It dawned on me last week that the sickly smell at the south end of the Blackwall Tunnel had gone. Then, while passing northbound on Sunday, I noticed that the Syral syrup plant responsible for the pong was being rapidly demolished. Closed on 1st November last year, business transferred to Belgium apparently, don’t know why it took me so long to miss it. The land is owned by Morden College and must be returned to “meadow” haha.
Allegedly, when it was Tunnel Glucose, the workers used to swim in the ice-pop mix. When I think back… damn, that was a pube after all!
(this tunnel scares me, as I’m a claustrofobic… Once I went there by mistake and that was sooo stressful…)
The uniquely revolting pong from the Syral plant was an intrinsic part of the Millennium Dome experience - a literal reminder that the whole thing stank.
The ground beneath the dome is so heavily polluted that even after thousands of tonnes of it were scraped away and dumped, toxic gasses would continue to seep through. So, they put down a huge plastic sheet and built on top of that - with a chimney to vent the nasty fumes … towards whomever was unfortunate enough to live downwind.
I’m quite prepared to believe that the Syral workers swam in the mix - in my brief, and thankfully limited, experience of industrial food production that would have been the most innocuous of their jolly games. :laugh:
