The Great Stink: How a Horrific Smell Changed London Forever

Podcast Transcript

In the summer of 1858, London was brought to a standstill by something you couldn’t see but definitely couldn’t ignore: the overwhelming stench of the River Thames.

The event, known as the Great Stink, wasn’t just unpleasant. It forced a modern city to confront a growing crisis of sanitation, public health, and urban planning.

What happened that summer would reshape one of the world’s greatest cities and change how we think about infrastructure forever.

Learn more about The Great Stink of 1858 and the smell that changed history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Looking back at the origins of the 1858 crisis, it is important to remember that London, as the world’s first great industrial city, faced unique challenges.

The driving force behind the Industrial Revolution during this period was the coal-powered steam engine. These coal engines were extremely dirty and emitted exhaust and soot, which covered everything and would hang in the air.

Writers of the era, such as Charles Dickens, provided stark accounts of the environmental devastation caused by the widespread use of coal. Their descriptions frequently paint a picture of factories polluting the air with smoke and contaminating waterways such as the Thames with industrial waste.

Urbanization posed equally severe challenges for English waterways, especially in cities like London.

London’s population surged from 1 million to 2.5 million the mid 19th century and exceeded 6 million by the 20th century. This rapid urbanization placed pressures on the environment that it could not sustain, leading to increasingly dire consequences and setting the stage for a crisis.

In Dickens’ era, London’s population neared 3 million, but its sewage system remained stuck in the dark ages. London’s antiquated sewer system was little more than a series of underground channels. These took waste to the river, which also happened to be London’s only source of drinking water.

If you remember back to my episode on the history of sewers, they are one of the most important inventions that make life in cities possible.

Urban London had long paid the price for its abuse of the River Thames, with recurring cholera outbreaks. Cholera is largely caused by consuming water contaminated with human waste.

A particularly vivid reminder was the 1831 cholera outbreak, which spread through the London water system and killed as many as 30,000 people. It wasn’t until John Snow’s work during the outbreak of 1854 that people began to realize that water was the source of the problem.

At the time, the miasma theory held sway, which said that disease came from breathing corrupted air, which was an interesting concept, given that the water they were drinking was the color of mud.

However, most of the drinkware of the time was made out of pewter, and they couldn’t see the putrid color of the water, even after it was boiled for their morning tea.

The hastily constructed homes for London’s booming urban population often lacked toilets, so human waste was collected in buckets. Rather than keep it indoors, which would have been intolerable, residents dumped it in the streets. From the buckets, it ended up coating the streets. In some areas, the road was covered by several inches of human and animal waste.

Estimates from the 19th century suggest up to 300,000 horses lived in London. Each produced up to 30 lbs of manure per day and several liters of urine. Whenever it rained in London, this horrifying runoff made its way into the city’s archaic storm system and, inevitably, into the Thames.

Charles Dickens predicted what could happen in his novel Little Dorrit, published a year before the summer of 1858, when he said: Miles of close wells and pits of houses, where the inhabitants gasped for air, stretched far away towards every point of the compass. Through the heart of the town, a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed in the place of a fine, fresh river.

In Little Dorrit, Dickens harshly criticized the city’s sewer management office by lampooning it as the Circumlocution Office, a fictional body whose sole purpose was to explore how NOT to do things, a clear dig at the real bureaucratic failings of the city.

When he wasn’t writing novels exposing the trials of urbanization, Dickens published his own weekly journal, Household Words, a Weekly Journal of Charles Dickens. During the summer of 1858, he addressed the sewage problem when he wrote:

The Thames, which, before reaching London, is polluted by the drainage from seven hundred thousand people, and in London deposits the filth of hundreds of thousands upon mud-banks exposed daily at low water, and in these hot days, festering at the heart of the metropolis.

Dickens wasn’t alone in his concern for London; his worries resonated with others on the front lines of science and public health. Alongside Dickens, the city’s most famous scientist, Michael Faraday, stepped forward in the crusade against pollution of the river.

In addition to his work on electromagnetic induction and electric motors, Faraday was among the first to sound the alarm on the crisis of the Thames. In 1855, several years before the catastrophic summer of 1858, Faraday conducted his white cardstock experiments.

Deeply concerned about Thames pollution, Faraday devised a simple test: as he walked along the river’s banks, he dropped white cardstock into the water, recording the depth at which it vanished from view. Faraday reported the cards vanished from sight before they had even sunk an inch. The water was a pale, opaque brown fluid.

