Working with the media: a guide for scientists and engineers

Last summer I decided to have a change instead of a holiday. It was just as good. Instead of the beach I went to Londonist, as part of the British Science Association's Media Fellowship Scheme. They let me pretend to be a journalist. I also skived around the media centre at the British Science Festival in Bradford in September. I learned a few lessons about the media and what engineers and scientists can do to improve their relationship to it.

Answer your email

Most people get a lot of email. Most of it is junk. An email from a journalist is not junk. If you see one in your inbox, reply promptly.

Unless you have a very good reason, your reply should be 'thanks for getting in touch, I'd be happy to talk, please give me a call'. If you do have a good reason you should reply 'thanks for getting in touch, I am sorry I can't help, please contact our media office who may know of someone who can'.

That sentence took me 16 seconds to type. We are all very busy. We can all spare 16 seconds.

Good reasons for not speaking with journalists

There aren't many. Scientists and engineers spend a lot of time congratulating ourselves about how important our work is. We moan that the public doesn't understand or appreciate us. Those of us in universities spend a lot of tax payers' money. When someone from the media needs our help to explain a complex topic or to find out what we are doing with all that money, our default position should therefore be to say yes.

A good reason to decline is that you physically can't respond before their deadline. This is not 'talking to journalists isn't going to help with my next promotion or grant application so I don't want to waste my precious time'. This is 'I am lecturing all day, my baby has a fever, and my partner is in prison'. For a feature article or a documentary the journalist might be prepared to wait until your baby is healthy, your partner's legal troubles have been resolved, and you have a break from teaching. For a news story they'll need a quick response, so spend that 16 seconds and say no.  

A very good reason not to speak with a journalist is that their query is truly outside your area of expertise. Every field has its blabber mouth professor who spouts theories based more on insights from their wine collection than their research. You don't want to be a blabber mouth.

Journalists don't want blabber mouths either, but sometimes those are the only people who will speak to them. Before you turn down an enquiry it is worth checking what they want.

What journalists want

Journalists might be looking for an alternative view on a story that has been picked up through the news system of press releases and conferences. Good journalists will always want a second opinion. You might be asked to comment on the work of a colleague. Think of this as public peer review.

If the work is truly ground breaking and flawless, say so. If you think their work is good, but overlooks an important issue, this is a chance to demonstrate the complexity of science. If the work is rubbish, think carefully about your answer. You probably don't want to get caught in a public slapfest, but you also don't want bad science getting a free ride because no good scientist was prepared to speak up.   

Sometimes journalists are after a simple explanation of a general scientific or technical concept - closer to a talk you might give at a schools careers fair than your latest Transactions of Arcane Scientific Microdiscipline paper. Explaining basic science and engineering to journalists is a worthy public service.

Occasionally science and engineering expertise is needed to respond to a news event, like an earthquake or plane crash. You may be the expert the media are looking for. This is when your friendly local press officer comes in handy. They can filter media enquiries for you. They can give you advice on how things work, what the journalists are looking for and what pitfalls to avoid. They might also provide some training in advance, so that you are ready when events call upon you.

A journalist might just be looking for a fun story to inform and entertain their audience. My most successful article for Londonist was about the impact of the 24 hour tube on tube mice - High Science. I love tube mice. The 24 hour tube had been a big story in London (strikes). Prof. Bill Wisden and colleagues from Imperial College had just published a paper on the brain chemistry of sleep deprivation. Brain chemistry isn't the kind of thing Londonist usually covers, but anything to do with the tube is. Bill was incredibly generous in speaking with me about tube mice and how they might compare with their gentile cousins in their lab at Imperial. I managed to squeeze some science in, and the article played well with Londonist readers.

Be like Bill. Science doesn't have to be serious all the time. If you want science and engineering to be meaningful for people who think it is dull (most people?) then you might need to be playful.

Don't be a snob

Secretly, a little part of many of us wants to be the dazzling expert in the newspaper we read or the TV and radio shows we watch and listen to. That is, most academics want to be in The Guardian, The Times and on the BBC. We want to talk to 'people like us'.

