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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