Dear Spurtle
I enjoyed the link you made between the new restaurant on East London Street and the earlier article on drainage (Breaking news, 15.1.15). The drainage article was extremely interesting, as was the further reading. It also turned out to be highly useful.
A basement flat in my tenement recently involved the Council in clearing a blocked drain. The Council shared the cost of this work between what seemed a capricious selection of householders in the tenement, and on Wednesday morning one of my neighbours asked me whether I had any idea why he was on the list, and how the Council had worked out whom to bill.
How serendipitous, therefore, to discover on Thursday afternoon, via Mr Tobermann's contribution, that an online archive of municipal drainage records exists! An hour's search was all that was required to locate a clear plan of the building's sewerage arteries dated September 1922; that little billing mystery is now solved.
This and other diagrams seem also to confirm the flat directly below us as the source of the noxious smells wafting out of the basin plughole in our WC compartment, and I am hopeful that we may now make progress in eliminating this nuisance.
Fred Street