Shenzhen Lotus Water Culture Base and Ground Level of Honghu Park Water Purification Plant / NODE Architecture & Urbanism. Image © Chao Zhang

Published on October 21, 2026

When London's main drainage was completed north of the Thames in 1868, the Metropolitan Board of Works marked the occasion with a banquet held inside a sewage pumping station. Abbey Mills had been built over the previous three years by the engineer Joseph Bazalgette , working with the architect Charles Driver, laid out on a cruciform plan with eight beam engines, two on each arm. Its style has been read as Byzantine , Italian Medieval, Russian, Ruskinian Gothic and Moorish , and its twin ventilation chimneys, richly ornamented, rose more than sixty meters. The builder called it an elegant structure in a swamp and thought it might pass for a mosque or a temple.

Almost everything else Bazalgette built was buried, and the exception did not last the century.…