Chapter Eight
Embankment
The Riverbank London Had to Invent
Why is Embankment called Embankment?
In brief: Embankment station is named for the engineered Thames riverbank created with Joseph Bazalgette’s interceptor sewers and new riverside road in the nineteenth century.
Transport context: London Underground station.
On 25 June 1858, the Thames enters Parliament without passing the doorkeeper.
It comes not as water but as smell.
The summer has been hot. At low tide, the river withdraws and leaves its burden exposed: human waste, dead animals, refuse from factories, the contents of drains and sewers, all spread upon the mud beneath the windows of the new Palace of Westminster. Heat works upon it. The river ferments in public.
Inside the House of Commons, the engineer responsible for ventilation says he can no longer answer for the health of the members. The stench has defeated every attempt to keep it out. Across the way, in the Court of Queen’s Bench, a surgeon is sworn and asked whether the air is safe. He has already been forced to leave the court three times. He says it is not. The judge considers adjournment.1
London is accustomed to foulness. Its streets contain dung, ash, blood, mud and the leakage of badly kept cesspits. Its people know the smell of tanneries, slaughterhouses, breweries, markets and overcrowded rooms. To live in the city is to possess a complicated nose.
But this smell has reached government.
That makes it an emergency.
For decades, London has been improving itself into disaster. The population grows. Water companies deliver more water to more houses. The water closet, once a privilege, becomes an aspiration. Waste that had remained in cesspits beneath homes is flushed into drains. The drains lead to sewers. The sewers lead to the Thames.
The river is asked to remove what the city no longer wishes to see.
It is also asked to provide drinking water.
These two duties are incompatible, though London persists in combining them.
Cholera arrives repeatedly. It moves quickly through poorer districts, emptying houses and frightening those who can afford to leave. Physicians argue about its cause. Much official medicine holds that disease travels through miasma: bad air arising from decay. The theory feels persuasive because filth smells and illness follows filth. It is wrong in the important detail.
Four years before the Great Stink, Dr John Snow has studied a cholera outbreak around Broad Street in Soho. He maps the deaths, investigates the local water supply and argues that contaminated water carries the disease. The handle of the Broad Street pump is removed. The evidence is powerful, but evidence does not always move at the speed of belief.2
In 1858, Parliament acts largely because it fears the air.
The result will protect the water.
History is sometimes improved by a misunderstanding.
Joseph Bazalgette has been waiting for the city to become capable of hearing him.
He is chief engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works, the first public body with something approaching authority across the whole expanding metropolis. He is not a visionary in the theatrical manner. He does not offer London a crystal palace or a marble arch. His imagination works in gradients, diameters, loads, tides and the rate at which brickwork cures.
He has already considered the problem. Plans have been prepared, examined, altered and delayed. Every proposal is expensive. Every outfall offends somebody downstream. Government departments object to the Board; the Board objects to consultants; consultants revise one another. London’s waste continues to flow while London’s authorities discuss where responsibility begins.
Then the river becomes unbearable at Westminster.
What years of epidemic have failed to settle, a few weeks of smell accelerate. Parliament grants the Metropolitan Board of Works the power and money to proceed. Bazalgette is not suddenly inspired by the Great Stink. He is suddenly permitted.3
His answer is not one sewer but a system.
The existing local drains are to be gathered into larger channels before they can discharge into the river. Six great intercepting sewers will carry the flow eastwards, using gravity wherever the ground allows and pumping stations where it does not. More than a thousand miles of street drains will feed into eighty-two miles of main brick-lined sewers. At Crossness and Abbey Mills, engines will lift what cannot descend by itself.3
The scale is Roman, but the paperwork is Victorian.
Hundreds of plans and sectional drawings pass through the Board’s offices. Contractors excavate beneath streets that must continue to function above them. Labourers dig by hand. Bricklayers lay hundreds of millions of bricks. Bazalgette insists upon strong, water-resistant Portland cement and close inspection, because a sewer that fails invisibly may continue failing for years before the city understands why.3
Most of the work can be hidden beneath existing ground.
The lowest sewer on the north bank presents a different problem.
It needs to run beside the Thames through the crowded centre of London, where houses, wharves, stairs, yards and palaces already occupy the edge. There is no convenient strip of empty land waiting for a pipe. The engineers must either negotiate with the old riverfront or make a new one.
