How we built the £4.5 billion supersewer that will save the Thames

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Saturday May 18 2024

In a dark hole 66 metres under the streets of east London, Roger Bailey is trying to explain the problem. "Imagine Wembley Stadium as an enormous toilet bowl," he says. "The whole thing filled to the brim. That's what four million tonnes of sewage looks like. Well, in a typical year London chucks ten of those straight into the Thames."

We are standing in the solution to that problem. The Thames Tideway tunnel, or the supersewer to its friends, is a concrete tube 25 kilometres long. It is cavernous — four times our height — and has a strange, unnerving echo. Stare ahead and the perfectly circular walls converge gently into blackness, giving the hypnotic impression of looking into infinity.

It is spotlessly clean and