Perhaps the greatest honour ever paid to Queen Victoria was to have a sewage-pumping engine named after her. Both she and Albert – and the future Edward VII, plus Alexandra – had the delight of becoming bywords for the mighty machines constructed by Joseph Bazalgette to lift waste from the depths of his (literally) ground-breaking London sewer system. 

Listening to Thames Unfiltered, a new six-part podcast from the Evening Standard, I was amused to learn that the trend now favours the Greek gods. Among the eight barges constructed to serve the Tideway Tunnel sewer, completed last year, are a Zeus, a Poseidon, an Apollo, a Phoebe and, er, a Churchill. What else to give those who have everything?

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Bazalgette was only 29 when he was appointed assistant surveyor to the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers. But he wasn’t entrusted with solving London’s sewage problem until the outbreak of the Great Stink a decade later in 1858. An unusually hot summer had exacerbated the already odious smells, which Charles Dickens described as ‘of a most head-and-stomach-distending nature’. Vast quantities of........

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