RuddyFusion:
Is this the Nigeria of our dreams?

PrinceOfLagos:


They called this place in picture a mega city

FvckAllMods:
Lagos sef

ipobarecriminals:
Inner roads look like this.Go to Iyana ipaja,okoko,Lasu,idimu,Agege,,Ipaja Ayobo,iju ishaga,mile 2,and all these sandy roads in lekki..These is still manageable, apart from Northern states,the rest nah eyesore

Thmaartentrends:
But here is anambra state where everything both dead and alive are billionaires.


Mud pi.gs

PrinceOfLagos:

Agege and mushin are Muslims

Sonyboom765:
You must definitely be living a miserable life.
Someone just exposed the dirt you father wallow yet you have the audacity to be insulting those superior to all that you can ever be.

PrinceOfLagos:

You're inconsequentialb

Getat

Sonyboom765:
Is your foolish father whose miserable life depict nothing but wretchedness of any repute in the hell where both of you will definitely end up.

In Victorian London, filth was everywhere: horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with "night soil," graveyards teemed with rotting corpses, the air itself was choked with smoke. In this intimately visceral book, Lee Jackson guides us through the underbelly of the Victorian metropolis, introducing us to the men and women who struggled to stem a rising tide of pollution and dirt, and the forces that opposed them.

Through thematic chapters, Jackson describes how Victorian reformers met with both triumph and disaster. Full of individual stories and overlooked details—from the dustmen who grew rich from recycling, to the peculiar history of the public toilet—this riveting book gives us a fresh insight into the minutiae of daily life and the wider challenges posed by the unprecedented growth of the Victorian capital.

Sometimes when writing reviews, the reviewer ends with who ought to read the book in question. In this case, I am going to start with it. Who should read this book? The answer is everyone who will ever make decisions about city planning, or housing. Actually, it would probably be easier to recommend it to anyone involved in politics, local or national.

Dirty Old London - The Victorian Fight Against Filth is a history and a monument to all the people who agitated, bickered, invented, planned, obstructed and constructed in London from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century. The book is divided into chapters regarding which type of filth and nuisance it is dealing with, which gives us separate chapters on subjects like sewage, soot, wretched housing and household refuse. This may seem arbitrary to more important subjects in society, but I think upon reading this book, everyone can agree that one of the foundations of society is that the filth and dirt humans produce (and we produce a lot) are dealt with in an organised fashion. If not, well, the evidence of what that does to our health and very lives is there in history. A lot of that, too, is dealt with in the appropriate chapters, and we gain quite a lot of insight into how the Victorians of the 19th century slowly began to link poor sanitation to poor health and increased mortality. What is more, the book also provides a unique insight into how the politics of the time, both on the national and various local levels, interaction to help, and often hinder, the development of modern sanitation.

The greatest testament to the ingenuity, creativity and belief in progress of Victorian London is perhaps Joseph Bazalgette's great sewer network, built in the late 1850s and early 1860s. In fact, these sewers remain still standing and serving London in this day and age. While some may laugh at this as there are far more interesting and much prettier works of architecture and construction, Bazalgette's and the Metropolitan Board of Works' sewers were both monumental for its time and have stood the test of time better than almost anything else constructed, with the proof in the pudding: they are still used to this day and age, over 150 years later, in the same fashion.
Perhaps surprisingly, this book on filth and the efforts to clean it up is one of the most convincing political statements I have ever read. It is almost completely free of ideology, apart from perhaps some small bits where the writer seems impressed by George Bernard Shaw, which seems to be a completely natural and sensible stance to take in me eyes; no, instead it is the documentation of the political bickering and back-and-forth that speak louder than anything else. The political responsibilities when it came to city planning and oversight were largely left to local vestries and paving boards; local government dealing with their own areas which parliament rarely meddled in. As London grew, the filth accumulated, cesspools overflowed, soot filled the air, yet the local authorities were more concerned with their own income and power and refused to relinquish anything to central authority. Coupled with laissez faire capitalism, this created a huge inertia which took decades to overcome, and in the meantime, London got dirtier, filthier and more unhealthy to live in. If anything could convince those promoters of the great qualities of local government to drop those huge axes they are grinding and support stronger centralised government, this should be it. Here, it is at times an actual matter of life and death that strong, collective action is taken, yet the different local government are as always dependant on their citizens and their purchasing power, making the rich more comfortable and the poor not only condemned to a life in discomfort, but one where the very environment they live in threaten their lives.

Of specific interest to today's decision makers should be the chapter on Wretched housing, which deals with how housing for the less fortunate looked before the advent of social housing. As we are again, in today's world, back to a society in which social housing built at a loss to the state is an ugly and shameful thing (and even potentially illegal), it is worth looking back at history and how people lived in society where capitalism dictated the rules of the day. And it ain't pretty.

To conclude, this is a very interesting book on an often forgotten subject: filth, and its accumulation. While the difficulties our sanitation-minded ancestors faced in their fight against filth were many and varied, one cannot help but admire their fortitude, ingenuity and thoroughness. Without some of these people, London and other parts of the UK would be very different places today. If nothing else, they helped save numerous lives which would otherwise have been lost to diseases such as cholera and typhus.

If you would excuse me, I am now going to scrub my kitchen with lime and then fumigate my house to get rid of the build-up of miasma