In the summer of 1858, the centre of London was stuck in the chokehold of a smell so foul, the city’s residents thought it might cause cholera. Wafts of this pungent, bitter stench had descended on the city, and as a result the capital had almost ground to a halt. The smell was so bad that the curtains in the House of Commons were doused in chloride of lime to help MPs and their staff to actually concentrate on lawmaking.
The Great Stink, as it has since come to be known, was a disgusting natural phenomenon in which that summer’s hot weather exacerbated the inescapable smell of untreated human waste and industrial chemicals that had seeped onto the banks of the Thames. The centre of London being thrown into chaos by the inexorable stench of human excrement that summer could have been avoided. It was largely down to the capital’s ageing and inadequate sewage system emptying directly into the famous river, and the episode led to a major upgrade of the wastewater network led by the engineer Joseph Bazalgette.
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