When was the great stink

Joseph Bazalgette was appointed chief engineer. He was born in London on 28 March and began his career as a railway engineer, gaining experience in land drainage and reclamation. By he had already spent several years drawing up plans for a new sanitation system that would include waste disposal, land reclamation from the Thames mud flats, and a clean water supply. Now he was ready to go to work. His scheme involved a network of main sewers, running parallel to the river, which would intercept both surface water and waste, conducting them to outfalls on the northern and southern sides of the Thames, from where it would flow more easily out to sea.

Pumping stations were built to raise up sewage from low-lying areas and discharge it onwards to the outfalls. It replaced kilometres of old sewers, and added kilometres of new ones. The engineer who ensured the Big Stink would never happen again died, in London, in Illustrated London News 15 August The fact that, as related in the Aberdeen Press and Journal , 90,, gallons of sewage entered the river from London on a daily basis, with only ,, gallons of fresh water passing over Teddington lock to counteract such pollution, meant that for all intents and purposes the Thames was a giant open sewer.

So something had to be done, and fast. The situation was untenable, with the Houses of Parliament nearly rendered uninhabitable and the lives of Londoners made unbearable by the stench, as well as the risk of disease to which the state of the river exposed them.

Luckily, there were many individuals and organizations who stepped forward to offer a solution to this problem. The Aberdeen Press and Journal at the end of June reports:.

How many plans have been proposed and rejected for the remedy of this grievous evil. Four bodies fight over the subject of metropolitan drainage — the Board of Works, the Metropolitan Board of Works, the Sewerage Commissioners, and that ancient body, the Thames Conservators. People were even writing books on how the problem could be solved, such as this one advertised in the Sun London :. Practical Suggestions for Diverting the Sewage from the Thames, and appropriating it to Agricultural Use; relieving the overcrowded thoroughfares of London, and securing improved means of locomotion.

Sun London 6 July Written by Joseph Mitchell, complete with cost estimates, maps and plans, this could be yours for 2s 6d. William Steevens, an agricultural mechanist.

Bazalgette, their engineer, in the year The scheme was to create more sewers, relieving the burden on that most notable of open sewers the Thames. The Illustrated London News relates how:. The effect was more ill than good. By overpowering the politicians in the Houses of Parliament, though, the stench still proved a catalyst for change.

Up to this point, London had lacked a unified authority with the money required to address such an extensive problem of sanitation on an effective scale. The network included 82 miles of new sewers, great subterranean boulevards that in places were larger than the underground train tunnels then under construction. With a minimum fall of two feet per mile, the main drainage sewers employed gravity to conduct their contents downstream, while smaller sewers were egg-shaped narrower at the bottom than the top to encourage the flow.

Pumping stations were built at Chelsea, Deptford, Abbey Mills and Crossness to raise up sewage from low-lying areas and discharge it onwards to the outfalls. The latter two especially were architecturally magnificent, evocative of cathedrals in their design, dimensions and ornament. Symbolic of the grandeur of the entire project, they proudly announced their role in forging a more wholesome and, perhaps, holy London. The scheme also involved the huge challenge of embanking the Thames, creating the Victoria, Albert and Chelsea embankments.

The hard work of thousands of labourers overseen by Bazalgette inspired the artist Ford Madox Brown as he painted Work , a large canvas completed in , the same year that the main drainage works were opened at Crossness by the Prince of Wales though the construction in fact continued for another decade. We aint got no privez, no dust bins, no water splies and no drain or suer in the whole place.

If the Colera comes, Lord help us. Chadwick suggested improvements to both water supplies and sewage disposal to reduce disease and mortality rates. The spectre of cholera looming over London did have positive effects though. The miasma theory of disease was still the prevalent one. This concept, with its roots in medieval and even earlier times, was based on the idea that disease was borne on the air by mysterious miasma, connected in some vague way with filthy conditions and rotting corpses.

The shrewd and observant physician John Snow was about to challenge that. During the cholera outbreak of — 49 he noticed that death rates were higher in the areas where water was provided by two companies: the Lambeth, and the Southwark and Vauxhall Water Company. Was the water supply the problem? It had little effect. When cholera broke out again in , Snow observed a high number of deaths in Broad Street, Soho, where people used a communal water pump.

The water had been contaminated by a nearby cesspool through a crack in its bricks. He published his results. A sea change in medicine was due, and in time it happened, with the work of pioneers such as Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Ignaz Semmelweiss and Robert Koch eventually receiving recognition.