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Key words: Rat fatberg eaterie latrines criss-cross

Abstract: The common denominator, humanising and social unifying factor of sewers; their parallel and orthogonal positioning with  other subterranean, municipal essential services in cities; the phantasmagorical and Gothic elements of urban sewer’s mythos; sewers as symbols of triumphant Victorian engineering, particularly as celebrated, Herculean redbrick structures memorialising the triumph of scientific Progress and Western Civilization; sewers as the metaphoric scatological, as representative of the subconscious; sewers as pharmacological cornucopias, and as the symbolic seedbed for narratives of crime, escape and capture; sewers as signifiers of abjection, evacuation and repression.

Peter Kalu