The middle classes need good science. There is nothing wrong with speaking to the good people who work for high minded news outlets. A problem arises if those are the only journalists that good scientists and engineers engage with.

185,000 people read The Guardian. 1.9 million read The Sun. You might despise its politics and editorial policies, but The Sun is what people read.

A journalist from The Sun will have a particular set of priorities and pressures in coming up with a story that will make it into the next edition. Nonetheless, for the most part they want to report good science. Take a chance. Work with them. They aren't monsters (mostly) and their readers probably need to be informed about science and engineering more than 'people like us'.

This is a lesson I first learned from Dan, a writer for FHM magazine, and I wrote about it at the time.

The media machine

At some point in your career your work might become a news story. Someone might write a press release about it. This could be a client, your employer, your professional body, your funding agency or the journal where your work is published. For really big stories - a space mission, a new species of hominin, a new cancer treatment - this will be highly orchestrated. For smaller stories this might just be a press officer hoping it gets picked up for a bit of publicity.

When you are in the midst of a news story things can happen very quickly. Beforehand you should have plenty of time to prepare. Spend time with your press officers. Get any training you need. Don't be caught out at the last minute, flumoxed by a question you didn't anticipate, unable to clearly explain what the story is.

Once the press release is out, the press conference is over and you've given all the interviews, there is not much you can do. In some cases it is OK to ask a journalist to send you any quotes they plan to use. It is never reasonable to expect to approve their final copy.

The story might not come out exactly as you would have liked. Some scientists have been treated very badly by the media, but this is rare. Mostly scientists and engineers are worried that journalists have sensationalised their work, or haven't reported the nuances of their findings. Some science actually is sensational and should be reported as such. Sometimes the nuances just aren't important.

Most scientists and engineers write stuff that few people will ever read. When a journalist takes on our story to get our work out into the world we should expect that a few of the finer details will be lost in translation.

The truth

Engineers, scientists and journalists are ultimately after the same thing - the truth. It sounds old fashioned and high minded, but that is our basic, shared purpose. Journalists need to sell newspapers, click-bait readers, keep people watching or listening. Parts of the media are cynical, and sales trump truth. Science and engineering can be cynical too, when grant income, self-promotion, journal impact and profit trump rigour. We all have different pressures and priorities, but ultimately our work is important to underpin a well informed democracy, an innovative economy and a fair society.

It is easy to focus on the superstar scientists and engineers who are on our airwaves every day. We might adore them or loathe them. The 'science communicator' has an important role and can be an exciting career path. Most of us, however, are happy beavering away doing the science and engineering. This does not mean we can leave the media work to the people with the shiny hair.

Working with the media can feel risky for scientists and engineers, but it can also be rewarding. Sharing our love for our work, helping people to understand the complex world we live in, and showing them why it is worth investing in science and engineering are all good reasons to spend 16 seconds saying yes to a journalist.

Wearing clothes, doing work.

This week some parts of the internet have been getting hot and sweaty about what academics wear to work, particularly the difference between what men and women academics wear. Given everything else going on in the world, in universities and in gender relations this seems absurd, and it is a great personal disappointent that I have failed in my attempts to simply ignore it. By way of recap - in his regular column in the Guardian Jonathan Wolff wrote about why male academics are so scruffy, and then Francesca Stavrakopolou responded in a blog post that he had reinsated a 'masculine' dress code as normal for academics, which undermines women in universities.

My inability to simply ignore this ridiculousness stems from two personal issues. Firstly, I spend more time that I would like to worrying about what to wear to work and I think this has something to do with my gender. Secondly, I think that my worries about what I wear to work are also partly attributable to the constant reinscribing of 'masculinity' and 'feminity' in discussion about clothing and fashion. Some days I worry that my shirt is too tight or my skirt is too short and I might transgress the norms of feminine modesty. Other days I worry that my suit is too square and my shoes are too flat and I might transgress the boundaries into masculinity, abandoning the sisterhood and reinforcing the patriarchy. This is nuts.

