History doesn't always smell like roses, in fact sometimes it stinks, quite literally. Because if
you want to have a human civilization then you have to deal with the problem of human waste.
The history of sanitation doesn't sound very exciting, but it is a key technology for humans
to thrive. In the middle of the 19th century the problem of accumulated human waste became
particularly acute in one of the world's greatest cities. And the answer didn't just transform the
field of sanitation engineering, it changed the way that we understand the nature of disease,
and how it is spread, saving countless lives. The Great Stink of 1858 deserves to be remembered.
The historic foundations of the City of London go back at least to the Stone Age as foundations
for Mesolithic structures dating back to 5000 BCE have been unearthed near where the river Ephraim
meets the River Thames. An 11th century history written by a cleric named Geoffrey of Monmouth,
suggests that the name London was derived from the pre-roman King Ludd,
although his work is considered unreliable and modern scholars more often attribute the name
to a Celtic origin. Perhaps Llan Dian, meaning lake fort. However there is a lack of evidence
of significant settlement before Roman times, and scholars today generally agree that the
settlement was originated by the Romans, sometime after the Roman invasion of Britain in 43 AD,
and was called Londinium. Remains of Roman walls can still be seen in London today.
At some 215 miles long, the River Thames is the longest river entirely in England. The river was
named by Britannic Celts, and might mean dark, possibly because the river is muddy. From the
start the importance of the settlement of Londinium depended upon the River Thames,
as the Roman built bridge over the river turned the settlement into a major road nexus, and
port. The settlement was located in a spot where the river was narrow enough to build a bridge,
but still deep enough for seagoing ships at the time. It was along the tide way,
the part of the river still affected by ocean tides, which would help ships trying to move
upriver. Several bridges had been built on the approximate side of the original Roman timber
bridge with the most current being a box girder bridge that opened in 1973. The location along
the Thames continued to make the city important, and it has often been the center of struggle,
beginning with the Boudican revolt in 60 AD, which left the settlement temporarily deserted.
The city has withstood invasions, plagues, the devastating fire of 1666, numerous riots,
revolts and protests, as well as the terrible aerial bombardment of the Blitz during World
War Two. And through it all, the very heart of the city has always been the River Thames.
The city went through a period of particular growth during the 19th century. In 1801,
less than a million people lived in London. By 1901, the population had grown to more than six
and a half million. During the nineteenth century, London became the largest city in the world,
the capital of the British Empire. At its height, the largest empire in the history of the world.
The population of the city of London roughly doubled just in the four decades between 1851
and 1891, and that raised enormous challenges to provide that population with clean water,
and deal with their accumulated waste.
The city's sewer system had been growing since the 1600s, with entire rivers encased in brick
sewers. Multiple water projects occurred around London in the 18th and early 19th century to
bring water to the city, establishing a number of reservoirs, and medieval wooden pipes were
replaced by modern iron pipes to carry water to the city. More than 100 sewers were constructed
between the 1750s, and the 1850s, along with hundreds of thousands of cesspits. Cesspits
are essentially just a holding cistern and where waste is supposed to break down. Flush toilets,
made practical by the invention of the S trap by Scottish mechanic Alexander Cumming in 1775,
started to be industrially manufactured and widely available by the middle of the
19th century. You might think all that work and clean water would improve the city sanitation,
but what it really meant is that the city's sewer system was often overwhelmed and overflowed,
and much of the accumulated human and industrial waste watched directly into the Thames. What's
more, much of the city's water supply was taken from the same river that they were polluting.
In fact, attempts to improve sanitation made the problem worse. The 1846 Nuisances Removal
and Disease Prevention Act had forced the filling and enclosure of old cesspits, and the joining of
house waste systems to the sewers. While this was supposed to remove waste from the city,
what it actually did was dumped untreated human waste down sewers originally intended for storm
drainage, directly into the Thames. And along with that human waste went the rotting carcasses
of dead animals, the offal from hundreds of slaughterhouses, the chemical and industrial
wastes from factories and businesses, and all the accumulated filth of a major city.
The Thames became a giant cesspool. A poem in Punch magazine in 1848 read, “Filthy river,
filthy river, fowl from London to the Knorr. What art thou but one vast gutter. One tremendous
common shore.” The most devastating result of the drainage into the Thames was the dreaded disease
cholera. An infection of the small intestine by the bacteria Vibrio cholerae, cholera has existed
for centuries on the Indian subcontinent, but cholera pandemics became common throughout the
world in the 19th century, as the disease was able to disperse via trade and the movement of
military troops. Cholera outbreaks in London in 1831, 1848-49 and 1853-54 had killed more
than 31,000 Londoners. In July of 1855, Michael Faraday, one of the most famous and influential
scientists in the world, wrote a letter to the London newspaper at the times saying,
“Of the Thames, surely the river which flows for so many miles through London, ought not
be allowed to become a fermenting sewer.” Then came June of 1858. The summer was unusually hot,
by some accounts 15 degrees above average for that time of year. The 16th of June was the hottest
recorded day up to that point in history in London, 94.5 degrees fahrenheit, in the shade. A
drought hit the countryside, and the level of the Thames sunk. The great mounds of waste that once
floated around the Thames now settled on the shore and fermented, and decomposed, creating such a
stench that the people could scarcely move within the city. The press called it, The Great Stink.
