The Wild Sewer Pigs of Hampstead

Victorian England's answer to the mythical alligators that were said to have roamed free in the sewers of New York City were the feral pigs or "black swine" which were said to have lived in the sewers of Hampstead, London in the early 1850s. By the 1850s, the sewers of London were a higgledy-piggledy mess (as it were) until civil engineer Joseph Balzalgette organized and rebuilt them in the wake of "The Great Stink" in the summer of 1858.

The story seems to have originated with some London sewer workers, interviewed in 1851 by Henry Mayhew, who quoted them in his London Labour and the London Poor:

There is a strange tale in existence among the sewer-workers, of a race of wild hogs inhabiting the sewers in the neighborhood of Hampstead. The story runs, that a sow in young, by some accident got down the sewer through an opening, and, wandering away from the spot, littered and reared her offspring in the drain, feeding on the offal and garbage washed into it continuously. Here, it is alleged, the breed multiplied exceedingly, and have become almost as ferocious as they are numerous.

Mayhew adds that the story must be "apocryphal" and that no one living in Hampstead has actually heard any grunts from the sewers, nor seen anything. But the believers argued to Mayhew that there was a good reason the pigs had not been seen. This was that the only way the pigs could get out of the sewer would be to get to the mouth of it, which would require them to cross the "Fleet ditch" against the rapid currents of which pigs would refuse to swim because of their "obstinate nature."

The Fleet ditch was originated from the River Fleet, which ran through London and gave Fleet Street its name. The river's headwaters were located at Hampstead Heath. The Fleet Ditch had been long known as a "pestilential nuisance." Mayhew writes that "the Fleet seems always to have had a sewery nature." It had been bricked over for many years by the 1850s, and ran underground.

Hampstead, located in north London, was still quite rural in nature in the 1850s (and like all parts of London, was home to plenty of farm animals). Hampstead would have been a far-off place to Mayhew's central London sewer workers - quite far enough away to be a locale for fantastic happenings.

The story was picked up, probably through reading Mayhew, by Charles Dickens, who was fascinated by London and often walked about all night, observing things. He wrote in his periodical Household Words, in 1852:

We have traditions and superstitions about almost everything in life, from the hogs in Hampstead sewers to the ghosts in a shut-up house.

Seven years after this, a Daily Telegraph editorial of October 10, 1859, mentions the pigs. This is reproduced in Thomas Boyle's Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead. The Telegram writer is expounding on the hidden mysteries of London:

It has been said...that Hampstead sewers shelter a monstrous breed of black swine, which have propogated and run wild among the slimy feculence, and whose ferocious snouts will one-day up-root Highgate archway, while they make Holloway intolerable with their grunting.

It is interesting to note how the Telegram writer has embroidered the Mayhew story with florid language ("slimy feculence," "ferocious snouts") and imagines the pigs emerging to wreak havoc on the city.

David Lawrence Pike, in his book Subterranean Cities, notes that urban legends about wild creatures in the sewers are directly related to myths about the underworld. These exist in every culture, ranging from the Greek Tartarus to the Buddhist Naraka. The urban sewer is a particularly frightening symbol of a dark and dangerous underworld teeming just below the surface of the mundane, regulated everyday world. The story of wild pigs (or alligators) living and waiting in the dark tunnels under city streets was a fascinating translation of earlier stories about the underworld. And of course, Lewis Carroll was writing his tale of Alice's journey down a rabbit hole (far nicer than the sewers of Hampstead, though equally dark and confusing), originally titled Alice's Adventures Underground, in 1865. It would be interesting to know whether he had ever heard of the mythical pigs of Hampstead.

SOURCES

Boyle, Thomas. Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism. (Viking, 1989), p. 205 [reproduction of Oct. 10, 1859 Daily Telegram editorial].

Dickens, Charles. "A Clouded Skye," Household Words: A Weekly Journal, vol. 5 (Bradley and Evans, 1852), p. 98.

George, Rose. "The Wasteland," Slate, Apr. 24-7, 2006; article found at Sewer History.

Jackson, Lee. Sewers in Victorian London, quoting from Cruchley's London in 1865: A Guide for Strangers (1865), at the Victorian Dictionary.

Mayhew, Henry and William Tuckniss, London Labour and the London Poor. (Griffin, Bohn and Co., 1861 ed.), pp 154 [pigs in sewer anecdote], 390 [Fleet Ditch]. The page where the Hampstead pigs are mentioned is also here, at the Tufts Digital Library ( their source is the 1851 edition).

Pike, David Lawrence. Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London 1800-1945. (Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 191.

Timbs, John. Curiosities of London. (Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1868), p. 348.

Wheeler, William Adolphus and Charles Gardner Wheeler. Familiar Allusions (Ticknor ad Co., 1887), p. 178 [more on Fleet Ditch],

More on sewers in Victorian London, from Cruchley's London in 1865: A Guide for Strangers (1865), at Lee Jackson's excellent site Victorian Dictionary.The Fleet Ditch is discussed over at the Victorian Dictionary as well. Jackson's source for the Fleet Ditch is the Illustrated London News, 1845.

More on the Great Stink (and Joseph Bazalgette) here at Crossness.org.

Tracing the Fleet River in London in modern times, here.

Image of the "sewer hunter" from Mayhew's London Labor and the London Poor (1861 edition), p. 388. Photograph of Hampstead street in 1965 from Victorian Web. John Tenniel's illustration of Alice in the rabbit hole (which looks rather like a Victorian subway tunnel) from my copy of Alice In Wonderland (Grosset and Dunlap, 1946), p. 14.