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 not the invention of the motor car but the flush toilet, which meant that instead of returning waste to the soil we now flushed it to the unrelated sea. Actually the flush toilet was invented a good few years before Bazalgette's sewer, so originally although waste was being flushed into the Thames it was then just left to rot on the banks.

The construction of the Embankment enclosing Basalgette's sewers. 

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

 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.