They choose the river.
The idea of a continuous quay along the north bank is not new. Christopher Wren has imagined one after the Great Fire. Later planners have proposed broad riverside roads and orderly façades. Their schemes remain on paper because London lacks either the money, the authority or the crisis required to build them.4
Sewage supplies all three.
The Victoria Embankment will not be merely a wall. It will be a piece of city large enough to contain several other pieces of city.
Within it will run the low-level sewer. Beside the sewer will run the Metropolitan District Railway. Above them will lie a broad road intended to relieve the crowded Strand, Whitehall and Fleet Street. Between road and older buildings, reclaimed ground will become gardens. Along the water will be a granite wall, piers, landing places and a promenade.4
One project is required to behave like five.
Work begins in 1864.
The Thames is narrowed behind temporary dams. Mud is excavated. Foundations descend below the riverbed. Granite blocks are set where water once moved. Earth and spoil fill the space behind the wall. Tunnels, drains and railway cuttings are fitted together beneath a roadway that does not yet exist.
The work is praised as improvement, and much of it is. It creates a direct riverside route, protects low ground, carries sewage away from central London and opens public space. It also destroys. Wharves lose access to the water. Stairs end against construction. Businesses dependent on boats are displaced. Buildings and entire fragments of waterfront disappear beneath the new line.5
The Embankment is clean when viewed from the new carriageway.
Its making is less tidy.
A single surviving structure explains the change better than any plan.
Walk into Victoria Embankment Gardens from Villiers Street and find the York Water Gate. It is a richly carved stone entrance built in 1626 for George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Its central arch contains steps designed to descend into the Thames. A boat could draw up there; a visitor could rise from the river and enter the duke’s house in ceremony.6
Today the gate stands among grass and trees.
Its steps lead nowhere.
The gate has not moved.
The river has.
Or rather, London has pushed the river away from it. The distance between the old water gate and the present embankment measures the land created by engineering. What looks like a small park is former Thames.
The name Embankment is therefore not poetic. It describes an action made permanent: a bank constructed against water, raised and strengthened to hold a river in a new position.
The city builds the thing first.
The station takes some time to accept the name.
On 30 May 1870, while finishing work continues above, the Metropolitan District Railway opens its extension from Westminster to Blackfriars. Steam locomotives pull wooden carriages through the shallow railway enclosed within the new river wall. Passengers travel beneath a roadway created partly to make room for the trains carrying them.7
The station near Hungerford Bridge is called Charing Cross.
This is reasonable. The mainline terminus has stood nearby since 1864, and Charing Cross is already one of London’s most familiar points. The embankment itself has only just entered the city’s daily vocabulary.
A few weeks later, in July 1870, the Prince of Wales formally opens Victoria Embankment. Plane trees line the broad new road. The gardens follow. London possesses a composed new frontage to its old river.8
It soon begins decorating it.
In 1819, Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, has given Britain an ancient granite obelisk to commemorate British victories over Napoleon’s forces at the Nile and Alexandria. The gift is generous in the manner of gifts that require the recipient to arrange transport. The stone remains in Alexandria for nearly sixty years because no government wishes to pay the cost of moving more than 180 tonnes of granite across the sea.9
The obelisk is called Cleopatra’s Needle, though Cleopatra had no part in making it. It was carved in Egypt around 1500 BCE for Pharaoh Thutmose III, more than a thousand years before her birth. It was later moved to Alexandria, and association supplied the name that history did not.9
In 1877, the engineer John Dixon encloses it within a specially built iron cylinder called the Cleopatra. The cylinder is towed from Alexandria. During a storm off the French coast, six men from the towing vessel die in an attempt to rescue the crew. The strange iron craft is cut loose, survives and is recovered.
The obelisk reaches London in 1878.
There is now somewhere grand, open and conspicuous to put it.
The Embankment receives Egypt.
The Needle is raised beside the Thames on 12 September 1878. Bronze sphinxes arrive later and face the obelisk in poses that are more Victorian than ancient. The monument becomes one of London’s oldest objects and one of its newest arrangements: pharaonic stone, a Napoleonic commemoration, Victorian engineering and imperial display assembled upon land that had been river a decade earlier.9
The new riverfront gathers memorials because it has the space to hold them. Generals, reformers, aviators and sailors appear in bronze and stone. Bazalgette himself receives a modest memorial near Hungerford Bridge. The city places his face upon the wall that contains his work, while the greater monument runs beneath everyone’s feet.10
Below ground, the railway multiplies.
