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City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
one of the world’s
first banking and
multinational
companies with
particular reference
to their London
properties and
activities and
Including a visit to one
of the most historic
and beautiful churches in London built by the
order. The round church of The Temple was built
900 years ago as the London headquarters for
the order and contains marble tomb effigies of
Knights Templar.
In decline by the 1300s many Templars assets
were transferred to the Knights Hospitallers and
this less contentious order was never suppressed
in the UK. Indeed in 1889 King Edward VII, then
Prince of Wales was made Grand Prior of the
Knights Hospitallers in a service that took place
at the Priory Church of St. John in Clerkenwell
which we visit along with the Museum of the
Order of St John housed in a Tudor gatehouse
next door to tell their story from the Crusades
through to their role today with the St. John
Ambulance and the Eye Hospital in Jerusalem.
The tour will be available weekdays throughout
the year from October 2012 at an anticipated
tour fee of £17.95 per person inclusive of all
admission fees. Let us know if you are interested
and we will be sure to copy you in as soon as
details are finalised.
If you would like a copy of our current brochure
(front cover shown below) please call us on
0845 812 5000
and we’ll pop on in the post.
Our 0845 number gets you through at local rates
but if you have a telephone contract that includes
free day time calls you are better off calling us on
0208 692 1133.
Joseph Bazalgette
was born in Enfield in 1819, the son of a Royal
Navy captain and the grandson of Huguenot
immigrants. He began his career as a railways
engineer and worked so tirelessly on projects
including the expansion of the British railway
network that he suffered a nervous breakdown
in his late twenties.
Whilst he was recovering London’s short lived
Metropolitan Commission of Sewers ordered
that all cesspits be closed and that drains should
now connect to sewers emptying directly into the
Thames. It was a disastrous decision and in the
cholera epidemic that followed over 14,000
Londoners died.
Championed by fellow engineer Isambard
Kingdom Brunel Bazalgette was appointed Chief
Engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works
which replaced the sewers commission.
At this time Bazalgette followed majority medical
opinion and believed that disease was spread by
foul air or miasma. Very few believed Dr. John
Snow’s theory that cholera was spread by
contaminated water. In 1858 the year of the
Great Stink Parliament passed an act enabling
Bazalgette's colossally expensive and
revolutionary scheme for over 2000 miles of
enclosed brick built sewers for London.
The belief was the new sewers would contain
the miasma and the sewage would be delivered
by gravity to pumping stations on the outskirts
of London where it would be pumped back,
untreated, into the river at high tide and thus
swept out to sea.