The Great Stink: everything you wanted to know

Summary

History Extra Podcast: Episode Summary – "The Great Stink: Everything You Wanted to Know"

In this engaging episode of the History Extra Podcast, hosted by Rosemary Ashton and Spencer Mizzen, listeners are transported back to mid-19th century London to explore one of the city's most infamous environmental crises—the Great Stink of 1858. Through a meticulous discussion, the hosts unravel the complex interplay of public health, urbanization, and engineering that characterized this pivotal moment in London's history.

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Introduction to the Great Stink

Rosemary Ashton: The episode kicks off with Rosemary posing a fundamental question about the Great Stink, setting the stage for a deep dive into the event's historical context.

Spencer Mizzen: Spencer explains that the Great Stink was a direct result of an exceptionally hot summer in 1858, where temperatures soared to unprecedented highs of 35°C (94.5°F) on June 16th (03:06). This heat exacerbated the already dire situation of the River Thames serving as an open sewer, overwhelmed by human sewage. The unbearable stench halted river activities, including tourism and daily life for those living near the unembanked banks of the Thames.

Public Outcry and Political Scandal

The conversation shifts to how the Great Stink became a national scandal, with the media and public demanding immediate government action.

Spencer Mizzen: He highlights the role of The Times newspaper in pressuring the government. The persistent coverage and public letters to the editor, including from influential figures like barristers near the Thames, amplified the urgency (04:34). A notable moment occurred on June 30th, when prominent politicians, including Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone, were visibly affected by the smell during a parliamentary committee meeting by the Thames, as reported by The Times (06:02). This public demonstration of discomfort by high-ranking officials underscored the severity of the crisis.

Cholera Outbreaks and Misunderstood Public Health

Rosemary Ashton: She introduces the connection between the Great Stink and the cholera outbreaks that plagued London during this period.

Spencer Mizzen: He delves into the misconception of the time that cholera was spread through miasma—poisonous air—linking it directly to the sewage-contaminated Thames (08:51). The episode recounts the significant cholera outbreaks of 1831, 1848, and 1854, emphasizing the pivotal role of Dr. John Snow. Snow's groundbreaking work in Soho demonstrated the connection between contaminated water and cholera, leading to the closure of the Broad Street pump and a dramatic drop in cholera cases (09:10). Tragically, John Snow passed away on the hottest day of the Great Stink, June 16th, 1858, before his theories were fully accepted (12:16).

Michael Faraday's Advocacy and Public Engagement

Spencer Mizzen: He recounts Michael Faraday’s critical letter to The Times on July 9th, 1855, where Faraday condemned the River Thames's state and predicted dire consequences if the situation remained unaddressed (09:10). This letter was immortalized in a Punch magazine cartoon, portraying Faraday handing his identity card to Father Thames, a mythological figure emerging from the polluted river (14:58). The vivid imagery and public discourse galvanized further support for addressing the Thames's pollution.

Joseph Bazalgette: The Hero of London's Sanitation

Rosemary Ashton: She steers the conversation towards the central figure of the episode—Joseph Bazalgette.

Spencer Mizzen: Introducing Bazalgette as the chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, Spencer outlines his visionary approach to solving London's sewage crisis. Despite facing significant opposition and bureaucratic inertia, Bazalgette championed an ambitious plan to construct extensive sewers beneath the Thames (20:13).

Overcoming Opposition and Implementing the Sewers

Spencer Mizzen: He describes the hurdles Bazalgette encountered, including competing engineering proposals and resistance from local vestries and private water companies reluctant to bear the costs. Benjamin Disraeli's decisive action in July 1858, presenting a compelling bill to Parliament (23:35), was instrumental in passing legislation that empowered Bazalgette to proceed (23:42).

Joseph Bazalgette’s Plan: Bazalgette proposed building two massive brick-sewn tunnels on either side of the Thames, designed to intercept and transport sewage away from the river to outfalls in the tidal estuary. His plan included the creation of the Victoria Embankment, which not only improved sanitation but also enhanced London's urban landscape by providing walkways and reducing traffic congestion along the Strand (26:11).

