In 1960 the first stage of sewage treatment was men with long forks raking the screens clear by hand, continuously, into barrows.
The sludge was dried in open beds in the weather. The biological treatment was a bed of clinker with arms rotating over it. The process was controlled by an operator looking at it, smelling it and watching how it settled in a glass cylinder.
And men went into the tanks with no testing and nobody watching.
Here are sixteen things that were ordinary at a sewage works in 1960, and what became of each one.
1. The Screens Were Raked Out by Hand and the Men Saw Everything
The first stage of treatment is a bar screen catching everything solid that should not be in the sewer. In 1960 it was raked clear by men with long forks, into barrows, continuously, by hand.
Mechanical raked screens, screw conveyors, washing and compaction now handle it with nobody touching anything. What comes off a screen is the single most comprehensive record of what a population actually puts down drains, and the men who raked it knew more about their town than anybody wanted them to.
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2. The Smell Was the Job and There Was No Escaping It
A works smelled, continuously, across its whole site and for some distance beyond, and the men worked in it all shift without protection of any kind.
Covered tanks, odour extraction with biological or chemical scrubbing, and siting rules have reduced it enormously, and a modern works can sit near housing without being noticeable. The smell was accepted as simply what the job was, and it followed the men home in their clothes, which is the detail their families remember.
3. Nobody Treated the Gases as a Hazard
Sewers and treatment tanks generate gases that displace oxygen and are toxic in their own right. In 1960 men entered chambers, wells and tanks routinely with no testing, no ventilation and nobody watching from outside.
Confined space entry is now one of the most tightly controlled operations anywhere: atmosphere testing before and during, forced ventilation, harnesses, rescue equipment, permits and a trained watcher outside at all times. Every element of that regime was written after deaths, and this is the single most consequential safety change in the industry. Stated here as occupational history; anybody with concerns about their own work history should raise them with their own doctor.
4. The Sludge Was Dried in Open Beds in the Open Air
Solids settled out of the flow were spread on open beds of sand and gravel and left to drain and dry in the weather, over weeks, before being dug out and carted away.
Mechanical dewatering with centrifuges and belt presses, and anaerobic digestion before dewatering, replaced the drying beds entirely. The beds took enormous land area, worked badly in wet weather, and were the part of the process most responsible for the smell – but they required almost no energy, which is a point their modern replacements cannot make.
5. The Works Produced Gas and Burned It to Run Itself
Digesting sludge produces a flammable gas, and works collected it and used it to heat the digesters and in many cases to generate electricity, making the site partly self-powering.
This has expanded enormously rather than disappeared, and sludge digestion with energy recovery is now central to how the industry manages both its waste and its power consumption. It is one of the very few items in this entire series where the 1960 practice was not superseded but massively scaled up – they were right, and they were right early.
6. The Treated Water Went Into the River and the River Showed It
Treatment standards were far lower, storm overflows discharged routinely, and the watercourse below a works was visibly and chemically affected for a considerable distance.
Discharge consents, defined standards, continuous monitoring and far more thorough treatment transformed river quality over subsequent decades. Storm overflows remain a live and contested issue, and it would be dishonest to present this as a solved problem – the standards for normal operation improved enormously and the question of what happens in heavy rain is unresolved and currently the subject of substantial public argument.
7. The Biological Stage Was a Bed of Clinker With Arms Rotating Over It
Much treatment was done on trickling filters – circular beds of stone or clinker with rotating distributor arms sprinkling liquid over them, with the actual work done by the biological film growing on the stones.
Activated sludge processes, and now membrane and advanced biological systems, handle most modern treatment, though filters are still in use. The filter is a beautifully simple machine: no power except the flow itself turning the arms, and a treatment process that consists of providing a surface and letting something grow on it.
8. Flies and Vermin Were a Permanent Condition of the Site
Filter beds and drying beds in warm weather generated flies in enormous numbers, and the site attracted rats continuously. Both were accepted as part of the works.
Covered processes, different treatment methods and active pest control have largely removed it. Fly nuisance from filter beds was a frequent source of complaint from neighbouring houses and one of the practical reasons works were moved or enclosed.
9. The Men Were Called Names and the Job Carried a Stigma
Sewage work was essential, skilled and continuously staffed, and it was regarded socially as the bottom of the employment ladder, with the men marked out by where they worked.
The stigma has softened as the work became technical and invisible, and modern operators are process technicians rather than labourers. The men doing it in 1960 were running the single most important piece of public health infrastructure their town possessed, and were treated accordingly, which is to say badly.
