna Carta. He had an essentially Victorian belief in power, and understood that gas would inaugurate a new order of things.
    Yet there were serious misgivings about the nature of this new underground force. It was claimed that mounds of earth, each one the size of Primrose Hill, would be needed to keep the gas down. Fears of explosions were often expressed. Some of the pipes, from a myriad of new companies, were laid at too shallow a depth. In 1867 theFenians—the Irish nationalists of the period—blew up a gas main inClerkenwell as part of their campaignof terror in the 1860s, and a barrel of gunpowder was found beside a largegas-holder inShoreditch. The largest explosion of gas in the city occurred at the end of October 1865, when eleven workmen were killed by the accidental lighting of 1,000,000 cubic feet of gas at theLondon Gaslight Company. People walking a mile from the scene were thrown violently to the ground. The thing that lurked beneath, the thing that created terror, was now gas.

    Beneath the streets, 1900 (illustration credit