A new fence has gone in around the beautiful old sewage pumping station by the Greenway, Joseph Bazelgettes Victorian masterpiece of engineering, a 10 mile tunnel which carries much of Londons sewage to this day to Barking Creek, where originally it was timed to be dumped into the Thames as the tide was going out. Nowadays thr sewage is treated first, and steam pumping stations like this remain (now full of a handful of electric pumps), beautiful buildings closed to the public. Not just closed, hostile. It's a very , effective looking fence, backed up with video cameras and topped with razor wire. Of course it's not sinister, it's entirely in keeping with the industrial area and will protect the olympics, and by extrapolation civilisation itself from occupy, socialists, radical muslims, ecologists, anarchists, vegetarians, lesbians, the locals, or whoever else you've been told to be frightened of this week. Now you feel safe don't you? The pumping station looks an awful lot like one of the grand public buildings of Berlin or Dresden, and the barbed wire following the ridge of makes the whole place feel more in keeping with cold war East Germany than a Victorian poo pump.
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