The Great Stink

Until the early 19^th century human waste generally fell into cesspools below buildings, which were dug out by hand when full. In many cases only thin wooden floorboards separated people from their excrement. The liquid contents drained down into the ground, with the solids emptied from time to time, for a fee, by night-soil men, often employing children. It was then carted out of town to be used as manure in the surrounding countryside. In the early 19^th century there were around 200,000 cesspools in London.

Waste of all kinds tended to find its way into London’s rivers and streams. As early as 1357 King Edward III was complaining that when travelling along the Thames he found “dung and other filth accumulated in diverse places in the said City upon the bank of the river aforesaid and also perceived of the fumes and other abominable stenches arriving therefrom”.

An early attempt to regulate problems of sewage was made during the reign of Henry VIII throughout the country by the appointment of Commissioners of Sewers. Commissions were established in each of the City of London, Westminster, Holborn and Finsbury, Tower Hamlets, St. Katharine’s, Poplar and Blackwell, and Greenwich. Others covered Surrey and Kent.

The cost of having cesspools cleared out was beyond many of London’s poorer people, so it was not unusual for them to overflow into neighbouring spaces. In 1660 Samuel Pepys went down into his cellar and “I put my feet into a great heap of turds” because the neighbour’s cesspool had overflowed into his property. There were numerous ordinances over many centuries dealing with how cesspools should be maintained. Christopher Wren and John Evelyn made proposals for an improved system of sewerage following the Great Fire of 1666, but nothing came of it.

The population of London increased by almost three-fold in the first half of the 19^th century, rising by 1855 to two and a half million people. As the metropolis grew in size it became more difficult and uneconomic to transport the content of cesspools to ever more distance farms. That became especially so when cheaper fertilizers became available from around 1820. A network of sewers was created that flowed into rivers and streams. The Fleet, Tyburn, the Wandle and other natural watercourses were increasingly used as sewers by adjacent residents and businesses, all flowing out into the Thames.

London’s unsanitary condition came to the attention of Edwin Chadwick, who in the 1830s had campaigned for social reform and in 1834 was appointed as Secretary to the Poor Law Commission. In 1838 that body’s commissioners presented a report to the Home Secretary of their findings into London’s sanitation and disease. They proposed a new law that would require good drainage in new homes for the working classes.

Chadwick continued researching the topic and in 1842 published ‘Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain’ in which he outlined the effect of poor sanitation on the working classes. In the London metropolis alone there were eight separate district commissions of sewers, with a lack of coordination and compatibility between adjacent districts. Chadwick criticised the ineffectiveness of the various local bodies, with overlapping responsibilities and limited authority, and argued for appointed local officers to oversee the issue of sanitation.

Flushing water closets began to be introduced into London’s homes from the end of the 18th century and they gradually replaced the cesspools. A patent was taken out in 1775 by Bond Street watchmaker Alexander Cumings for a water closet. Three years later the valve mechanism was improved by inventor Joseph Bramah and he sold thousands of water closets in the following decades. Many people would have experienced their first flushing toilet at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park. There the toilets could be used upon payment, introducing a new phrase into the language “to spend a penny”. The flushing mechanism of water closets was further improved by Thomas Crapper in the 1860s.

The use of flushing toilets almost doubled during the first half of the 1850s, greatly increasing the amount of water being used in the metropolis. The water closet made it possible for the more liquefied waste to flow through pipes together with drainage water, so new sewers were created, flowing out into the Thames, cleared with each rainfall. The banks of the Thames were also increasingly lined by industrial enterprises, many of which flushed their polluted waste-water directly into the river.

Throughout the Middle Ages London’s supply of fresh water came from wells, or conduits that brought it from rivers and springs outside the city. From 1582 until the early 19^th century waterwheels operating below London Bridge supplied premises in the area surrounding the bridge directly from the Thames. In the early 17^th century the New River was created, a channel that brought water into the city from springs in Hertfordshire and the upper River Lea.

As London expanded and its population increased, from the latter 17^th century new companies were formed to provide water, but most of their supply, as with the London Bridge waterworks, was extracted from the Thames into which the city’s sewage was flowing. The river’s ebb tide took waste downstream, only for it to be brought back again on the next incoming tide. During the first half of the century the Thames became ever more filled with human waste. Thus, many of the people of the capital were literally drinking each other’s sewage.