Construction, Challenges, and Legacy

Spencer Mizzen: Discussing the execution of Bazalgette’s project, Spencer notes the immense scale and technical challenges, such as maintaining adequate slope for sewage flow and navigating existing infrastructure like railways and canals. Originally estimated to take 5.5 years and cost £2 million (30:05), the project ultimately spanned nearly 13 years and cost between £3-4 million (30:16). Despite these overruns, the sewers remarkably alleviated the public health crisis, effectively ending major cholera outbreaks in London (31:48).

Celebration and Critical Acclaim

Bazalgette was rightfully celebrated for his contributions, being knighted and revered as a hero. Although a minor setback occurred in 1878 with a ship collision near a sewage outfall, resulting in some casualties, Bazalgette’s reputation remained largely untarnished due to his continuous efforts to improve London's infrastructure (31:55).

Alternative Proposals and the Superiority of Bazalgette’s Design

Spencer Mizzen: He contrasts Bazalgette’s effective solution with the more impractical proposals of contemporaries like Goldsworthy Gurney, who suggested deep channels to divert sewage without removing it from the Thames (32:55). Bazalgette’s comprehensive and forward-thinking design ultimately prevailed, laying the foundation for modern urban sanitation.

Enduring Impact and Modern Commemorations

Spencer Mizzen: Highlighting Bazalgette’s enduring legacy, Spencer mentions landmarks such as the Cathedral on the Marsh pumping station and the ongoing Thames Tideway Tunnel project, which extends Bazalgette’s original infrastructure to accommodate London’s growing population and modern needs (35:26). The Thames Tideway Tunnel, drawing inspiration from Bazalgette’s work, underscores the lasting relevance of his engineering prowess (37:41).

Exploring Bazalgette’s Contributions Today

Rosemary Ashton: Concluding the discussion, Rosemary inquires about the best places in London to witness Bazalgette’s achievements.

Spencer Mizzen: He points to the Embankments near Charing Cross and Westminster Bridge, where subtle tributes to Bazalgette can be found etched into the brickwork (35:42). Additionally, the upcoming Bazalgette Embankment as part of the Thames Tideway Tunnel project will serve as a prominent homage to his work, further cementing his legacy in London’s urban landscape (37:41).

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Conclusion

This episode masterfully intertwines the historical narrative of the Great Stink with the broader themes of urbanization, public health, and engineering innovation. Rosemary Ashton and Spencer Mizzen provide a comprehensive understanding of how a combination of environmental catastrophe, scientific inquiry, and visionary engineering led to the transformation of London’s sewage system. Through notable quotes and detailed explanations, listeners gain a vivid picture of Joseph Bazalgette’s monumental contributions and their lasting impact on modern urban planning.

Notable Quotes:

• Spencer Mizzen on the Great Stink’s impact (04:34): “The Times newspaper in particular... kept the government's nose to the grindstone, trying to get the government, the Parliament, to agree to something.”

• Spencer Mizzen introducing Joseph Bazalgette (20:36): “He was the chief engineer, and he already started. As soon as he was made chief engineer, he suggested extending the sewers to solve the problem of the effluent.”

• Spencer Mizzen on Disraeli’s role (23:35): “He took the bull by the horns... he brought forward a bill for the cleansing of London.”

This episode not only chronicles a critical moment in London's history but also celebrates the ingenuity and perseverance that reshaped one of the world’s greatest cities.

Transcript

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[Rosemary Ashton]

The great stink of 1858. It's certainly a distinctive name for a historical event, but, of course, it wasn't particularly pleasant to live through. So I wonder if you could start by giving our listeners an introduction to the Great Stink. What exactly was going on here?

[Spencer Mizzen]

Well, what was going on was that you had, in the summer of 1858, the hottest summer yet recorded, the hot weather above the 75, or, you know, Fahrenheit would be quite hot. And the whole of June and into July was in those temperatures and above. And one day, it's the 16th of June, the hottest temperature ever recorded in London, which was 35 degrees centigrade, or 94.5 Fahrenheit, which, of course, now we've gone past, but we know why we've gone past it for reasons not dissimilar to those that occurred then. That is, we've got climate change. Now, what they then had was hot weather, confounded by the Great stink of the River Thames, which was a sewer. That's what had happened to the Thames. It was full of human sewage, and it had been so for some time, obviously. But it got worse and worse as the weather got hotter. And so the stench caused all sorts of things not to happen. For example, pleasure boats for tourists going up and down the River Thames had to stop because nobody could bear it. People living by the Thames, which was unembanked, so you've got to imagine it low, wide, flowing right onto the surrounding land with houses quite close. So you've got people, generally poor people, living by the side of the Thames and having to put up with this awful, terrible stink.

