ShortHand: The Great Stink

[Music] Back in year-olden days and quite a lot of now, life in London kind of stuck, literally. But in the sweltering summer of 1858, the entire city was brought to its knees by a truly unbearable stench, rising off the river temps. One that not only had London as holding their hankies to their face but sparked widespread hysteria, that everyone was literally going to die. Writers dispaired at the state of the nation, parliament nearly abandonship, and worst of all, even ruined Queen Victoria's date night. The so-called great stink led to a monumental overhauling of the city's plumbing infrastructure, creating the very same sewer system that serves Red Handed HQ today. Ready to take a dive down the U-Bend of history into London's sewers? You've got no choice, hold your noses. This is the very smelly, shorthand. First, let's give you some context about London's dubious sanitation system prior to the infamous summer of 1858. Starting way back in the Middle Ages when the very first sewers were constructed, these weren't actually built to deal with human waste. Instead, they were basically open drainage ditches designed to divert rainwater and prevent the city from flooding. And when it came to our own movements, well, let's just say it was a lot more rustic. Outdoor cubicles called privies were essentially just holes in the ground, with waste building up in cess pits beneath. In what surely takes the prize for one of the grimest old and timey jobs, night to soil men would then periodically collect this material to be used as fertilizer. These cess pits were obviously gross, but as for the River Thames, Jewel of London, it wasn't yet the filthy swamp it would later become known as. But everything changed when the industrial revolution rolled along, bringing with it soot, smog and boat loads of waste. Naughty coal guzzling factories often located along the riverside were now dumping their industrial effluent pretty much directly into the Thames. And with people flocking to urban areas for work in the early 1800s, London's population tripled from one to three million in just half a century. Needless to say, those extra arses led to a whole lot more waste. Now you might assume the invention of the flush toilet which took off in popularity after 1851's ground exhibition will help clean things up, but ironically it actually made things a lot worse. Thousands of households were suddenly flushing human waste into sewers that had never been designed to carry it, which all ended up flowing straight into the river. And to make things even worse, the Thames herself is tidal, which means that anything that goes into it doesn't just politely make its way out to sea. Like a great brown boomerang, it comes back. Though unsurprisingly all of this led to the river Thames becoming pretty bloody grim. By the height of the Victorian era, it was notorious for its opaque brown colour. Along with random floating bits of unidentified filth, it was best not to think too much about. Piles upon piles of sludge built up along the riverside, some of them up to six feet high, which as you can imagine, didn't smell too great. So while the Thames were still a vital thoroughfare through London, as well as a bustling hub for industry and trade, it was gaining an increasingly grim reputation. Because what had once been heralded as the vital lifeblood of Britain's mighty empire was now basically just a glorified sewer. Popular writers like Charles Dickens painted the Thames as a reeking cesspool, and pretty much everyone agreed that it couldn't be doing anyone's health much good. Now their actual scientific understanding of what was going on wasn't quite how we'd understand it today, but we'll come back to that in a bit. Still even as public outrage grew, nobody had much of a clue about how to go about cleaning up the river. And the government was in no rush to claim responsibility. And since the communities who actually lived and worked directly on the Inner City Banks, Fisherman, Lighteman, Mudlocks, etc. were working class, there wasn't a whole load of urgency going on. While chemicals, including chalk lime and carbolic acid, were poured into the water in 1857 in a vague attempt to neutralise the stench, this unfortunately needed sweetfuckle. So with no one stepping up to properly tackle this literal shower of shite, the grimness of the River Thames just became one of those things. But not for much longer. Because if Victorian Londoners thought things were bad, they hadn't seen or rather smelled anything yet. In the summer of 1858, a mighty heatwave hit London. And holding your nose just wasn't going to cut it anymore. That July and August temperatures consistently soared above 30 degrees Celsius. A bit like the long hot summer that we're sweating through in London this year. A prolonged dry spell meant the river's water levels dropped, while the heaps of sludgey waste only got taller. And when you take all that already putrid waste