The Great Stink was an event in Central London in July and August 1858. The smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent was present on the banks of the River Thames. Three outbreaks of cholera 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.
About Great Stink in brief
The Great Stink was an event in Central London in July and August 1858 during which the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent was present on the banks of the River Thames. The problem had been mounting for some years, with an ageing and inadequate sewer system that emptied directly into the Thames. Three outbreaks of cholera 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. Work on high-, mid- and low-level systems for the new Northern and Southern Outfall Sewers started at the beginning of 1859 and lasted until 1875. To aid the drainage, pumping stations were placed to lift the sewage from lower levels into higher pipes. 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. The prevailing thought in Victorian healthcare concerning the transmission of contagious diseases was the miasma theory, which held that most communicable diseases were caused by the inhalation of contaminated air. This contamination could take the form of the odour of rotting corpses or sewage, but rotting vegetation, or the exhaled breath of someone already diseased. Miasma was believed to be the most likely vector of transmission of diseases in the 19th-century Europe.
The disease was deeply feared by all, because of the speed with which it could spread, and its fatality rates, which were higher than those in those supplied by the Vaux and Lambeth areas. In 1848–49 there was a second outbreak in which 14,137 London residents died and this was followed by a further outbreak in 1853–54 in which 10,738 died. During the second outbreak, John Snow, a London-based physician, noticed that rates of death were higher in those areas supplied by Lambeth and Southwark than in those in South and South East London. In the century preceding 1856, over a hundred sewers were constructed in London, and at that date the city had around 200,000 cesspits and 360 sewers. Much of this outflow either overflowed, or discharged directly,into the Thames, and the smell from the river was so bad that in 1857 the government poured chalk lime, chloride of lime and carbolic acid into the waterway to ease the stench. The scientist Michael Faraday described the situation in a letter to The Times in July 1855: ‘Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface, even in water of this kind… The smell was very bad, and common to the whole of the water; it was the same as that which now comes up from the gully-holes in the streets; the whole river was for the time a real sewer’
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This page is based on the article Great Stink published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 20, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
