The Great Stink of 1858 led to the creation of London’s modern sewer system
The River Thames doesn’t have a great reputation for cleanliness. It carries its negative reputation for good reason – in fact, the late pop star Darius Campbell famously ended up in a coma in 2017 after accidentally drinking some water from the river, which led to him contracting bacterial meningitis.
However, there was a time when the state of the Thames was even worse. Despite having far fewer residents, those who did live in London around the time of the industrial revolution effectively used the waterway as an open sewer.
The rapid growth of London’s population at the time brought with it a surge in waste and filth, leading to a severe deterioration in water quality. By 1858, things had reached a truly dire state. A combination of sweltering temperatures, the torrent of human waste, and chemicals discharged from nearby factories into the Thames left Victorian Londoners enduring what was aptly dubbed the Great Stink.
Charles Dickens described the Thames as a “deadly sewer”. He wrote: “In the place of a fine, fresh river. The offensive smells… have been of a most head-and-stomach-distending nature”.
The river was so ‘stomach distending’ that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert could reportedly only last two minutes on a river cruise before abandoning ship.
However, the heatwave of June 1858 was on another level entirely. The Evening Standard recorded temperatures of 48C in the sun, intensifying the stench and bringing the capital to a virtual standstill.
Even politicians upstream in Westminster could not bear the smell, resorting to soaking the curtains of Parliament in lime chloride in a desperate bid to mask it. MPs departed meetings ahead of schedule, handkerchiefs pressed firmly to their noses, with mounting calls to relocate Parliament to St Alban’s, Hertfordshire, or even Oxford.
The crisis was worsened by the Victorian belief that foul odours carried deadly diseases such as cholera, and the stench provoked genuine alarm amongst the capital’s residents. On June 15, 1858, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli put forward the Metropolis Local Management Amendment Bill, a bold and sweeping solution to the Great Stink.
The bill stipulated that sewerage outlets should be relocated “as far as may be possible” from London, and introduced a three-penny levy on all London households to fund the new construction, equivalent to roughly 80p today.
Parliament also called upon civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette to overhaul the capital’s sewer network. His answer was to extend the street sewer by 1,100 miles, channelling waste into 82 miles of interconnecting sewers, with the overarching aim of intercepting London’s waste before it could drain into the river. The project would be valued at approximately £300 million in today’s money.
Sadly, Bazalgette’s Victorian sewers, designed to serve a city of three million, are not large or powerful enough to handle the waste generated by London’s ever-growing population of over nine million. As a result, a new ‘mega’ sewer was built and went into operation in February 2025. The Thames Tideway Scheme stretches 25km in length and 7.2m in diameter, and is expected to relieve the strain on the existing network to prevent flooding.
So far, the Thames Tideway has diverted 21 million tonnes of sewerage away from the Thames.
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