The Museum of London has been teaching visitors about the capital’s history for over 50 years now. It contains exhibits on the Romans, the Plague, the Great Fire and the Blitz. It even houses the Lord Mayor’s Coach, a great red and gold thing, which horses pull about the streets of the City each November for the Lord Mayor’s Show.
So it’s presumably in keeping with this tradition, of presenting the most educational and most beautiful artefacts from London’s history, that the museum’s newest exhibit will be a congealed mass of fat, oil, grease, wet wipes and sanitary products.
The Lord Mayor’s Coach and the fatberg (left). Image: Tony Hisgett/Wikimedia Commons (coach); Museum of London (fatberg).
The “monster fatberg”, a press release informs me, is “London’s newest celebrity, and has fascinated and disgusted people all over the world”. Found in the sewers beneath Whitechapel, the entire ‘berg was over 250m long (6m longer than Tower Bridge!) and weighed in at 130 tonnes.
The Museum won’t house the entire fatberg, alas. Most of it, the press release tells me, has been converted into biodiesel, “turning a nauseating waste problem into a cleaner-burning, greenhouse gas reducing fuel which will benefit the environment”. One relatively small chunk, though, has been donated to the Museum by Thames Water to promote its “Bin it – don’t block it” campaign, which encourages Londoners to, well, you can work that part out for yourself.
So what, I hear you wondering, is a fatberg, exactly? Where do baby fatbergs come from?
Well, as the name suggests they’re the result of cooking fat, poured down sinks to congeal in sewers. Assorted wipes and napkins are also involved, playing roughly the same role that fibre does in your gut. I wouldn’t think about it too much if I were you.
In 2014, back in the early days of CityMetric when fatbergs were all the rage, we learned that there are even fatberg groupies, including a couple who had visited one in situ in the sewers as an anniversary trip. Righto.
We wouldn’t recommend that, to be honest, but if you fancy seeing a chunk of one from within the safety of the Museum of London, it’ll be on display from 2018. Knock yourselves out.
Jonn Elledge is the editor of CityMetric. He is on Twitter as @jonnelledge and also has a Facebook page now for some reason.
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