London’s newest museum attraction is greasy, smelly and a glimpse at the hidden underside of urban life.
The Museum of London on Thursday unveiled its latest display, a chunk of a 130-ton fatberg that was blasted out of a city sewer last year.
It took sewage workers with jet hoses nine weeks to dislodge the 250-metre-long mass of oil, fat, diapers and baby wipes from beneath Whitechapel in the city’s East End.
The museum has lovingly preserved a chunk the size of a shoe-box, whose mottled consistency a curator likens to parmesan crossed with moon rock. Close examination reveals the presence of tiny flies. Three nested transparent boxes protect visitors from potentially deadly bacteria, and from the fatberg’s noxious smell.
Curator Vyki Sparkes says the lump started out smelling like a used diaper “that maybe you’d forgotten about and found a few weeks later.” The pong has now mellowed to “damp Victorian basement.”
“It’s disgusting and fascinating,” she said of the fatberg. “And that’s what’s been great to work with it has this impact on people.”
Souvenirs available
The museum is so confident of the item’s ick-appeal that the exhibition titled ‘Fatberg!’ comes with a selection of merchandise including T-shirts and fatberg fudge.
Ms. Sparkes considers the fatberg a natural for the museum, which charts the city’s ancient and modern history. The word itself, a hybrid of “fat” and “iceberg”, is one of London’s gifts to the world: It was coined by the city’s sewer workers and entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015.
She said museum curators struggled to figure out how to preserve their volatile sample of the mass of detritus mixed with cooking fat, palm oil and oils found in body lotion before they decided to air-dry it.
