“Underground Manchester” at the Greater Manchester Museum of Science and Industry

Abstract

Exhibit Reviews “UNDERGROUND MANCHESTER” AT THE GREATER MANCHESTER MUSEUM OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY CHRISTOPHER HAMLIN “Underground Manchester” is a new permanent exhibition in the rapidly expanding Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. Its subject is the water and sewerage of Manchester and, more broadly, the history and culture of modern public health engineering. Developed by a team led by Alan Wilson, with designers Deborah Conibear and Nadine Bell and model maker Colin Buckman, the exhibit opened in spring 1988, financed by the museum and North West Water, the regional water utility. “Underground Manchester” is truly underground. One enters by descending into the cavernous brick warehouses beneath the Liver­ pool Road Station, the eastern terminus of George Stephenson’s pioneering Liverpool & Manchester Railway, and the entire exhibit is housed in a winding tunnel beneath the station. The visitor’s first impression is aural: before there is anything to be seen but a descending staircase, one hears the drone of an Anglican funeral service interspersed with what 19th-century doctors would have called a “productive cough.” Turning a corner at the bottom, one faces a diorama: a child’s funeral in 19th-century Manchester. It brings one face-to-face with the problem that is the exhibit’s focus: the unhealthy environment of the rapidly growing industrial city, and the corre­ sponding magnitude of the technical achievements that have so greatly diminished the effect of what Victorian sanitarians called “the filth diseases.” The coughing fades as one begins a chronological journey through the history of sanitary engineering, beginning with the water-carriage waste disposal systems of a Roman military camp and an Augustinian abbey. Later sections take up Manchester’s early attempts to provide Dr. Hamlin teaches in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame. His article on “William Dibdin and the Idea of Biological Sewage Treatment” appeared in Technology and Culture 29 (April 1988): 189-218.© 1991 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X791/3201-0007$01.00 97 98 Christopher Hamlin itself with water, from the ill-fated Stone Pipe Company of the early 19th century to the highly controversial mid-century acquisition of Thirlmere, in the English Lake District, as one of the city’s principal sources of water. There are also sections devoted to a host of connected issues: a disastrous flood of the Irwell valley, the city’s problems with the cost-cutting contractors who built many of its sewers, and its role in the development of biological sewage-treatment processes. About two-thirds of the way through one comes to the high point, a walk through a 10-meter stretch of a main brick sewer (fig. 1). It is ill lit; roots hang from the ceiling; a rat leers out from one of the connecting tunnels; piles of stagnant filth cover the floor of another. There is the distant sound of slowly flowing sewage; indeed, there is everything but a sewage smell. One’s feet feel damp; it is hard to stifle a shiver. From the sewer one enters a reconstruction of the back garden of one of the turn-of-the-century, working-class terraced houses of a type that still dominates in northern England mill towns—the toilet in a closet in the corner of the garden, a tiny line for hanging out the dingy, smoke-infiltrated washing—and again the reality of urban sanitation in an earlier age is brought home. This introduces the main section of artifacts. Housed in what would have been their natural surroundings are a few of the ingenious schemes for the sanitary collection and removal of wastes that 19th-century sanitary reformers developed to outwit what they saw as the tendency of the poor to be defiantly dirty. Most fascinating—for children of all ages—is the self-flushing Tipper toilet (fig. 2), a few of which are still in use in northwestern England. A cistern suspended slightly off balance is filled by a slow drip—in actual use it might have received the gray water from the household—so that when a certain level is reached the entire cistern will tilt and flush the pan, its own...