Despite this, the water companies insisted on the purity of their supply, while warnings by campaigners in the early 19^th century and proposals for alternative sources were ignored by Parliament. Opinion provided to a Royal Commission by the Grand Junction Waterworks Company was that “there is probably not a spring…. [which is] as pure as Thames water”. Yet, as Londoner’s consumed water extracted from the increasingly polluted Thames there were several cholera epidemics.

The accepted ‘miasmic’ theory, well into the second half of the 19^th century, was that diseases were airborne and inhaled into the lungs. That some forms of disease, such as cholera, could be carried by water was barely considered. Bad smells were obvious to everyone, yet contaminated water appeared clean unless viewed through a microscope. The first cholera epidemic arrived in England in 1831 and it was suspected that odours from poor sanitation was a cause. Despite the pioneering research by John Snow in Soho during the 1853-54 cholera outbreak, and his subsequent comparisons of deaths according to areas supplied by different water companies, the cause of cholera was only finally proven in 1883 by the German bacteriologist Robert Koch.

A Parliamentary Committee considered an imaginative plan submitted by the biblical and historic artist John Martin to tidy up London’s riverside by building new Thames embankments. Martin’s embankments could carry intercepting sewers that prevented the contents of local sewers flowing into the river within the metropolis. Yet there was no public body to carry out such a scheme, so nothing came of it.

A Parliamentary Bill was drafted in 1839 to establish a Metropolitan Court of Sewers for the London metropolis, which would lay down standards and ensure buildings were connected to sewers. But it failed to be passed, probably due to opposition from the City of London, which always guarded its independence. The City had its own plan for an embankment, designed by the engineer James Walker, but there was an objection from the Commissioner of Woods and Forests who owned the riverbed that would need to be reclaimed.

The Metropolitan Buildings Act 1844 specified that no new buildings should be constructed without being connected to a sewer. That was followed by the Cholera Bill of 1846, which allowed the Privy Council to issue regulations regarding sanitation to prevent disease.

The following year the government accepted the recommendation of a Royal Commission, which included Chadwick, that seven of the sewer commissions of the metropolis be amalgamated into the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers. Once again, the City ensured its independence by creating its own City Commission. The Act that created the MCS echoed the provisions of the 1844 Act but added that all new houses should have a WC and gave the commissioners authority to order the same for existing properties. The Act provided considerably more power than its predecessors.

The MCS were diligent in abolishing cesspools in favour of sewers. Yet at that time the sewers still emptied into the rivers, and ultimately the Thames, and then only at low tide. They also had to carry drain-water, so during periods of heavy rain sewage simply backed up and flooded into properties, and particularly at high tide.

Two different ideas of how to manage sewage were submitted to the Commission. In both cases it was to be collected via pipes and made available for agricultural purposes. The Commissioners were unable to choose between the two, so in 1849 they invited engineers to submit alternative schemes.

Well over a hundred submissions were received and commissioners argued amongst themselves about their merits. The Commission was therefore dissolved. A new Commission was formed, including the railway engineer Robert Stephenson, and with his colleague Frank Forster as Engineer to the Commission. The task of evaluating the submissions was delegated to the Assistant Surveyors Joseph Bazalgette and Edward Cresy.

In March 1850 it was announced that none of the submissions were practical. Forster was therefore asked to design a proposal. He devised a scheme with an intercepting sewer that would carry both sewage and rainwater from south of the Thames, to be discharged into the river at Plumstead. Forster and City Engineer Colonel William Haywood then produced a plan for another intercepting sewer for the waste from north of the Thames, discharging into the River Lea.

As part of this scheme, work on a new sewer was started from Pimlico to Percy Wharf at Westminster but the cost was well over four times the original estimate due to various problems. In June 1852 the commissioners resigned, but their successors argued about whether to support Forster’s plan. Forster died in April 1852, believed to be from anxiety caused by lack of support for the scheme. He was replaced as Engineer to the Commission by Bazalgette, who began working with Haywood on a revised version of Forster’s scheme.

