Cloaca Maxima

Applications

In the 1860s, London's sewer system was being transformed by the engineer Joseph Bazalgette (1819–91), with new intercepting sewers constructed to prevent waste matter from polluting the river Thames. During its construction, comparisons to ancient Rome and its sewer were consistently evoked. The journalist Henry Mayhew (1812–87) described London's sewers as second only to the “giant works of sewerage in the eternal city,” while Bazalgette used the Cloaca Maxima as a prototype for London's sewers in his lectures on his new drainage system.

When London's new sewers were completed, the press were almost ecstatic in their praise. In a ceremony held in 1865 to mark its formal opening, some newspapers compared the new sewers with the wonders of the ancient world. According to the Daily Telegraph, the main drainage system was a project alongside which even the pyramids of Egypt and the sewers of Rome “paled into comparison.” The Marylebone Mercury made similar comparisons: the main drainage system was described as the “representation of a mighty civilisation,” a civilization nobler than ancient Rome because it lacked its “despotic power.” Underlying these comparisons was the view that London's new sewers were a permanent monument to the future when the city—especially compared with its main rival, Paris—would become the cleanest and most magnificent city the world had ever seen. If the content of London's new sewers was “not a bit better” than that in the sewers of Paris, their technological and [Page 131]political basis most certainly was. Under Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann in the 1860s, Paris was undergoing a more radical transformation than London. New boulevards were driven through the medieval city, and new sewers were constructed beneath them. While some criticized London's government for not “Haussmanizing” London enough, most celebrated the city's new sewers as making the city above comparison with any other European capital. If Bazalgette had done “what Tarquin did for Rome,” he did it without the “despotic power” of the latter. The fact that Napoleon III was also self-consciously modeling his new Paris sewers on this Roman precedent also points to an implicit criticism of his despotic methods.

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