Beautiful Sewers

Chapter One — The Great Stink

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.

Cholera outbreaks had already killed tens of thousands. Many contemporaries explained disease through miasma: poisonous air arising from decaying matter. The smell was therefore more than a nuisance to people who believed that foul air could kill.

Hot weather intensified the smell of the polluted tidal river. Sewage accumulated on exposed mud and in the water beside a capital which had made the Thames both a drain and a source of drinking water.

Cesspits beneath houses received household waste and required periodic emptying. Where removal was neglected or their fabric leaked, they contaminated the surrounding ground. London was building upwards while leaving a substantial part of its sanitary arrangements under the floor.

The flush toilet, which we will examine in much greater detail in Chapter 12, is one of the great ironies of Victorian sanitary history. It was introduced as a hygienic improvement: a way of removing waste from the house quickly and cleanly, without the smell and mess of the chamber pot. What it actually did, in the short term, was to overwhelm the cesspit system by adding far more water than the cesspits were designed to handle.

From a working edition. The final published text may differ.