Awaymania

One of Margaret Gordon's original Womble designs. 

I don't remember this bit.

 There's a fine Brian Aldiss quote I can't find now about how humanity's greatest schism with the ecosystem was brought about by the invention not of the motor car, but of the flush toilet – because instead of returning waste to the soil, we now flushed it into the unrelated sea.

The construction of the Embankment enclosing Bazalgette's sewers. 

Notice the open-top  steam-powered London Underground, bottom left. (Source.)

  Actually, the flush toilet was invented a good few years before Bazalgette's sewer, so although waste was originally being flushed into the Thames, it was then just left to rot on London beach, and in this week's Ships, Sea & the Stars you can hear me read an account by Dickens of the smell. I also get to read some Wombles by Elizabeth Beresford, and there are further typically good insights into plastic, amber, the influence of rationing on seventies kid's television, how the London Sewer could be said to have started the mania for just sending stuff "away", and a schooner whittled from mutton bone.