History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

Background In the Victorian era diseases like smallpox, TB, syphilis, and ‘King’ cholera meant that infant mortality was very high, and children were lucky to reach their fifth birthday. The average life expectancy for a middle-class man was 45, but for working-class men this halved.   The Silent Highwayman (Punch July 1858) The ‘Great Stink’ in the summer of 1858 when the Thames was contaminated with untreated sewage forced Parliament to cover the windows with curtains soaked in lime. The government finally decided to fund Joseph Bazalgette’s scheme to build a system of sewers. The initial cost was £2.5M, but the final cost was £4.2M (today worth about £400M).    Work began in the early 1860s in Kilburn as he worked his way across London putting some of the rivers and streams, such as the Kylebourne, in underground culverts.    The huge construction, which was not completed until 1875, carried the sewage to treatment centres and out to the Thames at Beckton in ...