In 1855 the scientist Michael Faraday, having made some observations of the state of the water during a boat trip on the Thames, wrote a letter to The Times: “Surely the river which flows so many miles through London, ought not to be allowed to become a fermenting sewer.”

In the same year the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers felt a great urgency in carrying out Forster’s scheme on the south side of the Thames, much of which was subject to flooding at high tides. They then discovered they lacked the power to purchase the necessary land because that was outside their area of jurisdiction. Therefore, the Metropolitan Management Act of August 1855, presented to Parliament by MP for Marylebone Sir Benjamin Hall (who Big Ben at Westminster is named after), replaced the Commission with a new body, the Metropolitan Board of Works. Its first chairman was John Thwaites.

An unelected body that had powers to raise money from ratepayers and spend it on projects across multiple parishes, however, was fiercely opposed by many, particularly by those who felt that infrastructure projects should remain the domain of vestries and paving boards.

Joseph Bazalgette was appointed as Chief Engineer to the MBW and in February 1856 submitted plans for the drainage system on the southern side of the river. A plan for the northern side followed in May. When presenting the plans, he made it clear that they were not his original ideas, he had merely used his knowledge of earlier proposals that he then modified.

In these plans Bazalgette had low level sewers on the north side of the Thames directed to Abbey Mills near East Ham. A pumping station there would pump up and raise the contents, which would then flow down to just west of Barking Creek where it would be discharged into the Thames at the metropolitan boundary. Sewers on the south side of the river would be pumped up at Deptford to run down to Plumstead Marshes where they would discharge into the Thames at Crossness.

After receiving the plans, however, Sir Benjamin Hall made it clear that the Act by which the MBW was created specifically excluded any schemes from discharging sewage into the Thames. Thwaites and Bazalgette presented a new plan to Hall, in which sewage would be discharged into the river further downstream, which depended on the government providing additional funding for the more expensive scheme. Hall referred the plan to a committee of external engineers, who in October 1857 replied with their own proposed modifications, at more than double Bazalgette’s estimated cost.

There was a change of government in February 1858 and Benjamin Hall was replaced by Lord John Manners.

The summer of 1858 was particularly hot and the river smelled so bad that it became known as ‘the Great Stink’. By the beginning of June it became impossible to work in the Committee Rooms or Library of the Houses of Parliament due to the pungent odour. The Times newspaper predicted that it would finally force the government to take action. Ross Mangles, MP for Guildford, asked in the House of Commons: “By perverse ingenuity, one of the noblest of rivers has been turned into a cesspool, and I wish to ask whether Her Majesty’s Government intend to take any steps to remedy the evil.” Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, who was responsible for lighting and ventilation in the Palace of Westminster stated that he could no longer be responsible for the health of the building. Curtains soaked in chloride of lime were hung at the windows and MPs abandoned the House of Commons. The Parliamentary record for 11^th June 1858 records: “Honourable Gentlemen sitting in the Committee Rooms and in the Library were utterly unable to remain there in consequence of the stench which arose from the river.”

The Great Stink finally spurred Parliament into action, and by the middle of the following month Benjamin Disraeli, Leader of the House, introduced a Bill to extend the powers of the Metropolitan Board of Works to include the purification of the Thames and main drainage of the metropolis.

The Bill resolved that the MBW should, as far as possible, prevent sewage from entering the river within the Metropolitan area. This requirement settled the dispute regarding the siting of the outflows that had prevented progress to be made. The Bill also allowed the MBW to raise £3,000,000 to carry out the work, to be repaid over 40 years from proceeds of a new rate.

To calculate the requirements of the system Bazalgette made various estimates, including that the population of London would grow by 25% to 3,450,000, with two thirds north of the Thames and one third to the south. Other estimates included the amount of water usage per person and the amount of rainfall.

Bazalgette’s plan was to build an 82-mile network of sewers under the capital, linking with existing ones that could be found. Pipes and tunnels could be created to the north and south sides of the valley through which the Thames flows, taking waste down towards the river. London sits in an east-west valley, with the Thames running through its centre. The river itself flows downhill eastwards, with the eastern side of the metropolis lower than the west. Intercepting sewers running in parallel to the Thames could carry both waste and surface rainwater eastwards to where they discharged into the river beyond the metropolis. Yet the area of London either side of the Thames is not a simple gradient towards the river. There are hills and lower parts, with many square miles that could not easily be drained without a network of intercepting sewers and steam-powered pumping stations.

