The Victorian Era

What Was the Great Stink of London

Article · Science & Invention · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The Great Stink of London was a public health crisis of the summer of 1858 in which the smell of raw sewage flowing in the Thames became so overwhelming that the curtains in the House of Commons had to be soaked in chloride of lime to permit the Members to continue their work. The crisis, which centred on the hot, dry months of June and July 1858, forced Parliament to act on the long-planned scheme of Sir Joseph Bazalgette for a comprehensive new sewer system for London, the How was the London sewer system built?. The phrase was coined by the press at the time, and the episode has remained a byword for the failure of the old system, the success of the new engineering, and the importance of public investment in public health. The crisis is part of the wider history of Victorian Medicine and Public Health and of the Victorian Science, Invention, and Technology that made the new infrastructure possible.

The Thames in the 1850s

By the 1850s, the Thames was the open sewer of London. The medieval and early modern city had relied on cesspools, river-flushing, and the collection of night soil by the nightmen, but the population of London had grown so much that the old system had broken down. The 1851 census recorded a population of over 2.6 million in the metropolitan area, and the How did London’s population grow? of the period had outstripped the city’s ability to dispose of its waste. The new flushing toilets, of the kind manufactured by the Doulton and Twyford companies, sent the sewage directly into the river, and the result was a foul, fetid, and increasingly unhealthy stream flowing through the heart of the capital.

The smell was not new. Visitors to the river in the early 1850s had noted the stench, and the What was Victorian London like? had long been described in terms of its smell. Charles Dickens, the great chronicler of London, had written about the smell of the river in Bleak House of 1852-53, and the novel’s conceit of a Thames that “smells of all the dead dogs in all the world” was already a commonplace. But the summer of 1858 was exceptionally hot, the level of the river was unusually low, and a long stretch of hot, dry weather produced a stench so powerful that it was detected on the streets of Westminster, in the offices of Whitehall, and in the corridors of the Palace of Westminster itself.

The Parliamentary Crisis

The crisis was a turning point in the long campaign for a comprehensive sewer system for London. The first proposals for a new system had been put forward in the 1840s, and the Metropolitan Sewers Commission had been established in 1848 under the chairmanship of Edwin Chadwick, the great sanitary reformer. The Commission had recommended the construction of a network of intercepting sewers to carry the sewage downstream of the city, but the proposal had run into political, financial, and engineering difficulties, and it had not been acted on. By 1858, the Great Stink had made the issue politically urgent.

In July 1858, the government introduced the Metropolis Local Management Amendment Act, which established the Metropolitan Board of Works under the chairmanship of the engineer John Thwaites and gave it the power to borrow £3 million for the construction of a new sewer system. Bazalgette’s scheme, which had been worked out in detail over the previous decade, was a network of 82 miles of new intercepting sewers, running from the northern and southern sides of the river and discharging the sewage downstream at Beckton and Crossness, well below the city. The works were begun in 1859 and were largely complete by 1875. The story of their construction is told in How was the London sewer system built?.

The Reports of the Crisis

The reports of the Great Stink in the press were vivid. The Times reported on 18 June 1858 that “the Thames at Westminster is now in such a state that the gentlemen who are compelled to inhale the effluvia which arise from it are, by a most unjust law of nature, subjected to an infliction which no amount of care on their own part can enable them to escape from”. A letter from Michael Faraday, the chemist and the discoverer of electromagnetic induction, published in The Times on 25 June 1858, described how Faraday had walked along the river from Waterloo to Hungerford Bridge “to see whether by any chance the atmosphere was less contaminated there than elsewhere”. The smell, Faraday wrote, was “a very strong, very bad smell, a smell of bilge water, a smell of sewage”. The editor of The Times, John Thadeus Delane, also wrote about the crisis, and the phrase “the Great Stink” was coined by the press of the day. The chemical company of Clayton’s, the manufacturers of the disinfectant chloride of lime, supplied vast quantities to Parliament, and the curtains of the House of Commons were soaked in the chemical to permit the Members to continue their work.

The Wider Sanitary Reform

The Great Stink was part of a wider sanitary reform movement. The Public Health Act of 1848, championed by Edwin Chadwick, had established the General Board of Health and had given local authorities the power to appoint medical officers of health. The 1848 act was repealed in 1854, but the principle of public health intervention had been established, and the Great Stink of 1858 revived the cause. The Royal Commission on the Health of Towns, established in 1843, had documented the appalling conditions in which the working classes of the Victorian Cities, Transport, and Entertainment lived, and the report of the Commission was one of the founding documents of the sanitary movement. The reformers, including Chadwick, the lawyer Thomas Southwood Smith, the epidemiologist John Simon, the statisticians William Farr and Florence Nightingale, and the engineer Joseph Bazalgette, all campaigned for the new legislation that followed the Great Stink.

The sanitary reform of the 1870s, including the Public Health Act of 1872, the Sale of Food and Drugs Act of 1875, the Artisans’ Dwellings Act of 1875, and the Rivers Pollution Prevention Act of 1876, were all part of the response to the conditions revealed by the Great Stink and by the work of the sanitary reformers. The new public health legislation was part of the wider history of Victorian Political History, and it is part of the longer story of Victorian Morality and Social Reform.

The Stench in Literature and Memory

The Great Stink entered the literature of the period. Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, the last novel he completed, opens with a scene of a man and a woman pulling a dead body out of the Thames, and the smell of the river is a recurring motif in the Victorian Novel of the 1850s and 1860s. The period’s great sanitary novel, Our Mutual Friend of 1864-65, was published in serial form just as Bazalgette’s sewers were being built, and the image of the city of London as a place of filth and disease was a powerful one in the period.

The memory of the Great Stink also shaped the public memory of the Victorians. The episode became a byword for the failure of the old system, the success of the new engineering, and the importance of public investment in public health. The death of the last great cholera epidemic in London in 1866, just two years after Bazalgette’s eastern sewer was opened, was a direct consequence of the new works. The story of the Great Stink is central to the history of Victorian Medicine and Public Health.