Workers Ventured Deep Beneath London’s Streets To Battle A Foul Mass The Weight Of A Cottage

For weeks, the team worked in horrific surroundings under the ground, struggling with cramped spaces and terrible smells. But eventually, they began to win the war. So what was this disgusting monster lurking beneath London? And how did it make its way into the sewers of this sprawling city?

After all, London has a rich and varied history, with plenty of sinister secrets lurking in the depths of its past. Was one of these finally uncovered when engineers from Thames Water ventured into the network of tunnels beneath the capital’s streets? Or was there another grim relic lodged in the city’s underbelly?

The history of London’s sewer system stretches back to the middle of the 1800s, when cholera outbreaks were devastating the city. After thousands had died, the link between the infection and poor urban hygiene became difficult to ignore. And so, an engineer named Joseph Bazalgette was commissioned to design a solution.

What Bazalgette came up with in the end was certainly impressive. Come the mid-1860s vast swathes of the city had been connected to a sprawling system of underground sewers, conducting waste through tunnels towards processing facilities. And as time has passed, the network’s grown even more extensive and complex.

Today, London’s sewers stretch for well over 1,000 miles beneath the city. This remarkable feat of engineering isn’t without its problems, though. According to Wired magazine, the system was designed with just 2.5 million people in mind – a figure that must have seemed reasonable during Bazalgette’s time. But, of course, the population of the city has since soared.

In the 21st century, some nine million people currently use London’s sewer system on a daily basis – and it’s starting to show the strain. As a result, those in charge of maintaining the network are facing more challenges than ever before. But nothing could’ve prepared them for the monster that was recently discovered beneath an East London street.

So what exactly was it that an intrepid band of Thames Water engineers discovered when they ventured below the surface in early 2021? Just as the city above boasts plenty of dark legends, the world beneath London’s no different. In fact, many believe that all manner of strange and sinister things are lurking down in the inky blackness of the sewers.

Take, for example, the stories of escaped creatures thriving in the warm, damp conditions of the tunnels beneath London. Of course, many are familiar with the urban legends claiming that alligators are in the sewers of New York. So could these reptiles have also taken hold in another major city on the other side of the Atlantic?

Well, for the moment at least, there don’t seem to be any credible reports of reptiles residing under London’s streets. But according to a 1999 article for the debunking website Snopes, the sewers may once have been home to a colony of wild pigs. In fact, this bizarre story may even have inspired the alligator legends that continue to surround New York.

The article claims that this tale dates back to at least 1851 and speaks of a pregnant hog that found her way into the sewers under the Hampstead Heath area of London. There, the creature gave birth, raising her young on the detritus that made its way into the tunnels. On the back of this gruesome diet, the story goes, these creatures multiplied until an entire population of feral pigs was thriving beneath the city.

Of course, this story has little in the way of evidence to support it – and there certainly hadn’t been any modern reports of pig sightings under London’s streets. But could a relative of these legendary beasts perhaps have survived into the present day? Or was a different sort of monster waiting to greet the plucky engineers?

After all, sewer workers around the world have been known to locate some unexpected creatures crawling and slithering through the dark, wet tunnels. In 2009, for example, staff at Scottish Water retrieved a live Mexican desert kingsnake from underneath a treatment facility in Dunfermline in the county of Fife.

The beast that was recently spotted beneath London, though, was notable for its massive size – far larger than that of any known sewer-dwelling creature. So what was it? Well, it was definitely something that Thames Water workers struggled to deal with, even though they’d encountered similar monsters before.

In fact, dealing with London’s more gruesome secrets is just part of the job for the some of the thousands of people employed by Thames Water. Often working deep underground, these men and women are responsible for managing the waste system of one of Europe’s most populous cities. And that means some nasty surprises are occasionally lying in wait.

One of the most gruesome surprises of all, it seems, came in early 2021, when a group of Thames Water engineers encountered something blocking a London sewer. Situated beneath Yabsley Street in East London, this particular stretch of tunnel runs below the business district known as Canary Wharf. But its cramped, brick-built archways are a world away from the glinting skyscrapers above.

It was here, in this hidden, dark underbelly beneath London, that the team encountered their ultimate foe: a vast fatberg the size of a cottage. For those unfamiliar with the term, these disgusting objects are known to form in the sewers of the world’s major cities, where they typically wreak havoc until they’re dislodged.

So what exactly is a fatberg – and what causes these monsters to form? Simply put, they’re masses that form when you flush away objects that you shouldn’t. Remember all those notices asking you not to dispose of wet wipes or sanitary products in the plumbing system? This is why they exist.

Essentially, all those non-biodegradable products linger in the sewage system, where they combine with grease and cooking oil to form a solid mass. And in some cases, these clusters can grow to a terrifying size, causing blockages in the tunnels that we rely on to channel our waste.

Back in 2017, for example, a fatberg that Evening Standard reporters dubbed the “biggest ever” was unearthed in a sewer beneath the London district of Whitechapel. Estimated at a staggering 820 feet in length, the stomach-churning mass is believed to have weighed the equivalent of 11 large buses. And the work to destroy it lasted for almost a month.

