Text 1: Down among the fatbergs, by Lewis Nnamdi

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

The manhole cover comes off with a clang, and a smell rises to meet us that I can only describe as a bin left in a hot car for a week. ‘You get used to it,’ says Gary Pearce, who has worked in the city’s sewers for twenty-three years. ‘Give it ten minutes.’ He is lying, but kindly.

Before we go down, he clips a gas monitor to my chest. If it beeps, we leave immediately: the air in a sewer can contain gases that will make you pass out before you notice anything is wrong. Then we climb down an iron ladder into a tunnel of dark red brick, egg-shaped, just tall enough to stand up in. It was built in the 1870s and is still in perfect condition. ‘They knew what they were doing, the Victorians,’ says Gary, patting the wall as if it were a horse.

Today’s job is a fatberg: a mass of cooking fat poured down kitchen sinks, which has set hard around thousands of wet wipes and cotton buds. This one is about twenty metres long and blocks two-thirds of the tunnel. It has the texture of wet concrete and the colour of old porridge. The crew attack it with spades and a hose that blasts water at enormous pressure, breaking it into lumps that are sucked up by a tanker on the street above. At this rate, Gary says, it will take three weeks.

It is hard, hot, heavy work in waders and breathing masks, and the crew of six do it with relentless good humour. Over the years they have found false teeth, mobile phones, a goldfish (dead) and, once, a wedding ring, which they returned to its owner. Gary keeps a list of the strangest finds on the wall of the depot.

What makes him angry is not the smell or the dirt but the wet wipes. Nearly all the blockages they clear are caused by things that should never have been flushed. ‘People think when it goes round the bend it disappears,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t. It comes here. And then it comes to me.’

When I climb back into the daylight, shoppers walk past the open manhole without a glance. I go home and throw away every packet of wet wipes in the house.

Text 2: Under the streets with the flushermen, by Frederick Mallam

An original magazine article written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this magazine article, written in 1866, a writer describes a visit to the newly built sewers of a large town in the company of the men who clean them.

It was at the invitation of the Board of Works that I descended, on a wet morning last week, into the new main sewer beneath the High Street, in the company of three flushermen, a foreman, and a lantern which I would not have exchanged for a king’s ransom.

Of the smell I shall say little, for my readers will be at breakfast. It is sufficient to state that it struck me like a blow, and that the flushermen, observing my face, laughed with great good nature and assured me that a man came to like it in time. I did not believe them, and I do not believe them still.

But of the sewer itself I cannot say enough. It is a noble work. The tunnel, of smooth brick and shaped like an egg set upon its point, is tall enough for a man to walk upright, and runs, I was told, for three miles without a break. Into it, through a hundred lesser drains, pours all the filth of the town, which was formerly allowed to lie in cesspools and soak into the wells, to the great profit of the fever and the undertaker.

The work of the flushermen is to keep this great channel clear. In long boots to the thigh, they wade through the stream with shovels, breaking up the banks of silt which gather in the bends, and opening the sluices to send a rush of water down to carry it away. It is dangerous work. Foul air gathers in the side passages, and the men watch their lamps as a sailor watches the sky; if the flame burns low and blue, they retreat at once. In heavy rain the sewer may fill in minutes, and the foreman showed me a mark upon the wall where two men were drowned in the spring.

We came up at last through a shaft in the market place, into the midst of the busy crowd, who stared at us as if we had risen from the dead. I went home, took a long bath, and slept that night with a new respect for the men who labour beneath our feet.

Both of these texts are about visits to the sewers beneath a town or city.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the work done in the sewers
• how the writers present the workers and their work

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