£78.50 (Non JG member)
Overview
The day includes a top-notch Blue Badge Tour Guide, a Thames Cruise, the tour at Crossness plus morning coffee and a cup of tea at the end of the afternoon. Two thousand years ago the Romans enjoyed indoor plumbing but until a couple of hundred years ago Londoners were still emptying their chamber pots out of the window. In 1858 the long hot summer turned into The Great Stink with the Thames little more than an open sewer. Something had to be done. We begin in central London tracking London’s lost rivers, cruise the Thames to Greenwich and drive across the old Thames marshes to the extraordinary Cathedral of Sewage built to house the Crossness Engines. Bazalgette stopped London’s waste running into the Thames by building massive intercepting sewers beneath new Embankments created by pushing back the mighty Thames behind stone walls. On Bazalgette’s Victoria Embankment, we board a Thames Pleasure Cruiser to Greenwich. From Greenwich the coach whisks us further east past Woolwich to the Thames Marshes and the Cathedral of Sewage. With bacteria yet to be discovered or understood Bazalgette believed the danger lay in the miasma – the stink. The new sewers simply delivered London’s waste to Crossness to be stored before being pumped back into the river for the high tide to sweep it out to sea. Discover some of Britain’s most spectacular ornamental Victorian cast ironwork and possibly the world’s largest surviving beam engines. There’s a museum and a social story here too – the workers lived on site in terraced cottages built right above the massive sewage storage tank. Mesh at the windows kept the flies at bay. It must have stunk to high Heaven but my goodness they grew good tomatoes! Please bring a picnic to eat during the cruise.