In 1906, the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway—the future Bakerloo line—opens deep platforms beneath the District Railway. Its company calls the new station Embankment. For a time, passengers may interchange between parts of one station bearing different names: Charing Cross above, Embankment below.11
This is not confusion by London standards. It is preparation.
In 1914, the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway extends south to the river, adding what will become the Northern line platforms. The map tries repeatedly to impose order. The station becomes Charing Cross (Embankment), then Charing Cross. Decades later it becomes Charing Cross Embankment, and in 1976 at last simply Embankment. Three years afterwards, the name Charing Cross is given to the newly combined stations farther north at Trafalgar Square and the Strand.11
The names behave like passengers at an interchange.
They change lines.
By the time the riverfront station settles upon Embankment, the word no longer needs Victoria before it. Londoners know which embankment is meant. The engineering term has become a district, an address, a pier and a destination.
Today four Underground lines meet there: Bakerloo, Circle, District and Northern.12 The oldest platforms belong to the age of steam and cut-and-cover construction. The deepest belong to rival companies that bored their own routes beneath the first railway. Stairs, escalators, passages and ticket halls bind together structures built at different times for organisations that did not expect to become one system.
On the northbound Northern line platform, the station preserves another kind of relic.
The Voice That Came Back
Oswald Laurence was a theatre actor. Decades ago, he recorded one of the Underground’s most economical pieces of language: Mind the gap.
The warning belonged to the railway. The voice belonged to him.
After Laurence died in 2007, his widow, Dr Margaret McCollum, continued to pass through Embankment and hear the recording. For everyone else it was an instruction delivered between the arrival of a train and the opening of its doors. For her it was an ordinary continuation of a person who was no longer ordinary and no longer present.13
Then, during an upgrade in 2012, the voice disappeared.
McCollum asked station staff what had happened. The request moved through Transport for London until someone searched the archive, found the old recording and restored it to the northbound Northern line platform.13
The act is small by the scale of the system. No line was built. No station was renamed. A recording was recovered and placed where it had been before.
Yet the story reveals something that engineering histories often miss. A transport network enters private life by repetition. The same announcement accompanies work, shopping, hospital visits, meetings and returns home. A voice heard thousands of times becomes part of a marriage without ever knowing it has done so.
A public railway makes few concessions to private grief. Here it made one.
The result is easy to miss. A train arrives. Doors open. Laurence issues his warning. Most passengers obey without wondering who is speaking.
Beneath the street, Bazalgette’s brickwork continues to carry away the life of the city. Above the track, a dead man continues to caution strangers—and, for one listener, to come briefly home.
Leave by the river exit.
The first impression is breadth: sky, water, bridges, the open view towards the London Eye and the South Bank. It feels as though the city has always presented itself to the Thames in this composed manner.
It has not.
Walk east. The granite wall beside you is not the natural bank of the river. The road is not an old road widened. The gardens are not ancient ground. Each belongs to the same act of reconstruction.
At Cleopatra’s Needle, look at the marks on one of the sphinxes left by a German bomb during the First World War.9 Look beyond the monument towards the river that carried it here only after another vessel had lost six men. Then turn inland to the York Water Gate, stranded decoratively in the grass.
The gap between them is the chapter.
One monument arrived because the new bank offered a place for it.
The other became useless because the new bank took the river away.
Return towards Hungerford Bridge and find Bazalgette’s memorial fixed to the embankment wall. He is represented by a bronze profile and a moustache substantial enough to deserve its own engineering calculation. Traffic passes. Trains move below. Sewage moves lower still.
Almost nobody comes to London as a tourist in order to admire a sewer.
They come for the river views, the bridges, Trafalgar Square, the theatres, the South Bank and the ancient obelisk. They emerge at Embankment station because Bazalgette’s work made all of these approaches easier, cleaner and more orderly than the waterfront he replaced.14
Listen when the station name is announced.
Embankment.
It sounds impersonal. A technical noun. Something from a drawing or an Act of Parliament.
