Bracknell, as everyone knows, is currently undergoing a great modernisation. Seen as grey and drab in its post-war get up, it was decided in the mid 2000s that the town needed a £240 million regeneration, to transform the centre into a sleek and shiny shopping and leisure destination.

On September 7, it opens to the world and Bracknell residents, long deprived of a beating heart of their own town, will have a town again. While on top it’s all change, with beautiful Lexicon as far as the eye can see, beneath the surface innumerable pipes will continue to wend their way under the town’s homes, quietly doing Bracknell’s dirty work as they have been for decades. Since 1956, the destination of these surprisingly small metal arteries - about the diameter of a cricket ball - has been the Sewage Treatment Works just east of Binfield.

Currently the Thames Water run plant processes the waste of 90,000 people. With the average British human excreting just under half a kilogramme a day, around 14,900 tonnes of human made manure head for the plant each year, the equivalent of 2,500 African elephants. While this is no insignificant amount, what is immediately striking about the treatment works is how quiet it is.

“Three people are on hand to operate the site at any given time,” explains performance manager Emily Goren, as she led me and a begrudging photographer on a tour around the Hazlewood Lane facilities, on which little human activity could be spotted amidst the vast, slowly undulating pits.

The second striking thing is how inoffensive the smell is. Rather than the overpowering festival toilet stink one might expect, the aroma is fruity - not dissimilar to a working farm. According to Andrew Popple, regional operations manager, Boxing Day has its own particular flavour - somewhere between Yorkshire pudding and Brussels sprouts.

Following the path of the sewage we were led first to a large inlet filter, where the biggest unwanted items are separated from the rawest sewage.

“Here we are taking the rag out of the system,” Mr Popple explained.

“All the things people have put down the toilet that they shouldn’t have.”

Amongst the weird and wonderful ephemera caught on the industrial sized colander over the years are Lego bricks, wedding rings, false teeth and a Lala Teletubby toy.

A skip’s worth of pure rag - the stuff Thames Water is keen people stop flushing, given its propensity to block sewers -is turfed off to the dump each week.

In the other direction flows the now slightly cleaner water, past storm tanks occasionally used to catch excess rain water that runs into the town’s drains.

Sometimes the storm tanks can reach capacity, meaning a mixture of rainwater and sewage is dumped in the nearby River Cut. We are also told this only happens in exceptional circumstances.

On the sewage goes, through primary sedimentation tanks in which the sludgier part of the mixture are separated from the water and pumped away to the digestion process. Gas by-products from this section are caught and run through a combined heat and power engine, which produces enough electricity to run the whole plant, with a little left over to sell to the National Grid.

From here the water is rinsed through a bacterial mesh that removes the remaining organic matter. A couple of repetitions later and it is ready to be treated and squirted back into our pipes.

The sludge eventually finds itself in a big heap, to be sent off for a second life as manure.

There is something very pleasing about the whole set up and the thought of its presence, slowly shifting through and making better the products of our weaker moments, with little fuss or offence.

In terms of the future, the works are expanding.

“Currently we can cater for 90,000, the same size as a capacity Wembley crowd,” Mr Popple said.

“With all the development and additional housing we are going to have a major investment. We will be making the works bigger.”