[Rosemary Ashton]

Now, it seems that the Great Stink caused a great stink among the public, politicians and the press. Can you give us some examples of how newspapers and MPs turned the odours emanating from the Thames into a kind of national scandal?

[Spencer Mizzen]

Well, it was a scandal and it was the newspapers, above anything else, really, which kept the government's nose to the grindstone, trying to get the government, the Parliament, to agree to something, because it had been known that something must be done. For several years there had been hot temperatures and there had been the stink. And there had been, and we'll come on to this, had been cholera outbreaks, which people were obviously also very worried about and which they connected to, to stinking air. Nobody knew exactly what caused cholera, but people thought it was all to do with poisoned air. So as soon as the Thames began to stink again in the summer, for about the fourth summer running in 1850, eight people began to say, look, something's got to be done. And the Times newspaper in particular, which was, of course, the newspaper of the day, was constantly saying to Parliament, get on with it. Do nothing. Stop doing nothing. The Metropolitan Board of Works, which had been founded only a few years earlier, was told to earn its money. You know, if you're the Metropolitan Board of Words, why are you not doing something about this? So there was an awful lot of stuff in the papers. And also quite recently, newspapers had started having an editorial column, plus letters to the editor. And so you now got letters to the editor and interestingly and usefully, for something actually getting done, both the Houses of Parliament sat, as they still do, on the Thames, and the Law courts further east sat, as they still do on the Thames. So you got letters to the editor saying, I am a barrister at Temple Inn and I am being poisoned, I am being choked, I am being killed every day by this foul miasma, this poisonous. You know, you get the picture. And so it was actually quite useful to those who wanted to do something that both lawyers in particular, but also parliamentarians, were suffering. For example, on 30 June, which was not the hottest. It had already passed the hottest day, but it was still unbearable. There was a committee meeting of parliamentarians taking place in a committee room right on the Thames. And what we've got, we've got the Times reporting this. Three days later, a sudden rush from the room took place, foremost among them being the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And that was Benjamin Disraeli, who, with a mass of papers in one hand and with his pocket handkerchief clutch in the other and applied closely to his nose, with body half bent, hastened in dismay from the pestilential odor, followed closely by Sir James Graham, Home secretary. And then Mr. Gladstone also paid particular attention to his nose. And they all precipitately quitted the pestilential apartment, the disordered state of their papers which they carried in their hands, showing how imperatively they had received notice to quit. And that's how the Times manages to make, you know, this a big story.

[Rosemary Ashton]

So is a key thing here, then, the fact that some of the most powerful men in the land were the ones who were feeling the full force of distinct.

[Spencer Mizzen]

Absolutely. That was rather fortunate that these were cabinet members of great importance, and particularly Disraeli, who he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he was also the leader of the House of Commons, because the Prime Minister was Lord Derby, so he sat in the Lords, and therefore you had to have a separate leader in The House of Commons, and that was Disraeli. So he was the one who was able, and who in fact, jumped to the task of bringing in legislation to sort out the problem of the stinking Thames. And it's worth saying that newspapers had increased in number greatly over the last 20 years because of technical improvements in printing, for example. And also tax on newspapers had been repealed only in 1855, so they were much cheaper. You could get penny papers. And, of course, literacy had improved. All sorts of things fed into the fact that finally something was about the problem.

[Rosemary Ashton]

Now, you mentioned cholera just a few minutes ago, and that's obviously an important part of this story. There've been, I understand, a series of quite severe cholera outbreaks around this time. How does this come into the story of the Great Stink? How does this impact on the politicians and the press's reaction to the Great Stink?

[Spencer Mizzen]

There had been in 1831, then 1848, and then most recently for us, 1854, there was a cholera outbreak, a serious one, where, you know, hundreds if not thousands of people died of cholera in the summer of 1854. And everybody talked about, as the lawyer in the temple did in his letter, the miasma, which they thought was caused by cholera. Now, the miasma is simply the smell, and nobody knew what caused cholera, but they associated it, rightly enough, with this terrible stink.

