Great Cities: London's Great Stink heralds a wonder of industrial world By Emily Mann, The Guardian, adapted by Newsela staff 05/20/2016 Lexile: 1190 Word Count 2092
Editor's Note: By the mid-1800s, the River Thames had been used as a dumping ground for human excrement for centuries. At last, fear of its ‘evil odour’ led to one of the greatest advancements in urban planning: Joseph Bazalgette’s sewage system.
In the steaming hot summer of 1858, there was a hideous stench of human waste rising from the River Thames that was seeping through the honored halls of the Houses of Parliament and was finally too much for Britain’s politicians. Many fled in fear of their lives to the countryside.
Clutching hankies to their noses, they were ready to abandon their newly built House, which had been destroyed by the 1834 fire. The lawmakers agreed that urgent action was needed to purify London of the “evil odor ” that they believed to be the cause of disease and death. The outcome of the “Great Stink,” as that summer’s crisis was coined, was one of history’s most life-improving advances in city planning. It was a monumental construction project driven by unsure science and political self-interest. However, it still dramatically improved the public’s health and laid the foundation for modern London. You’ll see no sign of it on most maps of the capital or from a tour of the streets for it is hidden beneath the city’s surface. It is a wonder of the industrial world: the vast Victorian sewerage system that still flows (and overflows) today.
Doubling Down As A Dumping Ground
London is, of course, an ancient city. However, according to the city’s much-published biographer (and Londoner) Peter Ackroyd, the 19th century “was the true century of change.” By the mid-1800s, reform of the capital’s sanitation, like much else in the nation’s political and social life, was long overdue. For centuries, the “royal river” of celebrations, the city’s main thoroughfare, had doubled as a dumping ground for human, animal and industrial waste. As London’s population more than doubled between 1800 and 1850, making it by far the largest in the world, the build-up of waste itself became a spectacle no one wanted to see or smell. With a lack of planned housing and infrastructure to support the crowded population, increasingly filthy streams, ditches and very old drainage pipes all bubbled into the River Thames, where the detritus litter simply bobbed up and down with the tide. The use of new flushing toilets (sold to so many at the Great Exhibition in 1851) only made things worse. Old cesspools overflowed forcing ever more liquid waste into the river, which belched it back into the city at each high water.
The River Thames Flowed Brown
The “silver Thames” remembered by earlier poets had become, in the words of the Royal Institution scientist Michael Faraday in 1855, “an opaque pale brown fluid." Dropping pieces of white paper into the river, Faraday found that they disappeared from view before sinking an inch below the surface. All too clear was the main contaminant: “Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface, even in water of this kind,” he wrote. Faraday’s report of the dire straits of “Father Thames” was echoed in numerous editorial columns and cartoons. They scorned the once-majestic river’s death into the most polluted city waterway in the world. The British Empire was literally rotting at the core. “Through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of a fine fresh river,” Charles Dickens wrote in Little Dorrit (1855-57). The stinking fumes alone, it was thought, could strike a man dead. What made the water deadly, however, was that a great many Londoners were drinking it. It was piped directly into their homes from the Thames. Even water pumped from outside the city risked contamination with sewage. The wells still in use lay dangerously close to leaking cesspools.
Cholera Was A Most-Feared Killer
In 1834, the humorist minister Sydney Smith vividly described the bad-tasting truth: “He who drinks a tumbler of London water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, women and children on the face of the globe.” The result was waves of water-caused diseases such as dysentery, typhoid and the most feared, cholera. For this “Victorian plague,” as the historian Amanda J. Thomas called it, had no known cure. Both poor and wealthy were not immune. The first major cholera epidemic in Britain, in 1831-32, killed more than 6,000 Londoners. The second, in 1848-49, took more than 14,000. Another outbreak in 1853-54 claimed a further 10,000 lives. With the bodies piling up, the people and the press pushed for change. The working class basket-maker and poet Thomas Miller wrote in the Illustrated London News: “Let us then agitate for pure air and pure water, and break through the monopolies of water and sewer companies, as we would break down the door of a house to rescue some fellow-creature from the flames that raged within. It rests with ourselves to get rid of these evils.” Contaminated Water Causes Cholera
Investigating cholera’s spread in Soho in 1854, the physician Dr. John Snow deduced that the cause was contaminated water. His evidence included the 70 workers in the local brewery who only drank beer and all survived. Yet public health officials were slow to be convinced. The “miasma" or "bad air theory” that diseases were caused by harmful smells in the air was believed to be the cause. The well-meaning social reformer Edwin Chadwick, sure that “all smell is disease” pushed for flushing the sewers into the Thames. The effect was more ill than good. His arguments largely ignored, Dr. Snow died in 1858 at the height of the Great Stink. The bad air event did not unleash a new outbreak of disease. If the miasma or bad air were deadly, the Great Stink surely would have killed thousands. By overpowering the politicians in the Houses of Parliament, though, the stench still proved a catalyst for change. Those that feared the smell were at least right about one thing: the reeking river did relate to the city’s health and needed to be cleaned. MPs met behind curtains soaked with chloride of lime to mask the fumes. In the heatwave of 1858, the stagnating open sewer outside Westminster’s windows boiled under the scorching sun. Just a few years earlier, Faraday warned them that they could not ignore the state of the Thames and will be punished when “a hot season give us sad proof of the folly of our carelessness.”
