Andrew Adonis on Joseph Bazalgette

Great Lives

BBC

History, Documentary, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2014

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Matthew Parris hears from Labour peer Lord Adonis why Joseph Bazalgette, the Victorian engineer, has his nomination as a Great Life. Bazalgette, the grandson of a French immigrant who made a fortune lending money to the Hanoverian royal family, is one of the most important of the great Victorian engineers. He not only built a sewage system for London which wiped out cholera in the city, he also built the famous Embankments, laid out several of the main thoroughfares and built or improved many of the city's landmark bridges. Yet he is far less well-known than his flamboyant contemporary Brunel and less celebrated than the creators of the railways. With the help of Joseph Bazalgette's great-great-grandson Sir Peter Bazalgette, the man responsible for Ready Steady Cook and Big Brother and now Chairman of the Arts Council, Matthew pieces together the story of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, "The Sewer King." Producer Christine Hall First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2014.

Transcript

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0:29.0	Great Lives is a download from Radio 4.
0:32.0	We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.
0:35.0	On London's Victoria Embankment, there are two notable public memorials.
0:40.0	One is a larger-than-life bronze statue of a man set high on an impressive Portland stone plinth.
0:47.0	The other, much more modest memorial, is part of a series of plaques set into the wall of the embankment overshadowed by an adjacent
0:55.9	bridge. The casual observer would naturally conclude that the first man, who was Isambard Kingdom
1:02.4	Brunel, was a great deal more important to the people
1:05.4	of London than the second, Sir Joseph Baseljet.
1:09.6	And yet it was Baseljet who was responsible not only for the building of the Victoria Embankment
1:15.2	itself but for saving the city from disease and modernising its infrastructure and making it
1:20.8	fit to live in long after he himself had gone.
1:24.0	But if you've never heard of Joseph Basiljet, you needn't feel ashamed.
1:29.0	Many people haven't.
1:31.0	And here, to rectify this shocking state of affairs, I'm delighted to welcome
1:36.0	Andrew Adonis, former transport minister and pioneer of the HS2 rail track. Lord Adonis you have a deep personal interest in Baseljet I think.
1:47.0	Last year I was looking at the infrastructure of London and how it had been transformed by the Victorians
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