Excerpted from Sewer, by former Atlas Obscura Senior Editor Jessica Leigh Hester, available November 3, 2022, from Bloomsbury. Used with permission. All rights reserved. Most of the people wandering the blocks of London’s Covent Garden neighborhood on a chilly evening in September 2019, nursing frothy beverages in the gold glow beaming from café windows or hurrying past sleepy tobacconists and hat shops, probably had no idea that the pipes far below their feet were gunked up with globs of fat. They likely had no clue that as they wandered home,…