[Rosemary Ashton]

There's a key point here, though. The fact that people believed that germs could be spread through the miasma, through air, in fact, and that the stink was actually doing that.

[Spencer Mizzen]

They did think that. They thought that that was how this particular infection was handed over from one person to another. And, of course, you've got London being a very crowded city, you've got slums and overcrowding which had already been noticed, and people were trying to do something about it. There was Edwin Chadwick and Henry Mayhew and others who were writing about the problem and trying to solve the problem of overcrowding and sanitation, but they didn't understand what the mechanism was for this. But in 1854, actually, we'll come. Who is our great hero? But the first hero is Dr. John Snow, who was a doctor and an early user of anesthetics, ether and chloroform, which came to use for surgery in the late 1840s. And John Snow in 1854 started to take account. He did statistics, really. He started to take account in Soho, where there was a particular lot of death going on from cholera. And he started to count the number of people dying in each of the streets in Soho in summer 1854. And he found that Broad street had the most deaths. And so what he did, he thought that the way that people were, they were getting their water from a public water pump in the street and he thought that it might be the water that was contaminating. So he managed to get permission to shut off Broad street water pump and lo and behold, deaths dropped almost immediately. And he went on doing this statistical business over the next couple of years and wrote letters and wrote articles and he actually worked it out that contaminated water was the cause, but nobody took him seriously until we got a couple of years later to 1858. It's worth just saying actually that if anybody wants to go round the area in Soho, Broad street is now called Broadwick street and there is a pub called the John Snow Pub, which at the back has a replica of the pub which he closed off in his heroic activity. The last thing I'm going to say about him, because he's a very interesting figure, is you might wonder, and I did wonder when I was writing about this, why did I not find that he was contributing to the discussion? In 1858, John Snow died suddenly of a stroke on the hottest day, the 16th of June 1858.

[Rosemary Ashton]

So right at the height of the great stink.

[Spencer Mizzen]

Yeah, and of course that got people started, that got the Times onto it and so on. And then Michael Faraday, another great scientist, the elect magnetous head of the Royal Institution, he wrote a letter to the Tynes in July 1855. So between the 1854 cholera and our 1858, and he wrote about the state of the Times. And this is what he wrote to the editor of the times. 9th of July 1855. Sir, I traversed this day by steamboat the space between London and Hungerford Bridges. It was low water and I think the tide must have been near the turn. The appearance and the smell of the water forced themselves at once of my attention. The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown liquid. I have thought it a duty to record these facts that they may be brought to the attention of those who exercise power or have responsibility in relation to the condition of our river. Surely the river which flows for so many miles through London ought not to be allowed to become a fermenting sewer. If we neglect this subject, we cannot expect to do so with impunity. Nor ought we to be surprised if ere many years are over a hot season give us sad proof of the folly of our carelessness. Well, there you have it. That's Farranday predicting what was exactly going to happen. And others picked this up. Punch, for example, the Comic Illustrated magazine full of cartoons, immediately picked up on Faraday's letter to the Times. Two weeks later, on 21 July, Punch has got a cartoon, Faraday giving his card to Father thames. And it's Mr. Faraday with his top hat on in a boat, leaning out and giving his card, his identity card, to old Father Thames, who's appearing all bearded and ancient mythical figure rising out of the Thames with disgusting things streaming down from his face. And so, I mean, in the cartoons of the period, did an awful lot, as you can imagine, to make it real to people, particularly people who didn't live in London and weren't actually experiencing this. It made it quite real. And the newspapers had great fun with this, if you like, a kind of morbid gratitude fun. Other things were newspapers were constantly going on about the Silver Thames of mythological history and Edmund Spenser's poem Prothalamian from the late 16th century, Edmund Spenser's famous line, sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song. And so there was a lot of fun with that and this. We say fun, but of course it was serious and it did get things going in the end.

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[Rosemary Ashton]

It's an interesting point you make there about the transition from the mythical silver Thames to the basically what would become an open sewer by the mid 19th century. I just wonder if you could spend a few minutes looking at why that had happened. Can you tell us a little bit about the city of London in the mid 19th century? How much had it changed over the preceding decades before the great stink? And how did that contribute to the terms becoming quite, you know, just so grim?