I was happiest in my work clothes in the first job I had after leaving university. I worked at an aluminium smelter. We were supplied with a uniform. Thanks to carcinogenic raw materials that contributed to the dirt on our clothes, my uniform was even laundered for me. Oh how I long for those lost days when I could cycle in to work in my shorts, stop in at the changing room, pull on a uniform and get to work! The uniform was a light blue, long sleeved shirt and a dark blue pair of trousers, 100% cotton, minimal buttons. Was this masculine dress? No. It was safety clothing, appropriate for the working environment. In fact the reason why I was so happy when I was first allocated my uniform was that I was given women's trousers, rather than the standard cut men's work trousers that I had been forced to wear as a student. This was truly androgynous clothing, which someone else washed and ironed, in blue, which matches my eyes. Heavenly.

Ever since I abandoned that Nirvana of androgyny I have struggled to figure out what to wear to work. I don't want to dress like a man but I also don't want to be judged by my skirt length or breast size. From time to time I think I have found a personal dress code that I can consistently settle in to. Then the seasons change, fashion changes, and my body changes, and I have flipped again into a different zone of my wardrobe. In summer and when I am feeling fat, I tend to wear dresses, usually with leggings to cover up my saggy knees and bulging veins. In the winter and when I am feeling slimmer, I revert to trousers, shirt and jackets. My dress at work is often determined by what events I have planned in the evening - if I am giving a funny talk about sewers in a pub I wear jeans and a t-shirt, if it's a serious dinner with potential funders I opt for a smart dress and matching jacket, for meetings with community groups my dress is somewhere in between. I envy those men and women who have a consistent pattern of dress, and I enjoy having the choice, but mostly I wish I could just get dressed every day without having to worry about how I am constructing or transgressing socially determined gender norms.

Here's the thing. I have had enough of people scrutinising my body, including my clothing, for signs of my sexuality and gender when I am just trying to do my job. I am equally annoyed by claims that women who wear trousers or cut their hair are too 'masculine' as I am by ideas that women should completely hide their bodies at work. I have written before about trying to see the funny side of people who mistake me for a man because I have short hair and wear sneakers. Every time someone ascribes particular items of clothing or styles of hair as 'masculine' or 'feminine' I feel myself further torn between social norms, none of which have ever been kind to me.

Last week I went to buy hair product. The kind of product used to style short hair. In the eighties we used gel. In the nineties it was wax. Now its goop. I went to the 'hair products' aisle of the pharmacy, where I had last bought my 'goop' and couldn't find any. Hair shampoo, hair conditioner, hair mousse, hair spray, hair defrizzing lotion, hair colouring... no hair goop. Nothing for short hair. Then I realised I was in the 'ladies' hair products section. Off I went to the aisle with the blue razors and aftershave lotion and bought hair product in a grey container labelled 'for men'. The good news is that it works perfectly well in my womanly hair. The bad news is anyone who snoops around in my bathroom will now think I have a secret boyfriend. The product is actually for 'hair', but since every single bodily function apparently must be ascribed a gender, I am forced to buy 'men's' toiletries.

I wear size 41 shoes. That's a ladies nine and a half in Australia and a seven or eight in the UK. I am just on the right side of the limit to ladies shoes sizing, except when it comes to sneakers. Like 'hair product', sneakers were originally conceived as androgynous. Sneakers were for doing sports or casual dress. Now, we have men's and women's sneakers. Women's sneakers only go up to about a size 40, just too small for me. Sneaker manufacturers rightly judge that the number of sales they will lose from size 41 women who refuse to buy a 'man's' sneaker is small enough for them to risk compared to the cost of producing a whole extra size for a relatively small group of consumers. This is sensible. Sneakers are after all androgynous. Except to sneaker sales people. These people are trained to sell one line of sneakers to women, and one to men. When I walk into the sneaker shop and start browsing on the 'men's' wall, I am politely directed to the 'women's' area. When I protest that my feet are too big for women's sneakers, the sale assistant usually ignores me, and I submit, entertaining the possibility sneaker manufacturers have changed their strategy and started making bigger 'women's' sneakers since the last time I went through this gender-bending ritual. The sales person then brings me several of their biggest pairs of women's sneakers. I try them on, and we all agree that they are about half a size too small and I am allowed to start trying on the 'men's' sneakers. I have been wearing 'men's' sneakers for all of my adult life (when I was a kid, I think they were just 'sneakers'). Does this make me 'masculine'? No. It does not. It makes me a person who wears sneakers.

