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Not every statue in London. The ones worth crossing the road for: Roman wall, medieval ruins, and the monuments that earn a detour.
A pump with no handle, on the spot where the science of epidemiology began.
MemorialsFree
Also in Science & Engineering.
In the last days of August 1854 cholera killed more than five hundred people within a few streets of here in ten days. John Snow, a doctor living in Sackville Street, walked the district marking each death on a map and found they clustered round the public pump on Broad Street; the brewery workers next door, who drank beer, were untouched, and a widow in Hampstead who had the pump's water sent to her because she liked the taste died of it. On 8 September he persuaded the parish to take the handle off. The prevailing theory was that disease travelled in bad air, and Snow's map was the first proof that it travelled in water. The pump is a replica set up in 1992 outside the pub that now carries his name, and in 2018 it was moved to the exact spot of the original, marked by a pink granite kerbstone. It has no handle.
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