Name: How Did The World Get So Ugly?
Uploaded: 2026-01-05T17:40:25.000Z
Duration: 15 min 37 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Now, it's a charming place where tourists love to come.

Well, you've got views of iconic buildings like the house of parliament, St. Paul's Cathedral.

Well, it does its job, but not much else.

It's details like these help make this such a charming place to be.

But these two lampposts don't just look different, they represent fundamentally different worldviews.

If you want to understand any society, don't listen to what it says about itself, look at what it creates.

London's little lanes are charming now, but

150 years ago in places like this, you'd have had whole families crammed into these tiny rooms without running water.

There would have been open cesspits spilling down the streets and the stench of sewage boiling in the midday sun would have been unbearable.

It wasn't only horrible to live in, but genuinely dangerous.

See, at that point, London had a problem.

Its population was growing every year, along with the construction of new factories and mills and dockyards.

All those people and all that industry produced a lot of waste.

And it was an engineer called Joseph Basilger who stepped in to construct London's new sewer network in the 19th century.

Sewers which still carry London's waste today, rushing beneath me at this very moment.

And he also constructed this embankment that I'm standing on to replace what was essentially a stinking swamp filled with rubbish and human waste and eels.

It's impossible to calculate how many lives he saved, how many millions of lives he improved.

And he's commemorated here at a memorial that no one ever stops to look at.

When Bazalgette's embankment was completed in 1870, it needed lighting, of course, and

so a public competition was held to design the lamps that would line this new promenade.

This was the winning design, featuring these peculiar creatures.

what's clear is that the Victorians took great pride in their embankment and thought it needed appropriately grand and dramatic decoration.

See, these lamps were among the first public electric lighting in the world.

This was a radical, revolutionary new technology.

Crowds literally gathered to watch them be lit up for the first time.

What the iPhone was in 2007, these lamps were in 1870.

But looking at it now, you wouldn't know that.

Because they are decorated and we don't associate decoration with cutting edge technology.

And that's a major difference between us and the Victorians in the 19th century.

They saw no contradiction between startle and modernity and time honoured tradition.

Just like this building, the legendary Houses of Parliament.

even then it had been designed in an old and medieval style of architecture.

Every technology becomes obsolete and outdated.

But a good aesthetic, even if fashions change, can never become obsolete.

Those lamps on the embankment did their job.

And even though more efficient and better methods of lighting have been invented, they remain 150 years later.

And it applies to lampposts no less, and to national parliaments.

And so here in the Houses of Parliament, everything we've been talking about comes together at last.

Except that this is not the Houses of Parliament.

It's an old sewage facility, a pumping station built in the 19th century as part of Bazalgette's new sewer system.

Strange to think that this is infrastructure, a purely functional building with the sole purpose of managing human waste.

And yet it has been designed with the same ornamental exuberance as any church or palace.

And why shouldn't people who work in sewers also have a beautiful place of work?

Of pride, a belief that what they'd done here was worthwhile, that it meant something.

And the result, over a century later, is that this place, a sewage facility, is now a museum, a tourist destination.

If you want to know what any society really believes in, just look at how they design their sewers.

Just a few steps from the old 19th century Victorian pumping station, which has now been decommissioned, is the one built to replace it.

it was very clearly not built by the same society, or at least not by society with the same views about architecture and design.

Will this, like the original, be turned into a museum?

In any case, I imagine that it is more functional and that it was more convenient to build and to design.

I think it says more about the modern world than anything else, more than phones or social media.

It's a miraculous technology, one that has changed the world and improved billions of lives.

Hence we stick them literally everywhere.

Ugly because it doesn't seem to express any belief in the idea that ordinary things can also be beautiful.

Now, it would certainly be a bit more expensive to make it prettier, take a little time and care and attention.

But these days it seems that we would rather make more money to make things look pretty.

So you can see, I hope, that through something as simple as those lampposts, you can understand the Victorians in their entirety.

They didn't have to make it look like that, but they did.

I don't think it was supposed to be beautiful.

At least interesting, at least not boring.

looking at its buildings and its infrastructure, you're not just looking at objects.

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How Did The World Get So Ugly?

literally

present

deserve

improve