In case you had any doubt, my worries about what to wear to work are bordering on pathological. A few months ago I got dressed for work, looked in the mirror and thought 'oh God, I look like Mark Miodownik', a colleague at UCL Engineering (also on the tellie). I look like a man, but does that necessarily mean that I look 'masculine', and does it matter? Mark does not strike me as someone who is uncomfortable with his gender, and maybe his style is just a little bit 'feminine'? The Miodownik dress code is something like this - sneakers (neutral), jeans (neutral), flowery shirt (girly), jacket (blokey). Jeans and sneakers first entered mass fashion in the sixties and seventies, as androgynous items of clothing worn by women's libbers and sexual revolutionaries. Mark, like many men these days, wears shirts that my Dad would think too girly. Men's fashion might not have caught up to Grayson Perry yet, but it has become more feminine. And the suit jacket gives an air of respectability, which might have been masculine once, but that doesn't mean it is only accessible to those who are male. On balance, I think it a fairly gender neutral style of dress, one that works in the university workplace.

Most days I wear my 'men's' hair product to work. Some days I wear dresses and shoes with heels, other days I wear my 'men's' sneakers. When I put my sneakers together with a pair of jeans, a shirt and suit jacket according to some I am falling unwittingly into the 'masculine' uniform of academic work. I am not. I am a person wearing clothes, to do work.

How to fix a leaking toilet with a handful of pennies and a tablespoon of sunflower oil: confessions of a tinkerer

Last year my landlord very nicely paid for my bathroom to be completely renovated while I was away on holiday. The plan was for me to come home to a bright new bathroom, but it took several weeks of plumbing visitations after my return for everything to work properly, more or less. One minor issue that was never quite resolved was the tendency for the toilet flush mechanism to get stuck open. It was one of those problems that didn't occur if you knew how to flush 'just right', but invariably appeared when uninitiated visitors flushed any-old-how. My guests should not require a special induction to flush the loo, but it was relatively simple for me to 'unstick' each time and didn't seem worth the effort to call a plumber. Plumbers can be as unreliable as modern flush mechanisms. Eventually even a 'just right' flush stuck open and the valve became more difficult to 'unstick'. By yesterday morning the toilet was leaking constantly. Something had to be done.

This is the point at which I should have called the plumber, but that would require looking up the phone number, rearranging my diary to work from home for a day, and a few more days of a leaking toilet. The toilet was right there in front of me, leaking, tempting me to tinker. Why spend five minutes making a phone call and booking a day at home when I had a whole bank holiday ahead of me to spend pulling my toilet apart?

The flushing mechanism is very modern. It consists of a cylinder with a valve on the bottom that is pulled up by a cable, similar to a brake cable on a bike, when the flush handle is pressed. It should be released when the flush handle returns to the normal position, but the valve was sticking in the up position. The flush mechanism consists of two 'black-boxes' - the cylinder with the sticking valve and the housing for the cable attached to the back of the flush handle. Normal people avoid opening their toilet cisterns. Smart people avoid opening 'black-box' mechanisms inside their toilets. Sensible people spend bank holidays sunning themselves in the park. 

The toilet was still leaking. I had removed the cylinder, I had a little 'black-box' in my wet hands. A voice inside my head said 'put the toilet back together, call the plumber', but my eye had spied the means to lifting the lid off the cylinder and my hand was reaching for the nail scissors and tweezers on the shelf above the sink. The voice inside was discussing options for plumbers, while my fingers discovered how the cable mechanism slotted into the valve mechanism. My fingers unslotted the mechanism, and then played with the molded bits of plastic, trying to figure out how it worked and why it wasn't. The voice inside let out a little squeak, but my fingers calmly reminded it that this was just another puzzle, like the wooden cubes or metal rings on the kitchen shelf at Grandma's house. Nothing had snapped or been lost, it would all come back together.         