Faraday published his findings in an editorial in The Times of London on July 9, 1855, published under the title, Observations on the Filth of the Thames. He warned that if the city didn’t act, it was effectively inviting a disaster. Faraday warned: “If we neglect this subject, we cannot expect to do so with impunity; nor ought we to be surprised if a hot season should give us sad proof of our carelessness.”

In the summer of 1858, a confluence of factors brought the River Thames to a crisis point. As July temperatures reached an astonishing 118°F (48°C), the river’s condition rapidly deteriorated, fulfilling earlier, ominous warnings. This perfect storm of events ultimately led to an environmental disaster.

Centuries of built-up waste in the Thames began to literally ferment in the water. The putrid fermentation intensified, unleashing a relentless, fetid odor that swept across the city.

The city’s suffering was captured by a series of famous cartoons in The Times of London, illustrating Father Thames rising from a stew of putrid water filled with dead animals and industrial waste.

By a twist of fate, Parliament had just relocated to the Westminster campus, directly on the Thames and now at the epicenter of the catastrophe.

The parliamentarians resorted to coating all the building’s curtains with calcium hypochlorite, also known as chloride of lime, in an effort to mask the acrid odor.

It didn’t work.

Members of Parliament fled their offices, forced to hold scented handkerchiefs to their faces as the odor overwhelmed any attempts to mask them.

Conditions grew so vile that even the most steadfast Londoners were finally forced to flee the city. Chancellor of the Exchequer Benjamin Disraeli was among those who could no longer endure it, leaving London for his country home by July.

Even Queen Victoria was not spared by the disaster as the crisis continued to escalate. In an effort to calm the public, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert took a boat ride on the Thames to show the city that all was well.

The trip was a colossal failure.

Despite scented handkerchiefs and a luxury boat, the royal couple managed only a few minutes before ordering the boat back as the dropping water levels exposed even more sewage,

Ironically, just a month after the Queen’s rapid retreat, she sent the world’s first transcontinental message to America via 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of undersea cable, an astonishing technological feat considering London’s waste problem that existed just miles from her palace.

Dickens argued that the message had finally reached the Circumlocution Office. Now that political leaders experienced the crisis firsthand, Parliament was compelled to act, launching years of blame and debate that produced little action at first.

Ironically, the plan to solve the crisis had been known for decades, waiting for adoption. The famous landscape artist and Faraday’s associate, John Martin, had drawn a plan to solve the problem.

In 1828, Martin published A Plan for Supplying Pure Water to the Cities of London and Westminster, and of Materially Improving and Beautifying the Western Parts of the Metropolis, which called for creating embankments along the river to capture waste and carry it parallel to the river, not into it.

Surprisingly, even dire public health warnings failed to spur Parliament into action. An 1842 report by published health reformer Edwin Chadwick in the Lancet claimed that as a result of filth, only half of children born in urban England would reach their 5th birthday.

Another cholera outbreak in 1849, which was again blamed on the miasma theory, didn’t move the needle. The city was not ready for a solution on this scale until 1858.

Benjamin Disraeli, the staunchest advocate for reform, explained the need for a solution when he said: That noble river, which has so long been the pride and joy of Englishmen, which has hitherto possessed every quality that can condition a great city to prosperity and health, has now become a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror.

The daunting task of saving the city fell on Joseph Bazalgette, Chief Engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works. Bazelgette’s genius was based on several fundamental insights.

He concluded that the North-South alignment of London’s sewer systems, which emptied into the Thames, needed to be altered. The new design would run the sewers parallel to the river and extend them to the river’s estuaries outside the city, allowing tidal currents to carry the waste out to the ocean.

Understanding the great cost, Bazelgette convinced Parliamentarians that the size of the system’s pipes needed to be expanded at a high cost, but given London’s urbanization, it would have to be done sooner or later. The city’s engineers also implemented Martin’s embankment plan to catch waste before it entered the Thames.

Bazelgette championed the use of Portland Cement for the new sewer systems, asserting that this modern material would endure the passage of time and withstand the strain of London’s continued growth.

The gamble to use Portland Cement paid off, as the sewer system still functions and is structurally sound more than 160 years later.

Bazalgette’s plan saved the city: with 82 miles of main intercepting sewers and over 1,100 miles of street sewers, he ensured that waste was caught before it reached the Thames and funneled east toward the ocean.

Bazalgette was knighted and remains a celebrated figure in English history.

Out of the stink of 1858 came one of the greatest engineering achievements in modern history, transforming London and setting a standard for cities worldwide. It’s a reminder that sometimes progress doesn’t begin with inspiration, but with desperation.

It turns out that sometimes the driving force of progress isn’t vision or ambition, but the overwhelming desire to escape a really bad smell.