While this had a dreadful effect on London, the government was still loath
to act because of the costs of changing the city's sewer system. But perhaps the
greatest driver for the government to act was the location of a very famous building.
The Palace of Westminster had been built in the 11th century, when its location along
the Thames was of strategic importance. Although technically a royal residence, it is the home of
the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The so-called Old Palace had gradually grown,
and had been significantly remodeled between 1824 and 1827. But a fire in 1834 had destroyed
most of the palace. The Gothic structure that we know today was the work of British architect Sir
Charles Barry. Construction of the new palace began in 1840, and the House of Commons chamber
had only been completed in 1852. Aside from being one of the most recognizable buildings
in the world, the lovely new building was still right next to the Thames, and The Great Stink.
The smell made business impossible. MPs flooded the meeting rooms holding handkerchiefs to their
noses, and Parliament faced a choice. Move the seat of government or address the pollution of the
Thames. After soaking the curtains of Parliament in lime chloride to hide the smell, Parliament
took just 18 days to pass a law allowing the Metropolitan Board of Works to borrow 3 million
pounds, to fund the construction of sewers that would deposit waste outside the metropolitan area.
The task fell to Joseph Bazalgette, the chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works,
who had been working on a more systematic plan for the city sewers since 1849, but had never gotten
funding. The plan included more than 1100 miles of new street sewers, and 85 miles of interconnecting
sewers that had a minimum drop of two feet per mile. Using gravity as well as pumping stations
to carry the waste to the east, outside the city to open sewers, that will allow it to more
easily reach the ocean. In order to carry all of London's sewage many miles downstream, Bazalgette
had to build a huge main, running parallel to the Thames. This involved building embankments
that created 52 acres of dry land. The project, completed between 1859 and 1871, was described
by the newspaper The Observer as, “The most expensive, and wonderful work of modern times.”
The Great Stink actually mitigated with the weather. In July cooler weather came,
and there were rains, and that washed the putrescent filth that had been laying on the shore
sometimes 100 feet long and 6 feet deep, back into the river. But The Great Stink paid London,
and the rest of the world a great service, because at the time, the transmission of the disease
cholera was not well understood. The population of most scientists of the era believed in the theory
called The Miasma Theory, which suggests that cholera was passed by unclean air and bad smells.
And that led to all sorts of medical advice, and public procedures to try to prevent cholera that
actually didn't prevent it in the least. In fact, cholera is caused by drinking contaminated water.
The reason that Parliament came up with the money to address The Great Stink wasn't just
because the smell was intolerable, but because people believed that the smell itself was causing
disease. It wasn't, but by addressing the smell, the city addressed the real reason that they were
having cholera epidemics. The fact that they were drawing their drinking water from a river that had
been polluted with human feces. And that fact was all brought home in 1866, when there was a further
cholera outbreak in London that killed 5,500 Londoners in the only part of the city that hadn't
yet been hooked up to the new sewer system. London has not had a major cholera outbreak ever since.
This proof that cholera was caused by polluted water, and not from Miasma,
has led to mitigation measures that might have saved millions of lives. Although cholera still
causes as many as a hundred thirty thousand deaths a year, mostly in the third world.
Originally Bazalgette’s sewers just dumped the waste into the ocean outside the city of London,
but people eventually thought that that was filthy too, and so the waste was collected on barges and
dumped out in the North Sea, and finally they stopped dumping it in the ocean all together,
and started incinerating the waste. Bazalgette's sewers are still in use today,
but 150 years later, London is starting to face the same problems that it had back in
the 1850s. Bazalgette had designed his system for about 4 million users, and today there are
about 8 million users. The system had a built-in overflow that was intended for extreme weather,
that was intended to keep the sewers from backing up and flooding the streets and
cisterns with sewage. But with so many people using the system that happens frequently today
as many as 50 times a year London is again dumping human waste into the Thames. And so today there is
another massive works project in the spirit of Bazalgette called, The Thames Tideway Tunnel,
described as a super sewer that is under construction, and intended for completion in 2023.
I'm the History Guy. I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series of short snippets of
forgotten history about 10 minutes long. And if you did enjoy it, please go ahead and click
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