If you are a parent, grandparent, teacher or otherwise concerned about the future of one or more children please make sure that they are never exposed to those darstedly little puzzles. They should come with a warning label 'keep out of reach of children, may cause brain damage'. They lead to irreversible neural re-structuring that causes vast overestimation of spatial and physical problem solving abilities. If one of those puzzles ever defeated me as a child there was always the option of putting the pieces in a plastic bag and waiting for Grandma to come over and show me how it was done. The stakes were somewhat higher with the tiny plastic pieces of my toilet. Grandma lives in Geraldton, my toilet is in London, and at 93 she is possibly past her puzzle-solving prime. 

I tinkered with the parts, and managed to put them back together, hoping that this reboot would be enough to solve the problem. The valve still stuck. The second black-box tempted me. My inner voice of reason was now whimpering with fear. Cable mechanisms have gone horribly wrong in my hands, leaving me stranded on the pavement with an upturned, brake-less bike halfway to work. My hands marched confidently on, now reaching into the cupboard for the spanners and screw drivers. If nothing broke and nothing was lost and if I moved slowly, everything would be OK. I opened the box, and the inner mechanism proved remarkably simple. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that lubricating the cable would probably help, but I didn't have any mineral oil or lubricating spray. The voice of reason could barely say 'walk down the street and buy a can of WD40', before my hands had reached for the sunflower oil from the kitchen. The cable was drizzled with edible oil and reinstated, and both black boxes returned to their rightful places in the cistern. The cable moved more freely, but the valve still stuck.

I picked up my purse and took out four pennies. I put the pennies on the top of the valve shaft to provide extra weight to help it drop down once the cable was released. The valve still stuck. I then found my jar of foreign coins and picked out the US pennies, Mexican pesos, Euro cents and Danish half-Kroner. I piled a few of them on top of the shaft, and placed some of them under the cylinder on top of the valve itself. 

It worked. 

I turned the water back on, filled the cistern and flushed, and flushed again, any-old-how. Every time the valve opened and closed on demand. There was a sunflower oil slick in the toilet and a rattle like a pocket full of change, but the cistern no longer leaked. I put the lid back on, packed the tools away and my sensible legs took me out jogging before my tinkering fingers could deny me any more sunshine.

Tinkering feels like a mental disorder. It is state of mental and physical obsession, a compulsion. Engineers are often characterised as tinkerers. The classic boy-geek engineer tinkers with TVs, cars or computers. I have never taken a TV apart nor deliberately looked inside a computer. I thought I was a different kind of engineer, interested more in the big picture than the nerdy mechanical detail. I thought I was special. I am not. It pains me deeply to come out as a tinkerer. Worse yet, I am a tinkerer of toilets.

Of course this is not the first time I have tinkered with a toilet. I have a secret history of opening cisterns and fiddling with valves. I usually take care not to tinker too long, lest people start to wonder what I am up to, but alone in the privacy of my bathroom my tinkering takes its own course. 

I know that tinkering is no longer something to be ashamed of. The 'maker' movement, including UCL's Institute of Making, positively celebrates this kind of behaviour, creating spaces for people to tinker together. Apparently there is honour in engaging directly and purposely with the material world around us. Matthew Crawford in his book 'Shop Class as Soulcraft' claims that working with our hands in this way is fundamental to our humanity. I should embrace my tinkering, be proud of it. 

So here I am. I am an engineer, and I tinker. I can no longer hide.      

Will the real imposter please stand up

Imposter Syndrome is the latest disorder of choice for those of us lucky enough not to have anything seriously wrong with us, but unlucky enough to be afflicted with a persistent sense of being out of our depth, standing on the outside looking in on all our competent and confident peers. It is a mild strain of inferiority complex. It is the feeling that we don't really deserve to be in the position we find ourselves, and one day those who know better will find us out and send us back to where we belong.

