The Metropolis

5 meanings of the London sewer fatberg

Mike Pollitt | Wednesday 7 August, 2013 12:05

A fatberg the size of a bus is formed under the London streets. What does it mean? Some possibilities…

The fatberg as reality art

The fatberg is one of the few ways that contemporary neighbourhoods combine to make something shared. The fatberg is the fruit of month’s of communal effort; the creation of many unthinking hands. In its accretion of a thousand actions, its transmutation of waste into an object of wonder, the berg approaches the status of municipal art. To be properly understood, it should be removed from its subterranean lair and elevated into plain sight. It belongs on the 4th plinth.

_{Artist’s impression of a fatberg on the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square}

The size of the fatberg corresponds to the size of the fuck we don’t give about the city we live in

Expressed by Rose George at the New Statesman – I’ve Seen Fatbergs You People Wouldn’t Believe - discussing how Londoners have ignored the pleas of water companies to change their flushing behaviour:

“…all these urgings, policies and laws collide with our stubborn disregard for the sewers that keep our cities going. That disregard us the size of a fatberg and just as distasteful.”

The city is a body, the sewer is an artery, the fatberg is a plaque

The idea of city as body has a long history. Here we see a specific expression. Much of the fat in the fatberg is used cooking oil from takeaways and kebab joints. The food these places serve is instant. It leave only two permanent memorials – fatbergs in the sewers and arterial plaques in the body. The fatberg clogging the sewer should scare us with thoughts of our own fat-clogged bodies. It’s discovery is a premonition of the moment we each find out that we are going to die.

Fatbergs are our ersatz replacement for the icebergs we are destroying

At the same time as news of the fatberg spread, so did news of a polar bear in Svalbard believed starved from lack of ice. There are only two connections between the two events, between the mass of fat in the sewer and the lack of ice at the pole. One is entirely superficial – both nouns can take the suffix -berg. The other connection human agency.

Wet wipes in the fatberg represent private overcleansing, and public filth

Fatbergs can be formed when flushed wet wipes sink and bind into oil and fat. The increasing use of wet wipes for arse-wiping (sales up 15% annually) is a triumph of the individual anus over the civic mind. The individual bottom is so precious that it must be cleansed ritually, sanitised utterly, by a moistened cloth. That these cloths then block the sewer, potentially causing sewage to flow up into the rivers and streets, is of no concern. The sewer cannot be precious by definition, since it belongs to everyone.

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