[Spencer Mizzen]

Yeah, of course. Well, the main thing is population rise. In 1800, you had a population of 1 million in London, which was then the largest city not only in Britain, but in the world by population. And by the 1850s, you had 2.5 million, so more than double. And this, of course, is because of the Industrial revolution. People coming in from agriculture in to work in these new factories. The factories, by the way, were part of the problem of the overflowing into the Thames, of the sewage, because they were sending out rubbish, you know, for example, slaughterhouses. You can imagine the effluent that's coming from them and so on. But basically what you've got then is an industrialized city, but you haven't got an infrastructure in terms of homes and in terms of, well, everything else really that you need in a city. And that was really a big part of the problem. You've got too many people. And of course, what happened in terms of sanitary matters, and particularly in terms of toilet going, was that there was an overflow. Now, why there was a sewage overflowing into the Thames, you might ask. Well, that's because previously the system of going to the loo, it sounds extraordinary, but this was. What was going on was that people dug cesspits, pits in their backyards or in their cellars, and they went to the loo down there. Then. I mean, this is extraordinary, but right up until the 1850s, you had people called night soil men who came to collect. Well, they came to collect the solids at night with carts and carted the solids out of London to sell to farmers as fertilizer, which of course is if you've got the right proportion of population and so on. That's rather a perfect solution. But it ceased to be a perfect solution when you've got so many people. And so you then had an botched attempt by Edwin Chadwick, who was a social reformer, and he was looking into sanitation and overcrowding. But he thought it would be better if not only the rich, but everybody had a water closet. I mean, water closets were actually. If you look it up, they were actually. Well, they seem to have existed in prehistoric times in some form. But even an Elizabethan chap, I think it was called, Sir John Harrington, had devised a loo that you would sit on and you had a cistern above and you could flush water down. So rich people could afford that, and they did that. But Edwin Chadwick wanted to extend that to everybody. He thought it was healthier. Well, of course, what then happened was you have far more going down into what, into sewers which had been built for rainwater and leading rainwater into the Thames. So these sewers were now taking not just rainwater, but two and a half million people's rubbish straight into the Thames. And the small sewers were just overflowing and it was hopeless. So that's what you've got. You've got a kind of. It's not sudden, but it seems sudden when you look back on it. But what you had was a complete breakdown of your sanitation system.

[Rosemary Ashton]

So you've essentially got the effluence of hundreds of thousands of people going straight into the river. Yes, now I can see why it's called the Great Stink. Okay, so now is the time. You've mentioned him before to introduce the hero of this story, and that's Joseph Bazalgette. Can you introduce us to him then? Who was he and why is he such a towering figure in this story?

[Spencer Mizzen]

Well, he's an engineer. He was the chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, which I mentioned earlier over the times and other, being rather annoyed that they weren't doing anything. But the Metropolitan Board of Works had been set up in order to try and sort out London's problems in 1855 or 1856. And he was the chief engineer, and he already started. As soon as he was made chief engineer, he suggested extending the sewers to solve the problem of the effluent. But of course, he met resistance. Now, why did he meet resistance? Well, to be fair, there were plenty of people trying to solve the problem. So there were other engineers with their ideas. He had his idea. We'll come on to that in a minute. And we had others, and indeed, we even had. I mean, if you look into it, you had engineers and socially concerned people in other cities, not London, other cities which were not suffering from cholera, like Glasgow or Liverpool or Manchester. You had engineers there sending their suggestions, you know, so people were putting their mind to it. But the people who were going to. I mean, the Metropolitan Board and then the Parliament were the ones who were dragging their feet and not actually deciding on anything. But Bazarget clearly had the best idea and yet nothing got done for a couple of years. He had these rivals and he also had resistance over not just which of the many plans was going to be chosen, who was going to pay, what would be the cost. And you got at that time a set of individual entities who were looking after London, if you like. So each area of London had its vestry and the vestries had a say over how money was spent on the local. The water committees themselves, the water companies. There were several water companies. They were private companies which took water from the Thames and then sold it to the inhabitants as drinking water. But in most cases they did not treat the water before they handed it back for people to use for cooking and washing and drinking. So none of them wanted to bear the cost. And then you've got Parliament. And if you look in the Parliament debates in the years immediately going up to 1850, you've got all sorts of muggins and buggins and Mr. So and so and Colonel are the next from all over the country coming on and saying, well, our population don't like special taxis, they don't want to be taxed. And then people from outside London saying, why would we? Why would our constituents want to pay for. You know, you can imagine what was going on. And all this was holding up any kind of movement or listening indeed to the John Snows and the Joseph Bazargettes who knew what needed to be done and wanted it to. So that's where we are at in 1858. And Bazargette is the one who finally, thanks to Disraeli, really. And if I can go on to why Disraeli was the one who did actually get Parliament to do something about it.