Everyone has Imposter Syndrome these days, particularly academics and particularly women. Sheryl Sandberg had a bout of it early in her career, Professor Stephen Curry recently outed himself as a sufferer on his blog, and Ruth Barcan wrote about it in the Times Higher Education magazine. The occasional speaker at our graduation ceremony last year called the women graduates out on it, saying they all looked more timid than the men crossing the stage (personally, I blame their shoes). Imposter Syndrome is a bit like thrush – it is an annoying discomfort that gets better or worse from time to time but never seems to properly go away, we all have it, we all know we all have it, but it still feels weird when an older woman stands up in academic dress and says it out loud.

The point of most of this sharing is to help us all to realise that even people who look successful and confident on the outside might be feeling just as uncertain as you are, particularly early in your career. If you have the same qualifications and experience as everyone else in the room, then you are no more faking it than they are. This problem can’t be necessarily be solved by more hard work, it just takes time and that magic ingredient ‘confidence’. As they say in AA, ‘fake it until you make it’.

Barcan’s THE article has a slightly different take. Her point is that that Imposter Syndrome is a more recent scourge of academia, brought on by unrealistic expectations from universities, students,  government and the public. We can’t all be ground breaking researchers, inspiring teachers, brilliant public speakers and social networkers, entrepreneurs, administrators and colleagues all of the time. But this is what the job demands, and so we pretend. We don’t have the time or energy to do anything as well as we would like to and we end up feeling like imposters. As Stephen Curry wrote in his blog, interdisciplinary research brings its own sense of inadequacy, always in between established points of knowledge, acutely aware of everything you don’t know. What this implies is that on some level, we actually are imposters. This is important in distinction from the version of the syndrome described by Sandberg and other boardroom feminists.

I have reached a point in my career where I am reasonably happy with my capabilities and I hope that I have a fairly balanced view of my limitations. I have been in academia long enough to know that I have as much right to be here as any of my colleagues. It was not always like this. For many years I was actually pretending. I was an imposter.

I am the first generation of my family to go to university and the only person in my extended family to have a PhD. My mother and grandmother had barely set foot on a university campus before they dropped me off for O-Week. At every stage of my career, from that very first day as a fresher right through my early years as an academic, I had to learn everything myself, from scratch. I am reasonably bright, and I learned quickly, but for much of that time I was one small step behind my colleagues from more academic families. When I was a kid hanging around listening to my Dad negotiate car deals, some of my colleagues were playing quietly down the back of the seminar room or doing their homework in proper, grownup libraries. I will bet my left foot that I could sell a car faster than most of them, but when it comes to knowing how to negotiate the nuances of academic life, they had a head start. They already knew a lot about how to be an academic, I was just pretending. But I learned. And so now, for the most part, I feel like I know what I am doing, and I have probably benefited from learning it all first hand.

There is a more dangerous strain of the syndrome that I now worry about. It is asymptomatic and often undiagnosed. This is the version of the illness that causes academics who are well recognised for their expertise in one specialist field start to pretend that they can speak or write knowledgably about others. I am highly susceptible to this. When my instinct says that I should decline an invitation to contribute to project or event on the basis of limited knowledge, it is tempting to tell myself that I am just suffering from Imposter Syndrome. Everyone is faking it, the devilish voice says, so I shouldn’t let my lack of confidence stop me from contributing and taking my 15 minutes at the podium. This is a very hard balance to strike, particularly when others seem willing to pretend to knowledge outside their narrow field. Interdisciplinary work means that, like Stephen Curry, I feel insecure in my own expertise most of the time, but this insecurity keeps researchers like us honest. It shows respect for colleagues in other fields of study and for the basic principles of academic work.

If you feel like an imposter, you probably are. If you are early in your career, keep working, keep growing older, and it should go away. If you are later in your career, stop, listen, and remember to show respect to your colleagues and the standards of knowledge we are paid to uphold. It is not necessarily a reason to hold back from contributing, but it can be a warning that you still have a lot to learn.