and bake it under the sun? Well, we'll leave that to your imaginations. Because the piles of filth started to ferment, creating a stench so pungent it travelled far and wide across the city. The press quickly dubbed it the Great Stink, a legendary event that would go down in London's history for all the wrong reasons. And this time it wasn't just the average plebs that were affected. When Queen Victoria and Prince Albert tried to go on a pleasure cruise on the Thames, they were forced to bail after a few minutes. Because the scent was such a vibe killer and they loved fucking them too. It would have taken a lot to put them off. Under the heavy fog of O-dapoo water, the city stugged a high heaven, which made living there feel like hell no matter who you were. That summer saw a fresh flurry of opeds and newspapers despairing about the state of the river, with one cartoon in Punch magazine showing the grim reaper rowing his merry way down the river collecting souls. A writer for the London Illustrated News complained that the situation was hardly a good look for a nation that had literally taken over most of the world, saying we can colonise the remotest ends of the earth, we can spread our name and our fame and our fructifying wealth to every part of the world, but we cannot clean the river Thames. But the smell from the river wasn't just a PR nightmare for the British Empire, it was also seen as a potentially deadly risk to public health and safety. Now as we mentioned earlier, Victorian attitudes to disease weren't exactly aligned with how we understand those things today. In those days, the miasma theory of disease communication was all the rage. First theorized by Hippocrates in the 5th century BC, it roughly translates to "bad air" and was based on the mistaken belief that foul smells carried diseases. Yeah, it's never far off though, is it? No, it's not bad. It's not bad. I'll give them now. And the Victorians were still hanging on to this theory well into the 1800s, or obsessed with airing their homes to avoid the dreaded lurgy sneaking into their bodies. Of course, this also meant that a shit ton of people died of pneumonia. In 1858, the most feared disease of all was cholera, the so-called Victorian plague. A rapid spreading illness with alarming fatality rates, it affected poor and rich people alike with no known cure. It had first arrived in London in 1831, with an initial outbreak causing 6,536 deaths, and a second outbreak in 1848 claiming over 14,000 souls, while a third, in 1853, killed nearly 11,000 people. These outbreaks were widely understood to be linked to the stinking cesspool that was the River Thames. A scientist hadn't quite got their facts right yet. While we know now that cholera is a waterborne disease, that you get by drinking from a contaminated water supply, at the time most scientists were still stuck to their mayasma theory. Yeah, it's like biologically speaking, the reason we don't like bad smells is because it's your body being like, there's something bad there, don't go near it. Like, so they've got that bit right, but it's like they don't obviously know the next bit, which is like wash your hands and don't drink dirty water. That's the crucial bit there this thing, unfortunately. Still, one guy did dare to swim against this particular tide of shit. A doctor named Jon Snow observed that the cholera deaths tended to be concentrated around lambs, southern convoxal. These were in a city slum areas just south of the river where impoverished residents were observed to drink directly from pales dipped into the Thames's filthy brown depths. In 1849, Snow published a paper suggesting that there might be something in the water, but everyone ignored him. Pretty much just saying, you know nothing Jon Snow. He ironically died in 1858 at the height of the Great Stink, with his theory silenced. It wouldn't be until at least the 1880s that germ theory took over over as the leading scientific framework for understanding how diseases like cholera travelled. So for now, the general consensus was that it was the cartoon smell waves knocking on people dead rather than the water itself, which meant the great stink was doing more than just putting Londoners off their tea. It might literally be poisoning them. Picture this, it's a coffee break and Julie says her long dead childhood pet brushed past her legs last night. Skeptic all believe her the whole room smiles and says, "Oh, it's cute, right? I'm care, the host of the dark paranormal." And twice weekly we release our listeners' darkest paranormal experiences with zero feel good returning pets. Why? Okay, back to the smiles for Julie's pet. Within those smiles maybe somebody has been getting pulled out of bed every night by no one. So this seems the right place to talk. Everyone seems empathetic. Oh, ghost pets and this are different things so they don't speak. They email us. With over 150 hours of episodes to binge, search for the dark paranormal and discover