The sewering of Britain's towns and cities is an important, though understated, theme in Britain’s nineteenth-century social history. It combined two Victorian passions – for social improvement, not least in public health, and large-scale engineering projects by which face-to-face communities joined the emerging mass society of Victorian capitalism. The literature on the great sewerage projects of later Victorian times is understandably preoccupied with London. Charles Dickens compared the River Thames to a ‘fresh-faced maiden’ come up from the country to a life of prostitution in the capital city. But Joan Dils’ recent study of the town of Reading has shown that the situation seventy miles by river above London was not the idyll Dickens implied. Here, as elsewhere, the installation of modern drainage and sewers to improve life expectancy and the lot of ordinary people only came about when, after years of neglect and alarms over public health, private interests were compelled by national legislation to act in the public interest.

On the Oxfordshire side of the river only ten miles downstream from Reading, Henley was acutely aware of the rapid urbanisation occurring on its doorstep. In mid-Victorian times it had some claim to be the centre of south Oxfordshire, for example in the administration of justice and the poor law, and it maintained a proud civic tradition. Yet the Great Western Railway from London to the west of England passed it by in 1840–1, and, although a branch line reached the town in 1857, Henley experienced sharp relative decline. A modern and progressive solution to the problem of drainage was seen as important in restoring its fortunes.