History
It was created during the 1870s by Joseph Bazalgette, and was part of a project for the Metropolitan Board of Works to provide London with a modern sewerage system.
The gardens were later expanded. This expansion was discussed in parliament in 1898 in the 'Victoria Embankment extension and St John's improvement bill'. A number of wharves were subsequently compulsorily purchased, including Dorset Wharf (shown on 1885 map) which was purchased from George Taverner Miller, son of Taverner John Miller, from where he ran a 'Sperm Oil Merchants and Spermaceti refining' business. The effects from this business and others were sold in 1905.
Read more about this topic: Victoria Tower Gardens
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)