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
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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.