To the north of the river sewers could flow downhill southwards until they met one of three intercepting sewers. Of these three, a ‘high level’ sewer ran from Hampstead to Old Ford at Stratford. It had a rapid descent and was therefore made of Staffordshire Blue bricks that could withstand the scouring of the fast-moving content. The ‘middle level’ sewer ran from Kentish Town to meet the high-level sewer at Old Ford, with branches coming from Piccadilly and Gray’s Inn Road. The ‘northern low level’ sewer ran along the north bank of the Thames riverside.

The ‘southern low level’ sewer ran from the western area of Fulham, Pimlico and Hammersmith. It was not possible to discharge from that area by gravity, so a pumping station was built at Chelsea to lift sewage from those areas 19 feet up into the northern low-level sewer.

A pumping station was constructed at Abbey Mills, East Ham, raising the contents of the low-level sewers 36-feet up to the ‘northern outfall sewer’, which then flowed downhill to Barking, where it was held in a reservoir until discharged into the Thames on the ebb tide. The northern outfall had to pass across marshy land and a network of roads, rivers and railways, which required the construction of large embankments.

There was a similar arrangement of sewers on the south side of the Thames. A ‘southern high level’ sewer ran from Clapham High Street to Deptford Creek. A ‘southern low level’ sewer ran from Putney High Street to Deptford, with a branch from Bermondsey. A pumping station was constructed at Deptford that lifted the sewage up 20 feet, from where it flowed downhill through a sewer to Crossness near Plumstead where it could be discharged into the Thames.

A large amount of cement was required to lay the brickwork for the sewers. The normal type in use in the first half of the 19^th century was ‘Roman’ cement, similar to that used in ancient times. In 1824 a patent was granted to a Yorkshire bricklayer for ‘Portland’ cement, but it had never been used on a large-scale project. Bazalgette’s assistant engineer John Grant tested the material and found it to be stronger than the older material, and thus the new sewer system was the first major project on which it was used. Thereafter it became the industry standard. In the later works, the MBW eliminated the use of bricks, making sewers entirely from Portland cement.

At an early stage it was clear to the MBW that the best way to accommodate the largest of the underground sewers through central London was to route them along the banks either side of the Thames. For that, new embankments were required and an Act of Parliament was passed in 1862, which allowed the MBW to negotiate with property owners along the north bank of the Thames for the purchase of riverbank.

At the same time, the District Railway Company was formed to create a new underground line. It would link with the existing Metropolitan line, forming a circular route to link all London’s railway termini, what we now call the Circle line. The MBW’s embankments created the possibility of running the tracks underground alongside the sewers.

The creation of the embankments was an expensive venture, beyond the normal means of the MBW. The government therefore passed a series of Acts of Parliament during the 1860s providing the MBW with the proceeds of duties on coal and wine brought into London. The District Railway had problems in raising the finance for its part of the costs, however, which delayed the work on the embankments, becoming an immense frustration for the MBW.

Three embankments were eventually created. The mile-long Albert Embankment on the south of the Thames opened in November 1869. Part of the cost was raised by selling land to St. Thomas’s Hospital, which had been forced to move from Southwark due to the expansion of London Bridge station.

The longer Victoria Embankment on the northern side of the river was opened in July 1870 by the Prince of Wales, accompanied by other members of the royal family and almost all members of both Houses of Parliament. Ten thousand tickets were allocated to spectators, who sat in specially-built stands.

As well as providing a new east-west road as an alternative to the congested Strand, the new embankment provided land for the creation of the Victoria Embankment Gardens park.

The Victoria Embankment was illuminated by beautiful cast-iron gas lamps, which are still in place. In 1878 the Avenue de l’Opera in Paris was lit by electric lamps. Street lighting was the responsibility of local vestries in most of London but the creation of the Victoria Embankment provided the MBW with the possibility of providing it with electric lamps. A generating station was created beside Embankment station and 20 of the gas lamps converted to electricity. It proved to be unreliable, however, and in 1884 the lamps reverted to gas.

