The Great Stink

It’s 1858, and you’re in London.

This summer has been especially hot. London is at the forefront of the industrial revolution, and it happens to be the biggest city in the world, and the beating heart of the British Empire, now the largest empire history has ever known.

London has been an important city for a long time, but it’s only fairly recently that the population has positively exploded. This has put incredible strain on the infrastructure of the city that was founded during the time of Emperor Claudius. Ancient architecture meshes with 19th century state-of-the-art design.

There’s both extreme wealth and extreme poverty here. Victorian England, in all its splendor, showcased opulent mansions right next door to crowded slums. Disease and social unrest rule the day.

Dear lord, what is that smell?

Your nostrils are filled with the acrid odor. Even your eyes hurt from the wretched smell. It follows you into parliament, where you take your seat alongside other MPs trying to do the business of the people you represent, but all anyone can think about is that tremendous stench.

It’s nauseating, overpowering, and inescapable. No matter where you go in this wretched city, the flames from the Thames scorch your nostrils.

That’s right: we’re talking about the Thames river, which has become an open sewer.

1858 was a banner year for London, but for the worst reason.

Rome was very likely the first city to reach a million inhabitants, some 2000 years before the Great Stink. This may surprise you, but those ancient Romans had a much better sewer system than Victorian London circa 1858. I wrote about that sewer system a little here:

After Rome, there were a few cities with a million inhabitants, and maybe even one with a million and a half—Hangzhou, China during the 12th century—but London left them all in the poop-dust, approaching 3 million by the time of the Great Stink.

Centuries of dumping raw sewage into the Thames (along with a bunch of other stuff you really shouldn’t put into a river, like butchered animal carcasses and even industrial waste) had taken its toll.

Cholera, typhoid, and dysentery were all incredibly common. Crowded and unsanitary conditions were very typical for most of those 3 million folks. Adding fuel to the fire, the industrial revolution demanded lots of factory workers and long hours. Immune systems were weakened by people who weren’t getting adequate rest.

The Great Stink caused business to grind to a near-halt, but it also caused those Members of Parliament to actually do something about it. After all, parliament was directly next to the river Thames!

Unfortunately, the massive engineering project to revamp the sewer system would take many years. Parliament opted to hire a civil engineer named Joseph Bazalgette. His idea was to have a set of interlocking sewers that would collect the waste before it got to the Thames, and massive pumping stations to push the resulting waste much further downstream.

Bazalgette’s icing on the urinal cake was to build the Thames Embankment—a huge wall to redirect the river—allowing the Thames to narrow and to flow much faster. This helped to sweep any remaining sewage out to sea.

Yes, friends, this is yet another poop piece. There’s just not enough dinner table conversation around this subject for my taste, so my quest to share info about all things scatological must continue!

Before we flush this topic down the toilet, let’s think a little:

What’s the Great Stink of today’s generation? Share your stories, whether sewage-based or not, and let’s think about this a bit. Together, we can create a future that doesn’t stink.