10. Everything Was Judged by Eye, Nose and Experience
Process control depended on an operator looking at the colour and texture of the sludge, smelling it, watching how it settled in a glass cylinder, and adjusting on judgement.
Continuous instrumentation, online analysers and automated control have replaced most of it, though the settlement test in a cylinder survives because it is quick and informative. An experienced operator could diagnose a process upset faster than a laboratory could, which was fortunate, because the laboratory result arrived the next day.
11. What People Flushed Was Already a Problem and Nobody Could Stop Them
Screens in 1960 caught rags, cloth, sanitary items, dressings and a steady supply of objects that had no business in a sewer, all of which had to be removed by hand.
The problem has become significantly worse rather than better, because wet wipes and similar products bind with fats into masses that block sewers outright. Public information campaigns are the industry’s only real tool, and the fundamental difficulty is unchanged: a sewer accepts whatever is put into it and somebody has to take it out again.
12. The Works Ran Every Hour of Every Day and Could Never Stop
Flow arrives continuously and does not wait. A works operated around the clock, every day, with shifts covering nights and holidays, and a breakdown meant untreated discharge within hours.
Still true, with far fewer people, remote monitoring and automated alarms rather than a man walking the site through the night. Of all the continuous-process industries in this series, this is the one where stopping is least optional, because the input cannot be turned off.
13. Storm Water and Sewage Shared the Same Pipe
Older drainage systems were combined – rainwater and sewage in one pipe – which meant heavy rain overwhelmed the works and the excess was discharged untreated by design.
Separate systems are standard for new development and the legacy combined networks remain in place across enormous areas, because replacing them means excavating entire towns. This is the single largest unresolved infrastructure problem in the sector and the direct cause of the overflow discharges currently under public scrutiny – it is a Victorian design decision that nobody has found an affordable way to undo.
14. Nobody Measured What Was Dissolved in the Water
Treatment targeted solids and oxygen demand. Dissolved substances that passed through – chemicals, metals, pharmaceutical residues – were neither measured nor considered.
Monitoring now covers a far wider range of substances and treatment has been extended to address some of them, with others remaining genuinely difficult and the subject of active research. The 1960 works was built to stop rivers becoming open sewers, and it largely achieved that; the questions now being asked of it are ones it was never designed to answer.
15. The Works Was Deliberately Put Where Nobody Would Object
Sites were chosen downstream, downwind and away from anything valuable, which in practice meant next to the poorest housing and on the least desirable ground.
Siting is now subject to planning, impact assessment and consultation, and odour control means proximity matters much less. The historical siting pattern is clearly visible on any map and is one of the more legible examples of how environmental burdens were distributed, which was not accidental and was not seriously contested at the time.
16. Nobody Thought Anybody Would Ever Care
In 1960 sewage treatment was invisible, unglamorous public works that the public neither thought about nor discussed, and the men who ran it expected that to continue indefinitely.
It is now a subject of national argument, regular news coverage and considerable public anger, which would astonish anybody who worked at a 1960 works. The attention is uncomfortable for the industry and is almost certainly good, because a century of being ignored is a substantial part of how the combined sewers and the overflow problem survived unexamined for as long as they did.
The Pipe Is the Part That Never Got Fixed
Almost everything on this list was improved, and one thing was not, and it is the one currently in the news.
Older drainage was built as a combined system: one pipe taking both sewage and rainwater. At the time that was sensible engineering – one network instead of two, built once, at a fraction of the cost, in cities that urgently needed any drainage at all.
The flaw is structural and was understood from the beginning. In dry weather the pipe carries sewage and the works treats it. In heavy rain the volume rises by a large multiple within minutes, far beyond anything a treatment works can process, and the system has to put the excess somewhere. So combined networks were built with overflows that discharge the diluted excess directly to the watercourse, by design, as the alternative to backing it up into houses.
That is not a malfunction. It is the design operating as intended, and the intention was formed when the alternative was flooding people’s homes with sewage.
Undoing it means laying a second complete pipe network under towns that were built on top of the first one, which costs sums that are difficult to state without sounding evasive and requires digging up essentially everything. Partial measures – storage tanks to hold the peak, separating surface water where redevelopment allows, sustainable drainage that keeps rain out of the sewer in the first place – are all being pursued and all chip at the edges of it.
So the one item on this list that has not been solved is the oldest one, it was a reasonable decision when it was made, and it is now the single largest unresolved piece of infrastructure in the sector. The men raking the screens in 1960 were working downstream of a choice made a century before them, and so is everybody else.
If you worked at a works, you will know what the screens caught and what the smell did to your clothes.
And if there is one near you, you have probably never noticed it, which is the whole measure of how much changed.
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