Great Stink
The Great Stink was an event in Central London during July and August 1858 in which the hot weather exacerbated the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent that was present on the banks of the River Thames.
The miasma from the effluent was thought to transmit contagious diseases, and three outbreaks of cholera before the Great Stink were blamed on the ongoing problems with the river.
The authorities accepted a proposal from the civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette to move the effluent eastwards along a series of interconnecting sewers that sloped towards outfalls beyond the metropolitan area.
Two of the more ornate stations, Abbey Mills in Stratford and Crossness on the Erith Marshes, with architectural designs from the consultant engineer, Charles Driver, are listed for protection by English Heritage.
Bazalgette's work ensured that sewage was no longer dumped onto the shores of the Thames and brought an end to the cholera outbreaks; his actions are thought to have saved more lives than the efforts of any other Victorian official.
[4][5] The scientist Michael Faraday described the situation in a letter to The Times in July 1855: shocked at the state of the Thames, he dropped pieces of white paper into the river to "test the degree of opacity".
During the second outbreak, John Snow, a London-based physician, noticed that the rates of death were higher in those areas supplied by the Lambeth and the Southwark and Vauxhall water companies.
He had been working as a consultant engineer in the railway industry until overwork had brought about a serious breakdown in his health; his appointment to the commission was his first position on his return to employment.
[21] London was mapped into high-, middle- and low-level areas, with a main sewer servicing each; a series of pumping stations was planned to remove the waste towards the east of the city.
[28] In a letter to a friend, Dickens said: "I can certify that the offensive smells, even in that short whiff, have been of a most head-and-stomach-distending nature",[29] while the social scientist and journalist George Godwin wrote that "in parts the deposit is more than six feet deep" on the Thames foreshore, and that "the whole of this is thickly impregnated with impure matter".
[7][31] Combined with an extended spell of dry weather, the level of the Thames dropped and raw effluent from the sewers remained on the banks of the river.
[7] Queen Victoria and Prince Albert attempted to take a pleasure cruise on the Thames, but returned to shore within a few minutes because the smell was so terrible.
One of its reporters described the river as a "pestiferous and typhus breeding abomination",[35] while a second wrote that "the amount of poisonous gases which is thrown off is proportionate to the increase of the sewage which is passed into the stream".
[36] The leading article in The Illustrated London News commented that: We can colonise the remotest ends of the earth; we can conquer India; we can pay the interest of the most enormous debt ever contracted; we can spread our name, and our fame, and our fructifying wealth to every part of the world; but we cannot clean the River Thames.
[40] Four days later a second MP said to Manners that "By a perverse ingenuity, one of the noblest of rivers has been changed into a cesspool, and I wish to ask whether Her Majesty's Government intend to take any steps to remedy the evil?"
[45][46] The leading article in The Times observed that "Parliament was all but compelled to legislate upon the great London nuisance by the force of sheer stench".
To overcome the problem he instituted a quality control system to test batches of cement, that is described by the historian Stephen Halliday as both "elaborate" and "draconian".
[57] The newly built station at Crossness was designed by Bazalgette and a consultant engineer, Charles Driver, a proponent of the use of cast iron as a building material.
[59] The power for pumping the large amount of sewage was provided by four massive beam engines, named Victoria, Prince Consort, Albert Edward and Alexandra, which were manufactured by James Watt and Co.[59][60][61] The station was opened in April 1865 by the Prince of Wales—the future King Edward VII—who officially started the engines.
[62] The ceremony, which was attended by other members of royalty, MPs, the Lord Mayor of London and the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, was followed by a dinner for 500 within the building.
[64] With the successful completion of the southern outflow, one of the board members of the MBW, an MP named Miller, proposed a bonus for Bazalgette.
[68] Work began on the system on 31 January 1859,[18] but the builders encountered numerous problems in construction, including a labourers' strike in 1859–60, hard frosts in winter, and heavier than normal rainfall.
[69][70] The high-level sewer—the most northern of the works—ran from Hampstead Heath to Stoke Newington and across Victoria Park, where it joined with the eastern end of the mid-level sewer.
[72] The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, in his Buildings of England, thought the building showed "exciting architecture applied to the most foul purposes"; he went on to describe it as "an unorthodox mix, vaguely Italian Gothic in style but with tiers of Byzantine windows and a central octagonal lantern that adds a gracious Russian flavour".
[75] The works claimed over 52 acres (21 ha) of land from the Thames; the Victoria Embankment had the added benefit of relieving the congestion on the pre-existing roads between Westminster and the City of London.
The Lancet, relating details of the investigation into the incident by Dr William Farr, stated that his report "will render irresistible the conclusions at which he has arrived in regard to the influence of the water-supply in causation of the epidemic."
The first boat commissioned in 1887 was named the SS Bazalgette; the procedure remained in service until December 1998, when the dumping stopped and an incinerator was used to dispose of the waste.
[100] The provision of an integrated and fully functioning sewer system for the capital, together with the associated drop in cholera cases, led the historian John Doxat to state that Bazalgette "probably did more good, and saved more lives, than any single Victorian official".
He was appointed president of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) in 1884, and in 1901 a monument commemorating his life was opened on the Victoria Embankment.
[18] The obituarist for The Times opined that "when the New Zealander comes to London a thousand years hence ... the magnificent solidity and the faultless symmetry of the great granite blocks which form the wall of the Thames-embankment will still remain."
