The "Great Stink": How A Disaster Saved Thousands of Future Londoners.

The Thames, used for centuries as a convenient dumping ground for sewage as well as household and industrial waste (not to mention the bodies of the occasional murder victim and executed pirate), was reduced in the Summer heat to a bubbling vat of stinking filth. The smell was just the most obvious of the problems. Unknown to all, it was a warning of a great threat to the health and lives to the tens of thousands who called the city home.

The city authorities had always had excrement to deal with, but in 1858 due to the sheer scale of all manner of foulness being poured and pumped into the Thames the problem became uncontrollable. By the middle of the 19th Century new flushing lavatories began to become standard in housing. All the waste ended up in the Thames. The situation was approaching crisis point and the authorities couldn’t claim they hadn’t been warned.

When Cholera arrived in London in 1832, over 6,536 people died and an estimated 20,000 people perished nationally. During the second major epidemic in 1848 the death toll in London more than doubled. The third outbreak in 1853–54 Cholera claimed 10,738 lives in the capital. The cause was the increasingly crowded conditions, poor and unsanitary water supplies and failure to deal with sewage meant that no British city was safe from the risk of cholera.

The shrewd and observant physician Dr John Snow was about to challenge existing ideas of "miasma theory" that went back centuries of what caused diseases, and reveal to the World that bacteria and viruses were created and thrive in filthy, unhygienic conditions. He called this "germ theory" and put it before Parliament. The MP's were sceptical and unwilling to accept Snow's findings. When cholera broke out again in 1854, Dr John Snow observed a high number of deaths in Broad Street, Soho, where people used a communal water pump. He removed the handle so the pump couldn’t be used and there were no further deaths on that street. The water had been contaminated by a nearby cesspool through a crack in its bricks. He published his results. The authorities continued to ignore it.

It was the Great Stink of 1858 bowling over the politicians that finally got some results, though. The government’s response during the early days of the stink was to douse the curtains of the Houses of Parliament in chloride of lime, before embarking on a final desperate measure to cure lousy old Father Thames by pouring chalk lime, chloride of lime and carbolic acid directly into the water.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Consultant engineer Joseph Bazalgette, who was already working as a surveyor for the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, was employed to mastermind a plan for sewers, pumping stations and the redevelopment of the embankments of London. The results of his remarkable efforts are still maintaining London’s health today. The Great Stink may not have the historic cachet of the Great Fire or the Plague of London, but its influence was ultimately to the good of the city.