Inside it are cholera maps and mistaken theories; a summer in which the Thames became impossible to ignore; judges driven from their courts; politicians defeated by their own river; Bazalgette bent over gradients; hundreds of millions of bricks; wharves cut off from the water; a road, a railway and a sewer fitted into the same strip of reclaimed ground; a ducal water gate left among flowerbeds; an Egyptian obelisk surviving a storm; and a widow waiting on a platform to hear her husband’s voice.
The river did not give the station its name.
London built the river a new edge.
The railway remembered what it was called.
Notes and Sources
UK Parliament, Hansard, House of Commons, 25 June 1858, records the ventilation engineer’s warning, the proceedings in the Court of Queen’s Bench and contemporary descriptions of the intolerable Thames stench. Historic England, “The Great Stink — How the Victorians Transformed London to Solve the Problem of Waste”, provides the wider context of the hot summer of 1858 and the polluted river.↩
London Museum, “John Snow: Cholera and the Broad Street pump”. Snow argued that cholera was transmitted through contaminated water; his explanation was not immediately accepted, while miasma theory remained influential.↩
London Museum, “How Bazalgette built London’s first super-sewer”, and the Institution of Civil Engineers, “Sir Joseph Bazalgette: pioneer of modern sewage systems”. The completed scheme connected roughly 1,100 miles of street drains to 82 miles of new main sewers and used approximately 318 million bricks. London Museum also records Bazalgette’s use of strong, water-resistant Portland cement and the close scrutiny applied to construction.↩ ↩ ↩
Historic England, “Victoria Embankment Gardens”, National Heritage List for England entry 1000844. The listing history explains the earlier proposals for a continuous Thames quay and the Victoria Embankment’s combination of sewerage, road, railway, navigation and public-garden works.↩ ↩
Historic England, “The Great Stink — How the Victorians Transformed London to Solve the Problem of Waste”. The embankment works removed or isolated wharves, riverside businesses, streets and dwellings; some river-dependent livelihoods were lost.↩
Historic England, “York Water Gate”, National Heritage List for England entry 1237938, and London Museum, “York Water Gate and the Adelphi from the River”. The gate was built in 1626 as the ceremonial Thames entrance to York House and was left well inland by the construction of Victoria Embankment.↩
London Transport Museum, “The District line”, and collection record “MDR Charing Cross (Embankment) station sections, 1870”. The District Railway opened its Westminster–Blackfriars extension, including the station originally called Charing Cross, on 30 May 1870.↩
Historic England, “Victoria Embankment Gardens”, and London Museum, “Victoria Embankment”. Victoria Embankment was formally opened by the Prince of Wales in July 1870; it housed the low-level sewer and the railway as well as supporting the new road and gardens.↩
London Museum, “How Cleopatra’s Needle came to London”, and Historic England, “Cleopatra’s Needle”, National Heritage List for England entry 1066169. Muhammad Ali gave the obelisk to Britain in 1819. It had been carved for Thutmose III, was transported from Alexandria in a purpose-built iron vessel and was erected on Victoria Embankment on 12 September 1878; six men died during the sea voyage. The bronze sphinxes were added in 1881 and retain damage from a German air raid during the First World War.↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
Historic England, “Memorial to Sir J Bazalgette”, National Heritage List for England entry 1357347. The wall-mounted memorial stands on Victoria Embankment near Hungerford Bridge.↩
Transport for London Corporate Archives, Research Guide No. 31: A Brief History of the Bakerloo Line, and London Transport Museum, “The new Charing Cross”. The sub-surface station opened as Charing Cross; the Bakerloo station opened as Embankment in 1906; the Northern line connection followed in 1914. After several changes, the interchange became simply Embankment in 1976.↩ ↩
Transport for London, “Embankment Underground Station”. The station is currently served by the Bakerloo, Circle, District and Northern lines.↩
London Transport Museum, “Mind the Gap — the story of Embankment station’s announcement”, and Transport for London, Annual Report and Statement of Accounts 2013/14. At Dr Margaret McCollum’s request, TfL restored the distinctive recording made by her late husband, Oswald Laurence, at Embankment.↩ ↩
Transport for London’s visitor information recommends Embankment for riverside views, and the station provides direct access to Victoria Embankment, the Thames, the Golden Jubilee Bridges, Trafalgar Square and the South Bank. See TfL Visitor Shop, “Free things to do in London”, and Visit London, “Trafalgar Square”.↩