“This fatberg is up there with the biggest we’ve ever seen,” Thames Water’s Matt Rimmer told the Standard in 2017. “It’s a total monster and taking a lot of manpower and machinery to remove as it’s set hard. It’s basically like trying to break up concrete.” Eventually, though, a team of eight workers were able to break up the mass and transport it to a recycling facility.

Later, in January 2019 another fatberg emerged to terrorize England’s beleaguered water companies. But this time, it was located some 200 miles southwest of London, in the pretty coastal town of Sidmouth. Known for its refined atmosphere and Georgian architecture, it’s perhaps one of the last places where you might expect a gruesome mass such as this to rear its head.

But workers from South West Water were horrified to discover a 200-foot fatberg lodged in the sewers beneath Sidmouth. According to reports, it was the biggest such object ever seen in the region – proving that the phenomenon isn’t restricted to cities alone. At the time, experts believed that two months’ work would be required to eliminate it.

The following year, back in London, another fatberg was unearthed – this time from under the upmarket district of Belgravia. As it turns out, even the upper echelons of British society aren’t exempt from plumbing issues. And in October 2020 Thames Water announced that it had won another battle against a fat-and-waste monster deep below the city.

This time, the fatberg was reported to have weighed around 11 tons and stretched over almost 100 feet in length. According to the BBC, workers were also forced to make their way past some 1,000 feet of grease and muck before they could tackle the disgusting obstruction. And that was just the beginning of their ordeal.

Eventually, Thames Water engineers were able to break apart the fatberg, which the company claimed weighed “more than an African elephant.” Speaking to the BBC in 2020, Rimmer explained, “[The mass had] set hard and had to be destroyed to get the sewer flowing well again.” Moving forwards, he urged the public to pay more attention to what they’re disposing of into the city’s waste systems.

Clearly, though, it’s a battle that’ll continue for some time yet. Just four months after the Belgravia horror was discovered, Thames Water workers found another epic fatberg lurking beneath the streets of Canary Wharf. According to reports, it weighed as much as a “small bungalow” – a type of single-story house common in the U.K.

According to Thames Water, the fatberg posed a risk to buildings in the Canary Wharf area, where the blockage could’ve caused sewage to overflow into local residences. Thankfully, engineers were able to tackle the mass before such an incident could take place. The job, though, was a fairly grim one.

Over the course of two weeks, a team of Thames Water engineers battled against the fatberg blocking the sewers beneath East London. But, surprisingly, they weren’t working with any specialist equipment. Instead, they just had a selection of hand-held implements and strong water-jets to tackle the festering mass.

According to the Standard, the fatberg smelled like “composting festival toilets and rotting meat” – hardly an appealing prospect. Yet despite the unpleasant conditions, workers had little choice but to continue until the job was done. Speaking to the London newspaper, Rimmer outlined the challenges that faced his dedicated team.

“This was a huge, disgusting fatberg that took a great deal of brute force and teamwork to clear,” Rimmer explained. “Our brilliant engineers were able to clear the huge blockage before it caused serious problems, negotiating tricky and cramped working conditions along the way.” Eventually, then, they were successful – but it won’t be the last time that they’re called upon to deal with such a monster.

According to the Standard, Thames Water alone removes more than 70,000 blockages from sewers in the London area every year. Many of these, the utility company claims, are caused by fatbergs. But despite this, people continue to dispose of the wrong things in their household plumbing.

Today, the problem’s so bad that Thames Water has launched an initiative, with the tagline “bin it – don’t block it,” to raise awareness about fatbergs. And as part of that, officials have been educating the public about what they should put down their toilet – and what should be thrown in the bin.

“We’d ask everyone to help fight the fatberg by only flushing the 3Ps – pee, poop and paper – as well as disposing of fat and oils in the bin, not the sink,” Rimmer told the Standard. Along with wet wipes and sanitary products, cotton buds, nappies and other non-biodegradable objects all contribute to the problem.

In fact, the Canary Wharf fatberg isn’t even the most recent of these unappealing masses to be discovered in the U.K. Three months later, in May 2021 one weighing a staggering 330 tons was spotted in a sewer in Birmingham, some 120 miles to the northwest. Though it was just three feet tall, experts estimate that it stretched to more than 3,000 feet in length.

Again, officials were quick to point out where the blame for these fatbergs lies. Speaking to the BBC in May 2021, Severn Trent Water’s Scott Burgin explained, “This giant mass is the result of everyone occasionally washing and flushing the wrong things down the drains and not realizing the impact that it is having.”

In this case, Severn Trent had installed devices in the ground to detect the presence of fatbergs, which is how it became aware of this particular mass. Like Thames Water, the company’s asked to deal with thousands of sewer obstructions every year – the majority of which are the result of human error. 

Back in London, Thames Water officials estimate that cleaning up fatbergs costs in the region of £1 million every month. Speaking to the Standard in 2017, Rimmer asked the public to be careful when they dispose of their waste. “The sewers are not an abyss for household rubbish,” he added.

If the Canary Wharf fatberg is anything to go by, though, these lessons haven’t been learned. So what will it take to transform attitudes and stop the harmful practices that cause these monsters to form? For those at Thames Water and other sewer companies around the world, it’s a grim waiting game.