Taking as its starting point two nineteenth-century events — London's cholera outbreak of 1854 and Wellington's typhoid epidemic of 1890 to 1892 — Holland Street recalls a world where disease was thought to travel through miasma, noxious air, and where bacteria were believed to be as real as Hydras, Gorgons and Chimeras dire.

It uses differing visual approaches to map critical sites related to those two events, one marking the birth of modern epidemiology and the other resulting in the construction of Wellington's present sewerage system. In telling that story it places the spectre of human waste centre stage.