why people are leaving their disbelief at the door. Hello, sorry I was dramatically reading it out there. Julie's cat, the one that ended up a demon. Yeah. Still, that didn't necessarily mean the powers that be would actually do anything about it, because as we know far too well, if a crisis mainly affects poor people, well governments historically tend not to give a fuck about it. From the 1830s to the 1850s, tens of thousands of people, most of them from working-class Riverside communities, had already fallen victim to collar outbreaks, without any significant action being taken. So what would it take for a bunch of stiff upper lit Victorian gents running the country to change things? Well, as it turns out, you just need to bring the shit to their door. Literally. I was thinking, Parliament's right there. Yeah, that'll do it. By the summer of 1858, the stench from the terms was so pungent that it infiltrated through the thick walls of the houses of Parliament. And this time the politicians were kicking up a stink of their own. Parliament was thrown into chaos, with multiple MPs refusing to turn up to meetings because of the offensive smell. That is, those who hadn't already fled to their summer homes are to fear that they'd be struck down by the miasma. Staff tried to quell the stench by hanging curtain soaked in chloride of lime, but to no avail. Unable to live laugh, love and legislate in these conditions, they even considered moving Parliament to the more fragrant climbs of Oxford or St Albans. The shit had hit the fat, and the government took drastic measures to clear the air. While previously London had never had a unified body in charge of sorting out the city's waterways and sanitation, the Great Stink changed everything. In August, lawmakers rushed through an emergency legislation that assigned responsibility to the recently formed Metropolitan Board of Works to overhaul London sewer network. And the new law ordered the MBW to ensure all sewerage outlets were outside the London Metropolitan area, as far as practical, to prevent the city's sewage from passing back into the river that was home to thousands of urban dwellers. As the times put it, Parliament was all but compelled to legislate upon the Great London nuisance by the force of the sheer stench. It took just 18 days of heated debates to address the problem decades in the making, or because some delicate Westminster nostrils were set up quivering. So the Metropolitan Board of Works had been given the green light to revamp London's inadequate sanitation system, which was all well and good, but it wouldn't be cheap. The initial plans for the works were estimated to cost a whopping £3 million, which in 1858 was the equivalent of about £1/2 billion in today's money. Needless to say, the MBW didn't have this kind of dosh rattling around in their piggy bank? So how would it be paid for? You guessed it, taxes. The government immediately lent the MBW the funds to get the ball rolling on the project, empowering them to raise the rest by placing a three penny levy on all London households for the next 40 years. Now this didn't actually mean collecting 3 pence from every Londoner, which would hardly scratch the surface. Instead it meant 3 pence for every pound of a property's annual value. So the bigger and more valuable your home, the more tax you'd pay each year. As basically a progressive property tax with contributions weighed fairly based on how much you owned, which was actually pretty fair for the notoriously harsh Victorians. With the funds sorted, now the plans had to actually get underway. Enter Joseph Basil Get, the MBW's chief engineer and the real MVP of this whole thing honestly. Basil Get had been working on plans to fix the London sewers for a few years now, but he had always been scuppard by red tape. He designed an incredibly intricate underground network of drains and tunnels across the whole city forming a brand-spanking new sewer system for London. And after years of fighting for funding, now Basil Get was given a full reign to turn his ambitious plans into a reality. Building took place between 1859 and 1875, hiring thousands of labourers to carve out a subterranean stinky paradise beneath London's feet. In 1861, the observer lauded the project as the most expensive and wonderful work of modern times. Emphasis on the expensive. If you have ever watched grand designs, you'll know that the initial budget always gets stretched, and it was no different here. The final bill came to an eye-watering 6.5 million, which is over £1 billion today. So what did the Basil Get system actually entail? The grand project involved building over 80 miles of brick-lined sewer tunnels running parallel to the Thames to intercept sewage before it could enter the river. They constructed the Victoria, Albert and Chelsea embankments to house these. In total, over 1,000 miles of new sewers were built beneath the city, over the next 16 years using a whopping 318 million