The Great Stink

Westminster Bridge, June 1858

Stand on Westminster Bridge in June 1858 and the first thing that reaches you is not the view. June that year was the fourth-hottest between 1800 and 1858 — 16.8 °C on the Met Office mean — and on 16 June the shade itself stood at about 94.5 °F. The London Museum puts the spike at 30 degrees: the city had never smelled anything like what came next.

The river sank lower than normal, leaving sewage stranded on the banks, and the filth baked in the heat. Over two and a half million people lived in London then, the largest city in the world — and London had been drinking its river for decades.

At Westminster, curtains and blinds were soaked in chloride of lime to block the smell — and still it came through the windows, off a riverbed of baking waste. The Crossness timeline puts it bluntly: Parliament, driven from its chambers by the stench of sewage.

One thing had made it worse: the increasingly popular flushing toilet, letting wealthy families send everything straight to the river. Dickens had already named it in Little Dorrit — as the London Museum quotes the line: “Through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of a fine fresh river.”

7 July 1855

Three years before the stink, Michael Faraday took the steamboat between London and Hungerford bridges, at low water, and wrote to The Times. “The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid,” he began — and then he proved it.

He tore up white cards, moistened them, and dropped them overboard at every pier: “Before they had sunk an inch below the surface they were undistinguishable, though the sun shone brightly at the time.” Near the bridges the filth “rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface.” His verdict: “The whole river was for the time a real sewer.”

“There is nothing figurative in the words I have employed, or any approach to exaggeration. They are the simple truth.” And the warning, three years early: if the river is neglected, “we cannot expect to do so with impunity; nor ought we to be surprised if, ere many years are over, a season give us sad proof of the folly of our carelessness.” The season came in 1858.

15 July 1858

On 15 July 1858 Disraeli rose in the Commons to ask leave for a Bill. “That noble river, so long the pride and joy of Englishmen,” he said, “has really become a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors.” Almost all living things in the Thames, he went on, had disappeared or been destroyed — and “a pervading apprehension of pestilence” hung over the city.

The price, Disraeli reckoned, could be no less than three million pounds — a floor, not a vote — paid by a rate of at most threepence in the pound for forty years, with a sinking fund to clear the debt. One member objected that no such sum could ever be enough. The House let the Bill be introduced anyway.

2 August 1858

Eighteen days after the speech, Parliament was prorogued, and the Queen “readily sanctioned the Act which you have passed for the Purification of that noble River.” The commission went to Joseph Bazalgette, Chief Engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works.

Work began in 1859: intercepting sewers to carry the waste east, away from the crowded centre, to outfalls and pumping stations on both sides of the river — Deptford, Abbey Mills, and, on the southern marshes, Crossness. Keep scrolling: the tunnels are going down.

Under the streets

Down you go, past the brick barrel of the outfall sewer running east under Woolwich toward the marshes. The tunnels are falling into place mile by mile — and they are being built for a smell.

People blamed the smell itself — what they called the “miasma.” Miasma theory, the belief that disease rose from foul air, dominated public thinking, and the early reformers blamed bad air rather than contaminated water — though the orthodoxy had already been challenged. The tunnels were built for a smell all the same.

That summer, water-borne diseases like cholera and typhoid fever swept through the population — the London Museum’s account of what the Thames carried — while Londoners still used the dirty Thames for drinking and washing. The contemporary record, in Hansard, notes no epidemic — Tite, in late June, called its absence a great blessing. Keep scrolling: the reservoir is filling, and the tide is about to turn.

Crossness, high water

You are standing at Crossness, the southern outfall, at high water. Behind the gates, the covered reservoir holds everything the sewers have been storing — because on this side of the river, Bazalgette wrote, sewage goes out at high water only. Press and hold, and let the tide take it.

The window is two hours after high water — the reservoir stores the sewage except for those two hours — and the ebb carries it 26 miles below London Bridge, with no return on the next flood. Before these gates, everything went out at low water and came back on the flood; the drift of many days toward the sea was almost imperceptible.

4 April 1865

On 4 April 1865 the Prince of Wales turned the handle and the great beam heaved: the first pumpful rose into the reservoir. Above the engines, Driver had raised a palace for the people — ornamental cast iron over sewage, Suffolk white brick outside. Cricket was once played on the reservoir roof.

The scheme left two reckonings of its miles, and this page refuses to merge them: Bazalgette counted about 1,300 miles of sewers with 82 of main intercepting, while the London Museum counts 1,100 miles of drains into 82 miles of new brick sewers. Touch each figure: it answers with its source attached.

Officially opened in 1865, finished in 1875 — and much of it is still used today, because the tunnels were built far larger than needed, anticipating the growth of the city. The sewers outgrew their century.