At Home

I recently read Bill Bryson's latest book At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Bryson currently lives in a former Church of England rectory built in the middle 1800's. Going room by room through the house, he writes about the history of each type of room. Starting with pre-historic dwellings in Great Britain, he covers a lot of ground. His treatment is rather episodic, and sometimes he stretches to connect the history he wants to tell with the room he is relating it to. He briefly covers many topics, but his stories are always interesting, and often very entertaining.

This book reminded my of Witold Rybczynski 1987 book Home: A Short History of an Idea. Rather than going room by room, Rybczynski gives a chronological history of the home. Each of his chapters begins with a painting of a home from a specific time period, and then he discusses how the painting relates to changes in the concept of what constituted a home during that time period. This is the first book that I every read by Rybczynski, but he has since become one of my favorite writers. I have read many of his other books, and seen him speak twice. I would recommend anything that he has written.

Going back to Bryson's book, one of the episodes that he relates is the creation of the London sewers. I was already familiar with this from Stephen Halliday's book The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis. In short, following the rise of the flush toilet in the early 1800's, the Thames River became on massive cesspool. The smell became so overwhelming that the Parliament had to be shut down. Joseph Bazalgette took on the task of creating a sewer system that would remove all the waste from London. In the process, he created the embankments that currently line the Thames through London, and built one of the technological wonders off the 19th Century. A century and a half later, the sewer Bazalgette build is still the backbone of the system London uses to dispose of sewage. All of this as a way of introducing this video which is a modern day descent into the sewer Bazalgette build. I am including the link to this video because, knowing the history, I thought it was interesting. That being said, it is very gross. So if you are squeamish you might want to skip it. On the other hand, this may be the only place you will ever see a discussion of affluent effluent.

Below the waste line: Inside London's sewer system