The Great Stink of 1858: London's Sanitation Crisis and Sewer Reform

[00:00:00]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.

[00:00:10]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.

[00:00:39]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.

[00:01:25]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.

[00:02:19]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.

[00:02:35]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.

[00:02:56]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.

[00:03:10]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 washed directly into the Thames. What's more, much of the city's water supply was taken  from the same river that they were polluting.

[00:04:11]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.

[00:04:49]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.

[00:06:27]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.

[00:06:41]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.

[00:07:27]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.

[00:07:55]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.

[00:09:16]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.

[00:09:27]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.

[00:10:05]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.

[00:10:20]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.

[00:11:19]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 that thumbs up button which is there on your  left. If you have any questions, or comments, feel free to write those in the comment section,  I will be happy to personally respond. And if you'd like more snippets of forgotten  history, all you need to do is subscribe.