The raw sewage in England’s rivers and seas is not just a story of corporate failure. It’s also a legacy of Victorian sewers – impressive and high-tech in their day, but with inequality and exploitation baked in.

In the summer of 1858, London succumbed to a “Great Stink” as hot weather exacerbated the smell of human waste in and around the River Thames. Along parts of the Thames, sewage was piled six foot deep.

This compelled the Victorians to find a new way of handling the faeces of the world’s largest city. The new Houses of Parliament rushed through legislation and soon commissioned the engineer Joseph Bazalgette to design and build a new sewer system.

Bazalgette’s design was hailed as visionary: a modern network that collected household waste and pumped it to centralised containment points. The shift away from informal sanitation to a formalised system was the bedrock of a public health revolution.

But the system was also a product of its time, and some people and environments benefited more than others. It prioritised the wealthy, and dumped the consequences downstream.

This Victorian legacy infrastructure forms the blueprint of the sewage crisis of the 2020s, in London and across the country. Sewers (often literally the same sewers with the same 150-year-old bricks) still spill untreated waste into rivers when it rains. And, just as in the 19th century, the costs are carried disproportionately by the poor and the environment.

Between 1800 and 1850, a third of the population in England moved into urban industrial centres, a shift that ushered in a new era of public health risks from faecal-oral diseases such as cholera. Sustaining........

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