With the bodies piling up, the people and the press pushed for change. Another outbreak in 1853-54 claimed a further 10,000 lives. The first major cholera epidemic in Britain, in 1831-32, killed more than 6,000 Londoners. For this “Victorian plague”, as the historian Amanda J Thomas characterises it, there was no known cure – whatever quacks claimed – and the wealthy were not immune. The result was successive waves of waterborne diseases such as dysentery, typhoid and, most feared of all by mid-century, cholera. In 1834, the humorist cleric Sydney Smith vividly described the unpalatable truth: “He who drinks a tumbler of London water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, women and children on the face of the globe.” Even water pumped from outside the city risked contamination with sewage when it reached the squalid streets, and the wells still in use lay dangerously close to leaking cesspools.ĭr John Snow’s cholera water pump replica in Broad Street, London. What made the water lethal, however, was that a great many Londoners were drinking it piped directly from the Thames. The fetid fumes alone, it was thought, could strike a man dead. “Through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of a fine fresh river,” Charles Dickens wrote in Little Dorrit (1855-57). The British empire was literally rotting at the core. All too clear was the main contaminant: “Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface, even in water of this kind,” he wrote.įaraday’s report of the dire straits of “Father Thames” was echoed in numerous editorial columns and cartoons that scorned the once-majestic river’s demise into the most polluted metropolitan waterway in the world. Dropping pieces of white paper into the river, Faraday found that they disappeared from view before sinking an inch below the surface. The “silver Thames” eulogised by earlier poets had become, in the words of the Royal Institution scientist Michael Faraday in 1855, “an opaque pale brown fluid”. The apparent progress of flushing toilets (marketed to the masses at the Great Exhibition in 1851) only made things worse, overwhelming old cesspools and forcing ever more effluent into the river, which belched it back into the city at each high water. With a lack of planned housing and infrastructure to support the crowded citizenry, increasingly filthy streams, ditches and antiquated drainage pipes all bubbled into the Thames, where the detritus simply bobbed up and down with the tide. Illustration: Hulton Archive/Getty Images As London’s population grew – and it more than doubled between 18, making it by far the largest in the world – the build-up of waste itself became a spectacle no one wanted to see, or smell.ġ858: A satirical cartoon from Punch magazine shows a skeleton rowing along the Thames. And by the mid-1800s, reform of the capital’s sanitation, like much else in the nation’s political and social life, was long overdue.įor centuries, the “royal river” of pomp and pageantry, the city’s main thoroughfare, had doubled as a dumping ground for human, animal and industrial waste. London is, of course, an ancient metropolis, but according to the city’s prolific biographer (and Londoner) Peter Ackroyd, the 19th century “was the true century of change”. You’ll see no sign of it on most maps of the capital or from a tour of the streets, but hidden beneath the city’s surface stretches a wonder of the industrial world: the vast Victorian sewerage system that still flows (and overflows) today. It was a monumental construction project that, despite being driven by dodgy science and political self-interest, dramatically improved the public’s health and laid the foundation for modern London. The outcome of the “ Great Stink”, as that summer’s crisis was coined, was one of history’s most life-enhancing advancements in urban planning.
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