‘Official’ photographs of sewers are sometimes fairly scarce on the net, this is especially true for London. Those found have always contained recognisable sections of well trodden locations such as the Fleet or Westbourne, nothing left to the imagination.

The first, ‘This Is It’, eventually fell after weeks of failed attempts back in 2009, leaving only only one.
We had no idea where to look, or even start for that matter, we had run out of plausible tunnels to check. No more storm drains, no more buried rivers and no more overflows, leaving miles upon miles of small, generic, backbreaking sewers. Try as we might we eventually gave up, deciding it if was to be found, we would probably just stumble across it.

For over a year the chamber fell from discussion, pushed to the back of the mind and eventually forgotten. That was until recently when JonDoe discovered an archive photo of a new, yet unexplored overflow :

Something about the picture looked familiar, i just couldn’t put my finger on it. This bugged me for a while before finally it tweaked. The bottom sections looked an awful lot like that chamber we had been searching for, its got to be it. With a bit more research and a few failed outings we finally agreed on its location.

To say its location is under a watchful eye is an understatement, frankly the positioning couldn’t be worse. The chamber sat directly under the headquarters of the Thames Water sewer flushers. Aka the artificial heart of the london sewer network, fu**! Surrounded by wader raping fences, gangster filled council flats and in a 24 hour active site things were bound to get interesting. Add this to the fact everything was floodlit, cars still in the compound, cameras pointed at the manhole and all the lights were on inside the building, it just spelled disaster.

We sat hunched in a corner, the dank smell of sewerage in the air, quietly watching the building, trying to ascertain if anyone was home or not. Eventually we just had to go for it, up, over, in and down. My stomach churned as we descended past the interceptors, possibly from the smell of the largest collection of turd ever seen in London, but more likely because deep down i knew what would await us should we be discovered, a flushers raw sewerfresh fist of justice! As this was something i definantly did not wish to experience we proceeded with much haste.

Touchdown. We emerged from the shaft slap bang in the middle of the rightmost overflow chamber, curvaceous brick arches fanned out in all directions, a low grumbling audible from the interceptors above. The top of the chamber stopped at a penstock the size of a small bus so we headed south down the connecting tunnel. We passed several walkways to the identical tunnel which ran along side before reaching a staircase. The tunnel grew to over 15ft in height, but unfortunately the water level was far to deep to continue so further exploration was therefore aborted. We returned to the arched chamber, taking pictures along the way before deciding it was time to leave.

I fully expected a circle of freshly dressed flushers ready for combat to be waiting for us topside, gloves and lube at the ready. Thankfully there was no such incident, the coast was clear so we headed for freedom, bidding farewell to our riskiest adventure yet.

Credit is owed to JD, Siologen and Site who recce’d, researched and had the balls to jump into the lions den. Without these guys, this probably wouldnt have happened.