[Rosemary Ashton]

Yeah. So how did he do that? I mean, Disraeli was obviously a very powerful figure, wasn't he? A real man of action. How did he force it through?

[Spencer Mizzen]

He took the bull by the horns. After all this business of the hottest day and the committee having run out of the committee room and he was one of them. So. So as early as the 15th of July, which is quick moving, it would be even today, he brought forward a bill for the cleansing of London and this is how he presented it. He knew he would get lots and lots of opposition. This is how he presented it. It's in Hansard. I took the liberty of moving the orders of the day should be postponed in order that I might Bring under the attention of the House a bill, the object of which is the purification of the River Thames. The condition of the waters of that river has fallen upon the inhabitants of the metropolis, generally speaking, as an unexpected calam. Well, it wasn't an unexpected calamity, but he wanted to put it that way so as not to suggest that Parliament had not been doing its duty. That noble river, so long, the pride and joy of Englishmen, which has hitherto been associated with the noblest feats of our commerce and the most beautiful passages of poetry, has already become a stygian pool reeking with ineffable, intolerable horrors. The public health is at stake. There's a pervading apprehension of pestilence in this great city. And I'm sure I'm only taking a step that will have been anticipated when I ask leave to introduce a bill which will attempt to terminate a state of affairs so unsatisfactory and fraught with so much danger to the public health. Now you can see what he's doing here. He's saying, the noble river, our noble river, you know, the river of great poetry, beautiful passage of poetry, our great metropolis. And he's more or less saying, reminding people we are the largest and greatest and most advanced metropolis in the world. And yet look at our city, look what's happening. And I'm sure you, my dear colleagues will see that we must get on and do something about it. And so, you know, he succeeded. There were a few people who sort of got up and complained and he just said, look, we've got a committee, the Metropolitan Board of Work. Everybody was arguing against them, but Disraeli said, they're all good, well minded, intelligent Englishmen. They are going to do their duty. And that's how he got Parliament to pass the bill immediately and straight away at the end of July when Parliament was rising for the summer holidays. Anyway, Bazalgette was told, right, go ahead.

[Rosemary Ashton]

So what did he go ahead with? What did Bazalgette's system look like? I mean, how did it work in practice?

[Spencer Mizzen]

Well, how it worked was his idea. It was extraordinarily ambitious. It was to build two tunnels and huge sewers in those tunnels down both sides of the Thames, north and south of the Thames, right at the edge of the Thames, taking actually quite a lot of water, taking the Thames. He narrowed the Thames by quite a bit by doing this because he dug under the sides of the Thames to build these two huge tunnels with the sewers inside them which would take all the effluent, because they would be interconnecting sewers from street level, you see. So the street sewers where people left their excrement would go down and into these. Instead of going into the Thames, they were going to, into these huge brick built sewers which went all the way out to the east to outfalls in the tidal Thames, because the Thames is tidal for part of its way. If you take it far enough out, you're in the Thames estuary and it will flow out to sea, otherwise it flows back on the tide, which is what it had been doing into the city. So, so this was his plan and I mean, it's quite extraordinary really, what he managed to do when he was finally allowed to do it. He took 52 acres reclaimed from the river and 82 miles of sewers went along there. He himself described much later in life, in an interview shortly before his death in 1890, some of the difficulties he had. He said, the fall in the river isn't above 3 inches a mile for sewage. We want a fall of a couple of feet, feet. And that kept taking us down below the river. It kept taking us down below the river and when we got to a certain depth we had to pump up again. It was certainly a very troublesome job. We would sometimes spend weeks in drawing out plans and then suddenly come across some railway or canal that upset everything and we had to begin all over again. It was tremendously hard work. It was supposed to take five and a half years and cost £2 million. Money is a bit difficult, but roughly multiply by 100 or 120 for today's costs. In fact, in the end, it took almost 13 years into the early 1870s to be completed. Although of course a lot of it was already done much sooner than that. And it cost 3,4 million, between 3 and 4 million pounds. But for that people got not just proper sewerage, a proper system. What they got also was part of his plan was building the embankments. So you have to imagine we've got these ones, wonderful embankments you can stroll along and view across the river and so on. That was not the case. You were down on the river's edge walking along the shore. That was what you were doing until he built these huge embankments which were for people to walk along. They also took traffic away from the Strand. The Strand was the one road which took traffic from west to east and Strand, of course, if you think about it, the title, the name means shore. So the Strand had been your nearest street, as it were, to the river. And now, of course, some of the traffic could take place on the embankments. And so you've got both a traffic improvement and you've got a more attractive city. He built parks and so on all along the way. And you've got your sewage problem sorted out. And also because the underground system started in the early 1860s, sewer, actually, the Victoria Embankment on the north carries part of the District Line underground system. They managed to incorporate that as it was being built, because that was when he was building the tunnels. So it's quite extraordinary, really.