Big Stink Helps Raise Money For Sanitation
Benjamin Disraeli, the Tory leader in the Commons and eventual prime minister, lamented how “that noble river” had become a hellish "Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror." He introduced legislation to clean the Thames and the main drainage system of the city. In the past, London had lacked the power or the money required to address such an extensive problem of sanitation. However, now the recently formed Metropolitan Board of Works was empowered to raise 3 million pounds and instructed to start work without further delay. The board’s chief engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, had already spent several exasperating years drawing up plans for an ambitious new sanitation system. Each plan was swiftly shelved. At last, he got the go-ahead to begin construction. Stephen Halliday, author of The Great Stink of London, explains: “Bazalgette’s plan, which was modified in some details as construction progressed, proposed a network of main sewers, running parallel to the river, which would intercept both surface water and waste, conducting them to the outfalls at Barking on the northern side of the Thames and Crossness, near Plumstead, on the southern side.” These combined sewers moved rainwater and overflowing river water downstream. It would be sent well beyond the built-up city to the east. From there it would flow more easily out to sea. The network included 82 miles of new sewers. The great underground boulevards were, in some places, larger than the underground train tunnels then under construction. Tipped down about 2 feet per mile, the main drainage sewers used gravity to move the waste downstream. Smaller sewers were egg-shaped (narrower at the bottom than the top) to help the flow.
Shape Of Embankments Helps The Sewage Flow
Pumping stations were built at Chelsea, Deptford, Abbey Mills and Crossness to raise up sewage from low-lying areas so it could flow down and away. The latter two especially were architecturally magnificent because they looked like cathedrals. Symbolic of the grandeur of the entire project, they proudly announced their role made London look more holy. The scheme also involved the huge challenge of embanking the Thames. They created the Victoria, Albert and Chelsea embankments. Bazalgette had experience draining land to make it more useful when he worked as a railway engineer. So London’s embankments were designed not only to carry tunnels (including the underground railway) but also to help cleanse the river by narrowing and strengthening its flow through the city’s center. Halliday notes that while the embankments were Bazalgette’s “most conspicuous works” for which he received the greatest credit, it is on Victoria Embankment that a monument to the engineer, who was knighted in 1875, may be found. He himself regarded the main drainage as his greatest achievement: “It was certainly a very troublesome job,” Bazalgette reflected. “It was tremendously hard work.” The hard work of thousands of laborers overseen by Bazalgette inspired the artist Ford Madox Brown as he painted Work, a large canvas completed in 1865. In the same year, the main drainage works were opened at Crossness by the Prince of Wales, though the construction continued for another decade. Brown’s image is bursting with activity as rich and poor, young and old, country and city depend on the industrious workmen at the center, building an enlightened tunnel below ground. Framed by forearms, tools and bricks – a building material that Bazalgette’s project employed – are carried into the depths in such large amounts that prices went up, along with the wages of bricklayers that rose from 5 to 6 shillings a day.
19th Century System Is Backbone For 21st Century London
According to the Observer newspaper, “every penny spent is sunk in a good cause” in the creation of this “most extensive and wonderful work of modern times.” And the work almost immediately proved its worth: in 1866, most of London was spared from a cholera outbreak which hit part of the East End, the only section not yet connected to the new system. “What was extraordinary about Bazalgette’s scheme was both its simplicity and level of foresight,” writes Paul Dobraszczyk in his book, London’s Sewers. A classic piece of Victorian over-engineering, the infrastructure was planned to accommodate a population growth of 50 percent, from 3 million to 4.5 million. Within 30 years of its completion, the city’s population had in fact doubled again, reaching 6 million. It is testament to the quality of design and construction that, with improvements and additions, the 19th-century system remains the backbone of London’s sewers in the 21st century. But the backbone is now severely strained, as a still-expanding population, dramatic downpours associated with climate change and the loss of green spaces to soak up the excess means the Thames is once again at risk. Bazalgette planned for extreme weather with overflows into the river, to prevent the flooding of homes and streets. Those overflows are now being used more than ever – around 50 times a year – dumping raw sewage under the noses of present-day MPs in Westminster. History Is Repeating Itself
Martin Baggs, the outgoing chief executive of Thames Water, has been upfront about the challenges. “They say that history repeats itself: 150 years ago the River Thames was polluted; that’s where we are again today. Was it acceptable 150 years ago? No, it wasn’t. Is it acceptable today? No, it’s not. We’ve got to do something about it.” Construction of the company’s solution, the Thames Tideway Tunnel – or “super sewer” – is due to begin this year, for completion in 2023. One of the largest civil engineering projects the country has ever seen, and not without controversy, the tunnel is a “visionary work of modern times,” in Ackroyd’s view, “in the spirit of Bazalgette.” Hopefully Ackroyd is right. That great engineer shared some wise words based on his own experiences of re-planning London: “Private individuals are apt to look after their own interests first, and to forget the general effect upon the public. It is necessary that there should be somebody to watch the public interests.”