16. Children would bathe in – and even drink – from the same filthy streams that were used as slum sewers.
In 1849, the journalist Henry Mayhew paid a visit to one London slum. His subsequent report, In a Visit to the Cholera District of Bermondsey, shocked his readers. Above all, his description of the filthy conditions the ‘wretched people’ of the slum had to endure on a daily basis made many angry – even if nothing was done about it. Mayhew noted that a single open sewer ran through the main street of the slum. Into this, occupants emptied buckets of waste. Indeed, he noted, “we heard bucket after bucket of filth splash into it”.
More shocking still, Mayhew reported that children not only bathed in the same sewer water, but that he witnessed some people taking water out of it. According to the journalist, the slum’s inhabitants would fill pails with water from the sewer. They would leave these to stand for several days. They would then be able to skim “solid particles of filth, pollution and disease” from the top of the buckets and drink the ‘clean’ water that remained. Any water that was leftover was used for bathing.