[Rosemary Ashton]

I mean, yeah, it sounds like an amazing feat. I mean, you say that it sorted out London's sewage problem. I mean, how long was it before Londoners could really see tangible benefits of what he'd done?

[Spencer Mizzen]

Yes, well, a good question. I mean, I think he started work in January 1850 and he got going west to east. It's not known, certainly, if you look at the newspapers and so on in 1859, you don't get recurring complaints that it's not sorted out or it's no good or it's no better. And so I think things did alleviate more quickly. You also never again had quite such a long sustained period of heat, you see, which you had. So it was pretty well immediately improved. But the real test was, was there ever going to be another cholera outbreak? And it's interesting because there was a Minor 1 in 1866 in a part of East London, unfortunately, and it can be proved that it was only in a very local area, and that was an area which had not yet been connected to the sewers. After that, London did not have any more cholera epidemics. Other European cities did have cholera outbreaks. Hamburg had lost thousands of people in 1892 because they had not yet figured out or followed on from Bazargette's efforts. And people had not really worked out, you can imagine. You'd have thought they would have known by then to follow London's example, but, you know, so it really did make a huge difference. And that was the beginning of the end of cholera from British shores. Except, of course, if somebody brought it from abroad, which did occasionally happen just.

[Rosemary Ashton]

To finish on Bazalgette, then. I mean, was he lauded? Was he celebrated at the time? Was he, you know, acclaimed as this great hero?

[Spencer Mizzen]

Yes, he was. He was quite rightly knighted. He became Sir Joseph Bazerteth. He was made a hero. And that was quite right, certainly. I mean, everybody thought that it was wonderful what he'd done. There was one disaster where two ships collided in 1878 along, unfortunately, to the east of London, where the outfall was, where all the sewage was being dumped. And unfortunately, one was a pleasure boat which sank and a number of people died. And that was unfortunate. At that point. Bazargette did get a little bit of criticism, but you could hardly say that what he'd done was a bad thing. What then happened was that Bazargette put his mind to making improvements and in fact, it was the fault of one of the ships going in the wrong line. So they improved the movement of ships on the Thames, really, to sort that problem out.

[Rosemary Ashton]

You said earlier that his scheme did face a bit of opposition and there were alternative suggestions. Would you be able to outline a couple of more outlandish.

[Spencer Mizzen]

Well, the one to think about is Goldsworthy Gurney, terrific name, who was in fact Parliament's specialist heating engineer. So, of course he had the ear of Parliament. But what he wanted to do was not to take the sewage out of the river, as Bazargette was going to do, but to keep it in the river. And he was going to dig two deep channels all the way down the Thames, hoping that the sewage would all go into the channels and not flow over and out onto the riverbank and into the river itself. Well, fortunately, they didn't choose that, because the quotation I gave from Bazarget will tell you that he found it very difficult getting deep enough to do his digging. So how on earth would Goldsworthy Gurney's plan have worked? And that was the most outlandish, but it was also the one that was most considered because of his position as the Parliamentary heating and lighting engineer. But Bazarsgette was by much the most ambitious and it was wonderful. And what it did do was also. I mean, he was extraordinary in this. This is a wonderful example of the Victorian gung ho can do attitude once they get through the bureaucracy, in being able to do the outfalls of these two tunnels. The northern one was at Beckton Barking, and there the pumping station has disappeared. On the south side you've got his pumping station where all the water was finally pumped into the tidal Thames is it crossing. And that has recently been opened to visitors. You can go and visit it. It's a bit hard to get to, but you go and visit it and it's the most. Look it up. It's the most wonderful. It was called the Cathedral on the Marsh because the Victorians, Bazalgette not only designed all the pipe work, obviously, to do the sewage business. There's wonderful ironwork, iron railings and there's beautiful coloured tiling. It is like a cathedral. And now you can visit that. And the joy of particular aspect of Bazargette's extraordinarily detailed work that he bothered about that as well as about the technical work. The joy of that is that easiest and quickest way to get to Crossness is to take the train to Abbeywood on the Elizabeth Line, the Elizabeth Line, which is our recent example of a great technical engineering project finally coming to fruition. So it's a very nice kind of conjunction, actually.

