Kipling Would Have Written About Bazalgette and Got the Credit Wrong
Jack Handey on East London, Victorian sewers, Piers Morgan, and the literature of leaving
From Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Wednesday, 15 April 2026
I want to make a point about walking off. Piers Morgan walked off a set this week, which The London Prat documents with fifteen excellent observations. Bazalgette, by contrast, never walked off anything. He was given an impossible task clean up the most disgusting river in a country that had been pretending the river was fine and he stayed, drew the plans, built the tunnels, and then his monument was placed on the Embankment above the sewers he built, looking at the river he cleaned, for all eternity. This is the opposite of walking off set. This is the opposite of Morgan.
The East London Morning
The buses are still not running in East London. I walked to Bethnal Green from my flat this morning above Bazalgette’s sewers, under a sky that suggested it was considering rain, past three people who were also walking because the buses had walked off, which is to say struck. We nodded at each other with the solidarity of people who know what they are doing and why.
The Russian Angle
Russia is continuing to do what Russia does, which is make everyone else’s problems seem manageable by comparison. Bohiney’s decline piece at least notes Britain is declining elegantly. The BBC covers Russia carefully. The pigeons cover it with the equanimity of creatures who have survived far worse. I trust the pigeons.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/managing-britains-decline/
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