Halliday, Stephen

PERSONAL:

Male. Education: Guildhall University, Ph.D., 1998.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Buckinghamshire Business School, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, Gorelands Lane, Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire HP8 4AD, England. E-mail—stephen. [email protected].

CAREER:

British Rail, management trainee and depot manager, 1964-68; CPC Ltd., distribution manager, resource planning manager, product manager, and sales manager, 1968-80; Hammick's Bookshop's, marketing director, 1980-81; Buckinghamshire Business School, Buckinghamshire, England, lecturer in marketing, 1981.

WRITINGS:

Which Business?: How to Select the Right Opportunity for Starting Up, Kogan Page (London, England), 1987, 2nd edition, 1990.

The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Capital, Sutton (Stroud, Gloucestershire, England), 1999.

Underground to Everywhere: London's Underground Railway in the Life of the Capital, Sutton (Stroud, Gloucestershire, England), 2001.

Making the Metropolis: Creators of Victoria's London, Breedon Books (Derby, England), 2003.

Contributor to periodicals, including British Medical journal, History Today, and Journal of Medical Biography.

SIDELIGHTS:

Stephen Halliday takes a close look at the world beneath London in his books The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Capital and Underground to Everywhere: London's Underground Railway in the Life of the Capital. Little is known about Sir Joseph Bazalgette, called the "least-sung of the great Victorian engineers," as he was described by E.S. Turner in the Times Literary Supplement. Born in France, Bazalgette has been credited with raising the life expectancy of London residents by twenty years due to his public works, which include not only the sewer system but also new bridges, roads, and embankments on the Thames River which housed gas pipes and a railway line. Sanitation was already poor in London when the flush toilet was invented in the late eighteenth century; but the increased water flow caused by the popularization of indoor plumbing had a disastrous effect on England's capital city. Cesspools backed up and the river, which is not free-flowing but ruled by tides, became a thick soup of human waste. Disease was on the rise until the more effective sewage system alleviated some of the hazards to public health. Halliday's book focuses less on Bazalgette's personal life than on his engineering achievements and the battles he had to fight to make them reality. According to a critic for the Contemporary Review, the story of his struggles and the changing theories of public health in that era make for "fascinating reading."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Contemporary Review, August, 2000, review of The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Capital, p. 125.

Journal of Social History, summer, 2001, Albert J. Schmidt, review of The Great Stink of London, p. 994.

Lancet, July 24, 1999, David Sharp, review of The Great Stink of London, p. 347.

Public Administration Review, January, 2001, review of The Great Stink of London, p. 121.

Times Literary Supplement, July 23, 1999, review of The Great Stink of London, p. 36.