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 sewers’ mythos. Sewers as symbols of triumphant Victorian engineering, particularly as celebrated, Herculean red-brick structures memorialising the triumph of scientific progress and Western civilisation. 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.