A democratic history of sewerage

Every culture has its mythologies and origin stories. These help us to frame our identities and provide a foundation from which to make sense of the uncertain world around us. Importantly, such stories usually tell us more about the present than the past. This is very different to the scholarly study of the past we call history, which requires painstaining research and detailed analysis*. The two are easily confused. What passes for 'engineering history' is more often 'engineering mythology'.

The story of Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the London sewers is one such touchstone, often deployed to support a particular view of the present, rather than to actually provide an explanation of the past. No better example can be found than this piece by John Kay in the FT. Kay's basic point is this - Balagette's far-sighted project to build London's sewer system would not have been possible today because of complicated project appraisal and planning procedures.

The project to build London's sewers was indeed a major engineering achievement, one of which my profession and city are rightly proud. This is one of the reasons why I teach the history of London's sewers to our second year students. However, the main learning outcome from this section of the course is that all major engineering projects happen in complex social, economic, ecological and political contexts. Taking a nineteenth century jewel of engineering and showing the messy details of political and technical negotiation runs precisely counter to the myths of engineering perpetuated in Kay's column.

The myth of London's sewers runs basically like this. There was a terrible environmental disaster. The politicians didn't know what to do. Our hero Sir Joseph Bazalgette stepped forward with the solution to the problem. The politicians gave him the money to implement his plans. The project succeeded, right up until the present day. The nineteenth century was the golden age of British engineering because politicians and activists did not stand in the way of progress. Engineers could solve all of today's problems if only the politicians, or more specifically the planning processes and environmental legislation, did not hold them up.

The history of London's sewers runs basically like this. London's population tripled in less than a century. The drainage and nightsoil systems that had been functioning reasonably effectively since the sixteenth century couldn't cope with the increased water and waste, leading to terrible environmental conditions with disastrous public health consequences. Until the 1840s the administration of sewers remained in the hands of decentralised vestries that had been formed hundreds of years earlier. Attempts to solve the sewer problem required institutional reform. Between 1848 and 1855 six separate 'Metropolitan Commissions of Sewers' were formed to try to come to an agreed solution. Engineers were involved in these commissions and presented an immense variety of solutions to the problem. There was much technical and political argument during this period, and the two often overlapped. In 1856 the Commissions were replaced with the Metropolitan Board of Works, a statutory body to solve the sewer problem. Joseph Bazalgette was appointed assistant surveyor to the Second Metropolitan Commission and worked his way up to being the inaugural Chief of the Metropolitan Board of Works. His original proposal as Chief Engineer drew on designs considered by the Commissions, and it was vetoed by Parliament on environmental and social grounds (discharge of sewage at Pimlico, concern about sewage flowing back into London on the incoming tide). Parliament was also concerned that Bazalgette had underestimated the cost of the project. The Great Stink and a change of government in 1858 led to reform of the bill governing the Metropolitan Board of Works, removing Parliamentary veto and providing Treasury guarantee of borrowing to finance the construction. Work started in 1859 on a modified proposal which did not discharge sewage into the Thames at Pimlico. The project was completed in 1888. During that time Bazalgette had to deal with a bricklayers strike, a sometimes hostile media, complex quality control systems and innovative contract management procedures.

If anything, the politics of sewers in London in the nineteenth century was more, not less, complicated than things are today (planning for the Thames Tideway 'supersewer' project has been remarkably smooth by comparison). Many of the consistent themes of British politics were present back then - centralised versus decentralised administration, expert led decisions versus democratic oversight and deliberation, managing the risks of government guarantee for major infrastructure investment in the capital, and the influence of strong personalities on debates and decisions.

The history of London's sewers shows us that democracy makes for better decisions about infrastructure. Bazalgette's sewers have served London well precisely because the options and plans were debated over many decades and because politicians and activists were present in the decision making, alongside the engineers. Let's all keep working together to make sure that democracy and good engineering are allowed to continue to deliver the infrastructure this city needs for centuries to come.
 
*I am not an historian. I have immense respect for those who are. For a full account of the history of the sewers and an insight into Bazalgette's life I recommend Stephen Halliday's book 'The Great Stink of London', published by Sutton Publishing in 1999.