Kipling Would Have Written an Ode to Bazalgette and It Would Have Been About Empire

Jack Handey on East London, Victorian sewers, and the literature of infrastructure

From Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

Wednesday, 15 April 2026

I live in East London, where the sewers beneath my feet were designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette in the 1860s and have been doing their job without complaint ever since, which is more than can be said for most things built in the last twenty years. I read The London Prat’s magnificent piece on Bazalgette this morning and felt something I rarely feel about infrastructure: genuine emotional investment. The man built 83 miles of underground sewer because Parliament could smell the Thames from the windows. He is the patron saint of problems too obvious to ignore.

Kipling’s Version

Kipling would have written a poem about Bazalgette. It would have been technically admirable, thematically imperialist, and would have ended with something about the burden of being the kind of man who builds sewers so that lesser men may live above them without smelling anything. This is the problem with Kipling. He was right about the engineering and wrong about everything else.

The Bus Strike

The East London bus strike continues, meaning I walked to work past Bazalgette’s sewers, above which the buses are not running, on streets built on Victorian civic ambition, in a city currently holding meetings about its own decline. Bohiney has the national perspective. I have the local one. The pigeons on my windowsill have the best one. They never expected the buses to run and are never disappointed.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/managing-britains-decline/

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