London's river smelled so foul that Parliament finally fixed the sewers.
In the hot summer of 1858, the Thames was effectively an open sewer and the smell engulfed Westminster. MPs soaked curtains in chemicals and talked of fleeing to Oxford. Within weeks they approved a vast new sewer system. It was built to stop bad air, but it worked because it stopped dirty water.
By the 1850s London's population had risen to about three million. Flushing toilets and new water pipes sent ever more waste into ageing sewers and cesspits, most of which drained straight into the Thames. In 1855 Michael Faraday dropped white paper into the river to test its murkiness and reported that the whole river was effectively a sewer. Cholera had struck London three times, killing more than 30,000 people across the 1831, 1848–49 and 1853–54 outbreaks.
Most Victorians blamed miasma, the belief that disease spread through foul air. The physician John Snow had argued in 1849 that cholera spread through contaminated water, and in 1854 he traced cases to a water pump in Broad Street, Soho, but few took notice. So when a heatwave in July and August 1858 made the river's stench unbearable, the stench itself seemed a deadly threat. Curtains in Parliament were soaked in chloride of lime, Disraeli was seen fleeing a committee room with a handkerchief to his nose, and moving government to Oxford or St Albans was discussed.
Suddenly Parliament moved fast. A bill passed on 2 August let the Metropolitan Board of Works borrow £3 million, and the engineer Joseph Bazalgette got to build his plan: 82 miles of main sewers, fed by around 1,100 miles of street sewers, carrying waste east beyond the city. Pumping stations lifted the sewage, and three new embankments along the Thames, the Victoria, Chelsea and Albert, housed the pipes. The main work, finished in 1875, used 318 million bricks.
It ended London's cholera outbreaks. A final epidemic in 1866 was confined to an East End district not yet connected to the system, where a water company had let sewage reach its reservoir. Bazalgette is thought to have saved more lives than any other Victorian official, and his system still serves a city of over nine million people.
Source: Wikipedia — Great Stink · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