A total of 52 acres was reclaimed from the river for the new embankments, allowing for new roads, riverside promenades and parks to be created at surface level. Chelsea Embankment was the last to be completed, from Battersea Bridge to Chelsea Hospital, opening in 1874.

By 1866 most of Bazalgette’s sewer system was in operation but the ‘northern low level sewer’, with its pumping station at Abbey Mills, was an exception. The last of the outbreaks of cholera in London occurred in that year. Over 90 percent of deaths were confined to the East End, between Aldgate and Bow, an area that would be served by the unfinished low level sewer. The district was also supplied with its drinking water by the East London Water Company. It was subsequently discovered that the company was taking a small amount of its supply from the contaminated River Lea, in contravention of the 1852 Metropolis Water Act. Abbey Mills came into operation in July 1868 and there were no incidences of cholera from people living in London after that time.

Between 1858 and 1875 a total of 82 miles of sewers and its pumping stations were created for the new system, requiring 318 million bricks. That requirement was so great that the price of bricks rose by up to 50 percent during construction work. While the main system was being constructed, the MBW and local vestries repaired or enlarged well over 1,000 miles of local sewers. The Main Drainage Committee of the MBW declared the almost complete system was “one of the greatest works of this or any other age”.

Throughout the course of construction the MBW ensured that politicians and the press were kept up to date, organizing regular visits to building sites to explain progress. The official opening of the system took place in April 1865 by the Prince of Wales, accompanied by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, various members of the royal family and peers, MPs, and the Lord Mayors of London and Dublin. The party began by inspecting the works at Abbey Mills, then crossed the Thames to Crossness to hear an address by Bazalgette. Finally, the four enormous beam engines at Crossness pumping station were set in motion by the prince to a loud cheer from the workmen. Despite the official opening, there was much work still to do, and the sewer system was only completed in 1875.

The Thames embankments through central London are a lasting legacy of the work of Bazalgette and the MBW. It is now difficult to imagine the river prior to that time. There was one physical obstacle to the full embankment, however: the Palace of Westminster, otherwise known as the Houses of Parliament. It had been destroyed by fire in 1834. Charles Barry’s plan for the world-famous replacement that we know today was made shortly after the devastation, and work on the hugely expensive building was still being undertaken as London’s new sewer system was being constructed. Given the circumstances, it was inconceivable that it could make way for a new embankment.

Another, somewhat embarrassing issue, was that the building’s internal sewer system had been designed according to past practice. No cesspools had been created and its internal piping drained directly into the Thames. Various adjustments were made over the years to Parliament’s very complex plumbing system but it proved difficult to effectively connect to London’s new sewers. Members of the Houses were literally sitting above their own waste. Despite a stink pipe being installed within the building’s clock tower, which houses the Big Ben bell, it proved difficult to completely eradicate smells. By the 1880s MPs were again complaining, but not by then due to the stench from the river but from their own sanitary system. Finally, a large hydro-pneumatic machine was installed under the Speaker’s Garden, which began operation in January 1887, to periodically blast effluent up to a level where it could flow into London’s main sewer system.

There were soon accusations that the MBW’s sewer system had merely moved pollution downstream to the area where it was discharged into the Thames around Barking. In September 1878 a collision occurred close to the outfalls between a large collier ship and the pleasure steamer Princess Alice. Over 700 people are thought to have died and it was believed many had succumbed to the polluted water, although a Board of Trade enquiry disagreed with that theory.

By the 1880s Barking and Plumstead on either side of the Thames had become substantial urban areas, so it was no longer deemed acceptable for raw sewage to be discharged in those areas. Instead, boats were introduced to carry pressed sludge down to Hole Haven at Canvey Island. The first of these vessels was named SS Bazalgette.

In 1889 the Metropolitan Board of Works was abolished after the Financial Times revealed corrupt practices by several of its officials. It was replaced by the newly-formed London Country Council. Joseph Bazalgette, by then 69 years of age, retired, having been its Chief Engineer for the entire 33 years of the MBW’s existence.