[Rosemary Ashton]

That was going to be my next question. Where are the best places in London to visit to get a real sense of what Basalgette achieved? So you mentioned that place there. What I mean, I guess just walking along the Embankment, that's kind of a tribute to what he achieved all those years ago.

[Spencer Mizzen]

Well, that's right. And crossing the bridges on the embankment itself, near Charing Cross on the north side, there is a very small head of Bazzette, but, you know, a statue. But it's not a standalone statue, it's just pitched into the brickwork. You'd hardly notice it, but you should look for it if you're walking along the Embankment near Charing Cross. There's also a mention in the brickwork, just as sort of his name really, in the brickwork on the south side, just south of Westminster Bridge. But it's not much really when you think about it. However, there will be very soon a new embankment being built which will be the Bazalget Embankment. And that is a result of our current most parallel effort, which is the Thames Tideway Tunnel, which is almost finished now. The Thames Tideway tunnel began in 2016, so it's taking about the same sort of time as Bazogette. It's a bit less, but there. This is because our sewage, because we're now nine million, not two and a half million. And so even Bazogette's tunnels were beginning to find things difficult, although really they have been the major way in which our sewage has been dealt with. However, there was going to be more overflowing and so on. And so that's why the Thames Tideway Tunnel is being built. It's being built through, using Bazargettes huge brick tunnels which have stood the test of time, but extending them and of course in some ways obviously using more modern materials. If you look on the website of the Thames Tideway Tunnel, you'll see how the people running that have nothing but admiration for Bazalgette's infrastructure, which they are.

[Rosemary Ashton]

Using using you would say then that Bazalgette system has stood the test of time then, you know, this is like more than 150 years ago. Like you say, the population's exploded, we've got climate change, etc. Etc. Has Basil Jet system generally, you know, endured all those changes?

[Spencer Mizzen]

Yes, absolutely. We'd been using his, you know, his sewers when we flushed the toilet right up until now. And although it ceased to be sufficient, I think if I'm right, that the current tunnel is being built with the same principles at heart. You're taking the sewage out of London through safe tunnels out of the Thames. You're purifying the Thames as you do it and you're accommodating 9 million people now who don't have to worry about where their sewage is going or whether they're going to catch some terrible. So surely to goodness you would say that. Bazargette, yes, we have been living with it and I think it's a shame there hasn't been more in the way of homage to him visual or visible on the river or near the river. But you will be getting this. Bazargette Embankment, I read, will be one of seven new embankments by the current project and it will be by Blackfriars Bridge. So I'll be looking forward to seeing that as I travel into London via Blackfriars very often. So I shall be certainly looking out. The Tideway tunnel ought to be opened this year. They finished all the underground work, so they're doing the equivalent of Bazalgettes Embankments and gardens along, you know, the gardens along the side and so on. Let's hope that they will. I'm sure they will speak of their debt to passership.

[Advertiser]

That was Rosemary Ashton speaking to Spencer Mizzen. Rosemary is Emeritus professor of English Language and Literature at University College London. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman. Hear that? Spring is here and the Home Depot has great prices on grills to make this season yours. So if you're working on improving your hosting skills, you're going to want the next grill four burner gas grill for $229. And of course, pair it with the next grill eight piece grill tool set. Now get outside and show off those new skills. Shop a wide selection of grills under $300 at the home Depot.

[Spencer Mizzen]

You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries. You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash brown rounds. McDonald's breakfast comes first.