Art History in the Pub - exploring London's sewers

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Dr Paul Dobraszczyk (University of Manchester), ‘Into the belly of the beast: exploring London's Victorian sewers’



Monday 30 July 2012, 7:30 p.m.

The Monarch, Camden, 
40–42 Chalk Farm Road
, Greater London NW1 8BG


Free to attend.
 

As part of the AAH's commitment to bringing the best in cutting-edge art-historical research to a wider community, the Association is pleased to be able to announce the next in the regular ‘Art History in the Pub’ series of talks, lectures and events.

These talks present a selection of the wide variety of topics, periods, methods and approaches common in art historical study, and are aimed at a generalist audience.

The next speaker is Paul Dobraszczyk, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Manchester. Sewers remain a powerful site for mixed ideas about the city. They are both signifiers of a truly modern city, efficiently disposing of its wastes, but also places of imaginative horror: the literal as well as metaphorical bowels of the city; everyday yet alien spaces. Their imaginative power is enhanced by their very invisibility. In London, most people travel underground every day on the hundreds of miles of tube; London’s sewers cover thousands of miles and are all but unknown to the city’s populace because their acceptability depends on their invisibility.

Even so, the very hidden nature of sewers both requires and entices explorers. This talk explores two ways in which London’s sewers have been, and continue to be, explored. Paul Dobraszczykconcentrates first on ‘legitimate’ exploration, that is, inspection by qualified people, usually surveyors, engineers or maintenance workers. He then moves on to consider moments when sewers have been presented to the public by those who built them, usually as a means of promoting their value to those who would pay for them. Finally, he considers illicit sewer exploration, from Victorian times to the present day. In contrast to legitimate sewer exploration, these journeys are fired by the imagination and by a subversive desire to experience secret spaces that transform understanding of the city as a whole.