Design Diary 5. The Undercity

John Tenniel's illustration¹, published during the Great Stink of July 1858, satirises Parliament's failure to clean up the Thames.

Part 5 of 8. Read part 1 2 3 4 6 7 8.

Sewers are a recurring trope in urban fantasy adventures, appearing in some of the earliest published adventure modules, such as Verbosh (Judges Guild, 1979) and Slave Pits of the Undercity (TSR, 1980)². The sewer motif persists in Goodman Games’ Punjar setting³. The encounter areas from Legend of the Ripper’s Cellar and Sewers level were adapted and incorporated into Return of the Ripper’s Undercity.

Although sewers do not figure directly in Ripper lore, they are emblematic of the Victorian era. London’s sewage system ranks among the most impressive Victorian engineering achievements. Hidden channels of filth flowing under London streets also have strong Gothic horror associations, symbolising the Victorians’ suppressed anxieties about morally unclean realities that must not be spoken of in polite society.

For centuries, London’s rivers had been used as a dumping ground for refuse, dung and dead things, including the bodies of people robbed or slain. In 1560, a doctor wrote of the spread of disease along the banks of the river Fleet:

In its stinking lanes, there died most in London and were soonest inflicted, and were longest continued.

150 years later, the situation had not improved, inciting the satirical poems of Jonathan Swift⁴:

Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.

and Alexander Pope⁵:

To where Fleet-ditch with disemboguing streams
Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames.

In 1732, the city authorities bricked over the river, as if it was a guilty secret that must be hidden from view.

The brick sewers of the Fleet and Walbrook continued to fall short of the needs of the growing city. Things came to a head in the hot summer of 1858, when the stench of untreated human and industrial waste became intolerable. In Sir John Tenniel’s cartoon in Punch, Death rows along the Thames looking for those responsible for not paying to clean up the river. Finally, Parliament commissioned the civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette to design a modern sewage system to provide relief.

My first encounter with London’s sewer system in fiction was The Talons of Weng Chiang, a Doctor Who story by Robert Holmes. Holmes often included Gothic allusions and horror elements in his scripts, and is probably the person most responsible for my childhood nightmares. The stage is set in Victorian London, complete with sewers and bricked-up river Fleet. As Doctor Who: the Complete Guide puts it, “groaning under the weight of so much clichéd Victoriana, Talons emerges as a garish hybrid of science fiction and literary pastiche”. While it has a strong script and great performance from Tom Baker, this serial comes with a content warning for its stereotyped portrayal of Chinese immigrants and the use of a white actor to portray the villain Li H’sen Chang.

On the big screen, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes has the eponymous consulting detective and his erstwhile companion pursue the villainous Lord Blackwood into the sewers beneath the Palace of Westminster. Part of the action was filmed in Crossness Pumping Station, the Victorian “cathedral of sewage” constructed as part of Bazalgette’s works (1859–65)⁶.

Back on the small screen, in the episode London Underground of the BBC police procedural New Tricks, the investigation follows the hidden river Fleet in search of a cult making blood sacrifices to the spirit of the river. This episode taps into the psychogeography of London’s underground waterways.

Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996) is a fairy tale that presents the sewers as a magical place, a parallel London called “London Below” where everything forgotten by the world above ends up⁷.

The idea for the corrupted naïad Peg Powler was dredged from the same sludge as the Nene Hag, the tragic and terrifying water sprite in Alan Moore’s epic, Jerusalem (2016). Her name is from the folklore of the river Tees in northern England.

This post is an excerpt from Return of the Ripper Appendix N: Inspirational Sources.
Part 5 of 8. Part 6 coming soon. Read part 1 2 3 4 6 7 8.

Notes

1. The "Silent Highway"-man by John Tenniel. Published in Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. XXXV, 10 July 1858.

2. Besides featuring sewers, another connection between Slave Pits and Return of the Ripper is that they share the same cover artist — Jeff Dee.

3. Adventures published by Goodman Games set in Punjar's sewers include DCC 53: Sellswords of Punjar by Harley Stroh (a low-level adventure through the slums and sewers of Smoke), DCC 60: Thrones of Punjar by Rick Maffei (an urban investigation adventure with a large part of the action taking place in the sewers) and The Jeweler that Dealt in Stardust by Harley Stroh, originally published for Free RPG Day and reprinted in the compendium DCC 89: Chaos Rising.

4. Jonathan Swift, A Description of a City Shower (1710).

5. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad: Book II (1728).

6. For a critique of the film's portrayal of Victorian London, see Holywood's Map of London in The From Hell Companion by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell (2013), p.89.

7. Originally a BBC TV series by Neil Gaiman and Lenny Henry.