Beautiful Sewers

In the summer of 1858, London’s imperial confidence met a difficulty it could neither annex nor politely ignore. The Thames stank. Parliament stood beside it.

The Thames had always been a working river, and working rivers are not clean. For centuries, Londoners had treated it as a drain, a dump, and a drinking supply, often simultaneously. The river’s self-cleaning capacity — real, if limited — had managed the worst of it for generations. Then the population doubled, and then doubled again. By the 1850s, London was home to more than two million people, and almost none of their waste went anywhere except into the ground, into the cesspits beneath their houses, and eventually, through the soil and the rain, into the Thames.