The Smell That Built a City

In the summer of 1858, the Thames was an open sewer roughly four hundred yards wide. London had grown from one million people to two and a half million in fifty years, and every one of those people produced waste, and all of that waste, by way of two hundred thousand cesspools and an expanding tangle of street drains, ended in the river. The Thames had been receiving the city’s sewage at industrial scale since the cholera epidemics of the 1830s and 1840s, when reformers — believing, incorrectly, that the disease was airborne — had successfully campaigned to move waste out of houses and into the river, on the theory that flowing water would carry it away.

It did not flow away. It accumulated. By June 1858, the riverbed at low tide was a sloping bank of fermenting human and animal matter, exposed twice a day to the sun.

The sun, in June 1858, was unusually generous. London recorded its hottest temperatures in over a century, with shade readings above 34°C. The Thames warmed. The bank cooked.

The smell reached the Palace of Westminster, on the riverbank, on or around 6 June.

A government that could not work

The Houses of Parliament had been moved to the river in the 1840s. The new building, completed in 1860 but already partly in use, had been designed with riverside windows facing the Thames. By the second week of June, those windows could not be opened. By the third week, they could not effectively be closed either.

Chloride of lime — bleach — was hung in soaked sheets over the river-facing windows of the chambers. Hundreds of pounds of it were used per day. The Times reported that members of the House of Commons were seen “rushing from the chamber with handkerchiefs to their faces.” A committee meeting on the Thames Embankment, held in a room overlooking the river, was abandoned partway through when one of the members vomited.

Benjamin Disraeli, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House, described the river to the Chamber in language unusual for a Parliamentary debate:

“a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror.”

He proposed that the House be moved upriver to Hampton Court for the duration. The proposal was taken seriously.

The fastest infrastructure bill in British history

A long fight over London’s sewers had been going on since 1848. Six successive Royal Commissions had recommended action. A consulting engineer named Joseph Bazalgette, working for the Metropolitan Board of Works, had submitted a detailed plan in 1856 — eighty-two miles of brick-vaulted intercepting sewers running parallel to the Thames, two pumping stations, and a system that would carry sewage downstream to Crossness and Beckton, where it would be released into the tidal estuary far from the city.

The plan had been approved in principle and stalled for two years over funding. Parliament had refused to commit the necessary three million pounds. Local authorities had refused to raise the rates. The Treasury had refused to guarantee a loan.

The Great Stink broke the stalemate in eighteen days.

A bill granting the Metropolitan Board of Works the power to raise £3 million on the public credit was introduced on 15 July, passed the Commons on 28 July, cleared the Lords on 2 August, and received royal assent the same day. It was, by some measures, the fastest piece of major civil-engineering legislation in nineteenth-century British history.

Bazalgette began construction within months. He designed the system to handle the population the city had in 1858, then doubled the capacity on the theory that London would keep growing. He was right. The sewers he built between 1859 and 1875 — 1,100 miles of them, by the time he was finished — remained the backbone of London’s wastewater system for over a hundred and fifty years. Much of them are still in use today.

The river afterward

The smell was gone by the spring of 1860. The Thames was visibly cleaner within a decade. Cholera in London, which had killed roughly forty thousand people in three epidemics between 1832 and 1854, did not return after 1866 — at exactly the moment when the connection between the disease and contaminated water was finally being accepted by the medical establishment.

Bazalgette was knighted in 1875. He died in 1891 and was buried in Wimbledon, with a memorial later placed on the Victoria Embankment — itself one of his projects. The bronze portrait on the plinth shows a serious, mustached man in a high collar. The inscription, in Latin, reads Flumini vincula posuit: “He put the river in chains.”

The chains held for a century and a half. They are now too small. The new Thames Tideway Tunnel, completed in 2025, runs parallel to Bazalgette’s system. It exists because London has eight million people and his Victorian arithmetic, generous as it was, did not anticipate that.

He thought he had built for the future. He built, as it turns out, for the next future.