bricks. The network of tunnels used gravity to naturally move waste downhill, as well as huge pumping stations to push it eastward for processing. One of these, the necessarily bougie, cross-nest pumping station in southeast London, was hailed as a cathedral of iron, featuring all-nate metalwork designs that made it look like an opera house, rather than part of the sewer system. The result of all this engineering work was that vast amounts of sewage were diverted far downstream to outside the city limits, before it was released back into the Thames. It was one of the most ambitious and impressive civil engineering projects in UK history, but not everyone was quite so thrilled about it. As part of the construction works many houses and businesses were demolished, and those who plied their trade along the river lost access to the wafes that were raised to make way for the new sewers and embankments, which affected their livelihoods. The pottery industry around Voxel and Lambert were hit especially hard, with Royal Dalton moving its operations to stoke on Trent in 1888. Ironically the same people who were most endangered by the dirty river ended up being the most displaced by the efforts to clean it up. Still we can all agree it paid off in the long run, because Basil gets sewer network didn't just clear up the nasty stench in the air. It utterly transformed London sanitation system for the better. In 1866 one final cholera outbreak took place in a tiny patch of East London, where the sewer system hadn't quite yet reached. But after that one, the disease was literally eradicated from London forever. Safe to say Basil gets ambitious project was worth every single penny. The man himself was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1875. It's agreed that Sir Basil gets work probably saved more lives than any other Victorian public official. And historian Peter Acroid has declared him one of London's heroes. So thank you, we owe you one, Sir Joe. And while it might be hard to believe, Basil gets original networks still remains a backbone of London's modern sewer system. That doesn't surprise me, everything's Victorian. Yeah, absolutely. It works, seemingly. And it's what's been called a classic example of Victorian over-engineering. The tunnels were designed to be far bigger than they actually needed to be for the time, accounting for a population growth of about 4.5 million. The only problem is that figure kept on climbing beyond anybody's imagination, and today the population of London has exceeded well over 9 million people. So even our surprisingly high tech Victorian sewer system is struggling under the strain of over 9 million bombs. To ease the pressure, London recently completed the 5 billion pound Thames Tideway Tunnel Project, a gigantic new super sewer designed to stop millions of tons of sewage overflowing into the river every year. But even 170 years on from the Great Stink, there there's no shortage of controversy surrounding the dodgy management of the capital's waste. In recent years, Thameswater and other nationwide companies have come under intense scrutiny over where exactly they're funneling our shit. The 2026 channel four documentary dirty business has shown a spotlight on the whole scandal of raw untreated sewage being sneakily dumped into Britain's rivers and coastal waters impacting local wildlife and beachgoers. I was actually talking about that with my friends when I was at a hen the other weekend, I haven't seen it, but they were like, "It will make you never want to drink water again." Yeah, I haven't seen it, but it's it. I'm aware of the story, disgusting. For now, it seems like London's battle with sewage is far from over. But if you live in the fair capital of the United Kingdom, take a step outside and breathe in a lump full of that lovely smoggy air and remind yourself that it could be so much, much worse, you could live in Paris. That's still stink. Exactly. Bonneux. Well, there you go. Now you all know, don't get in the Thames, and I probably just don't get in any of the water. You was ever thinking about getting in the Thames. No, don't, don't do it. I'm like, "Yeah." In the summer, it's like, "Oh, here are all the beaches that are not safe to swim in because they're full of feces." It's real bad. Real bad. There's somewhere in Kent where I think it's wistable, you have to check a report to see if it's safe to swim like on the daily. Yeah. Disgusting. We're just pumping human shit into our waters because our water system is incredibly corrupt and farcical. There you go, guys. That is the great stink of the past, and we continue to exist one today. But we hope you learned something and we'll see you next time for another shorthand. Wash your hands. But not with tap water. Are you washing your hands with bottled water? That's a whole other problem. Oh, no. I've got a filter now. Get a reverse osmosis system, that's what everyone should do because it's all disgusting. Goodbye. Goodbye. [Music]