The Great Stink: How a Smell Forced Parliament to Act — London, 1858

About this episode

In the summer of 1858, London — the largest city in the world at two and a half million people, the heart of the British Empire — was sitting on top of its own filth. For centuries the River Thames had served as the city's sewer. An exceptional heat wave arrived at exactly the wrong moment, baking the exposed riverbanks and accelerating years of accumulated waste into a smell so total, so inescapable, that it stopped the government of the most powerful nation on Earth from functioning. Members of Parliament hung curtains soaked in chloride of lime over the windows in a desperate attempt to filter the air. It did not work. Sittings were disrupted. Committee rooms were abandoned. There was serious discussion of relocating Parliament entirely, upriver, away from the smell. The Great Stink, as newspapers of the time called it, did what decades of public health warnings, cholera epidemics, and reformist campaigning had failed to do. Within eighteen days, the British government passed legislation and funded one of the great engineering achievements of the Victorian age — a sewer system so well built that most of it is still in use beneath London today. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you i