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The Men Who Map the Sewers
Beneath the city runs a second city, Victorian and vast. A small team keeps its map.
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The brickwork is beautiful, which no one was meant to see. A hundred and fifty years ago engineers built these tunnels to last, and lined them with arches as careful as a cathedral’s, for the sole audience of the water and the few who would ever come down to read them.
What follows is less an argument than an act of attention — the deliberate, slightly old-fashioned business of looking at one thing for longer than is strictly efficient.
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