Science & Engineering

The museums, the machines and the men and women who worked it out: laboratories kept as they were, beam engines under steam, the tunnel, the barrier, the roofs, and the plaques on the houses where the ideas came.

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Bazalgette memorial

The bust of the engineer who built the sewers and the Embankment you are standing on, with the inscription that he put the river in chains.

Statues & plaquesFree

Photo by Aethonatic, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Joseph Bazalgette answered the Great Stink of 1858 with eighty-two miles of intercepting sewers that still carry London's waste, and built the Victoria Embankment to hold the biggest of them, reclaiming the riverside from Westminster to Blackfriars; George Simonds's bronze bust of 1901, in a niche in the Embankment wall opposite Northumberland Avenue, says in Latin that he placed chains on the river. The sewers were sized for a city of four million and had to serve eight; the Tideway Tunnel completed in 2025 is his successor.

Where
Victoria Embankment, WC2N 6PB
Nearest station
Embankment · 2 min walk

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