Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 92, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 April 1913 — London With Lid off [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

London With Lid off

A Londoner goes to Italy tor a holiday, visits Rome, and comdk back brimming with information about the catacombs. One wonders if an Italian, visiting London, learns anything of its subterranean marvels, for certainly the Londoner himself remains woefully ignorant of. all the amazing systems of tubes, tunnels, drains, sewers, cellars and the like, which honeycomb the ground beneath his feet, and, compared with Rome’s catacombs, are%s a child’s toy to St. Paul’s cathedral. Take an instance in point, says the London Weekly Telegraph. For more than two years, from 1909 to the beginning of 1911, a considerable area of the Strand behind St. Mary’s church was inclosed by a gigantic hoarding. Literally millions of people must have passed and noticed that hoarding, but how many ever gave it a second thought? Yet if they had chosen to investigate they would have found that it inclosed an immense shaft leading down to one of London’s greatest drains—a huge, low culvert running all the way from Hammersmith to Bow, a distance of some twelve and a half miles, and costing more than three-quarters of a million to construct. Two Thousand Miles of Drains. -This drain, which is now completed, gives London a total of 352 miles, of main drains, which are linked up with a tremendous network of smaller drains having a length of over 2,000 miles. Their outfalls are at Barking and Crossness, where are immense pumping stations capable of dealing with some 15,000,000,000 gallons of sewage in the course of the 24 hours. In Paris one of the recognized sights of the city is its sewers, but who dreams of inspecting the far mem wonderful sewers of London, the winding serpents of a length almost sufficient to stretch from London to Edinburgh, and which guard the health of over six millions of people? They cost 355,000,000 to construct and 31,300,000 yearly to care for, yet the money, is well spent, for, since 1870, the death rate of London haß dropped from 24 to 14 per thousand. All day and all night, all the year round, work goes on ceaselessly in the wonderful subterranean world of the sewers. An army of sewer men in hugh thigh boots wade in the swiftly running fluid and work-in tha-close, hot air of the deep dug tunnels. Through these sewers now run what were once navigable rivers. The Fleet, for instance,, up which barges and pleasure galleys once made their cumbrous way, at present runs about four feet below the surface of Farrington street and New Bridge street. The tunnel through which the river flows is big enough for the passage of an omnibus, yet in wet weather its bore is not sufficiently large to carry off the storm water, as flooded basements in Tudor street and the neighboihood testify. When there are high tides in the Thames the ‘‘tidal flaps” at Blackfriars bridge are held back by pressure of water, and at such times they say that, were a five foot spike driven into the middle of New Bridge street, the pentup water of the Fleet would rush up in a jet as high as Ludgate Hill station. Queer Finds in Sewers. Strange things are found by the men who delve in the depths, digging London’s sewers. In making the Bucklersbury sewer the excavation ran suddenly into a large natural cave, though how formed it is impossible to tell. As for relics of past days, the Loudon county council has a collection of these and a very interesting little museum it forms. Here are tusks of the mammoth, the gigantic long haired elephant that once roamed the great marshes where London now stands. Here are bones of early British cattle and a perfect skull of a prehistoric Londoner who shot game with flint tipped arrows in the days when Stonehenge was the religious center of England. Some wonderful shells of giant and long extinct nautilius, so perfect that their sheen is still preserved, prove that the site of London was once covered with a warm but shallow tea. As for pottery of All ages, there Is any amount of it, and many other relics as well, the whole giving a sort of in kind of London from the earliest ages up to today. But the sewers, wonderful as they are, constitute only a very small portion of underground London. The sub-

ways are probably even less familiar to the man who walks the streets. Everyone knows Lolbora viaduct, but how many are aware that through the irtm gates just beneath the bridge is the main entrance to that part of subterranean London which is nearest to the surface. So near to the surface are these subways that their silence is disturbed by a low murmurous hum which is the roar of traffic a few feet overhead. . Through the subways run immense pipes. The biggest are the mams of the water board. Therev are others which belong to the hydarulic power supply, working lifts in thousands of tall buildings. Gas pipes, too, are everywhere. Festoons of telegraph wires belong to the general post office; others, carefully insulated, to the electric lighting companies. Overhead are the tubes through which, by air pressure, written telegrams are blown from the district offices to St. Martin le Grand. These underground streets are well paved and lighted with gas, and they bear exactly the same names as their counterparts overhead.

TOWER BRIDGE .LONDON