Partial Success: The Great Stink of London

Ok, so who thinks they'd like to read a book about sewers- for fun? Hands up? Guys? errr... guys?

Say you live in London in 1850 along with about a million other people. Your grandfather, who likes talking crap, tells you that in the old days every family had their own cesspit, which they would pay a lucky night-man to come and clean out every few months or so.

The nightman would then sell it to local farmers for fertiliser, but now there are no farms nearby, and what's more imported Guano from South America means farmers don't want human fertiliser, so prices of night men went up and people stopped cleaning out their cess pits so often. In poor areas, a lot of people lived above cellars and yards full of [censored], or as they liked to call it night soil. City life was fun.

But you're pretty wealthy, so you and your neighbours have just installed these new fangled water closets that flushes the night soil away- which is great, as because for the first time, the whole street isn't stinky.

Only trouble is you're dealing with medieval, (literally) sewerage systems. So what happens is that in about thirty years about half a million people start putting their waste directly into the thames unfiltered. Oddly, bad things start happening.

Did I mention you get your drinking water from the Thames?

It OK though, because the sewerage outlets are mostly downstream of the drinking water inlets. Though there are a couple of ones that sell cheap water that are after the sewers. Oh, and the thames is tidal, so the [censored] flows both ways.

Oddly, people start getting cholera. Still it's mostly poor people, and everybody figures they're dirty anyway. but then one hot summer the Thames gets really stinky, and because people believed disease was all airborne, this is bad. I mean, the house of parliament is right on the River- it's a damn DEATHTRAP!

So they decide to do something about it. Trouble is, there's no-one with the power to make it happen. All the old little villages that made up london run their own affairs. So they have to create a new kind of body, a sort of City council, with the power to raise taxes and build roads and sewers.

The council spend a fortune on build sewers to collect all the [censored] and take it downstream, where it goes straight into the river again. Because sickness is air-borne, remember. They rebuild tributaries, create reserviors and lakes.

At the same time scietists are looking at London water under a microscope- and finding -[censored]. they're also noticing that the closer to the Thames you are the more likely you are to get cholera and die. As the new system comes into place, they notice that only the areas without the new sewers get cholera, and begin to make the link. In the last outbreak only 6,000 people die- all in areas where the sewers aren't connected yet.

I won't even talk about typhoid.

So the change in the city meant a stinky, deadly problem was created, then a new council, a new law and millions of pounds had to be raised to prevent thousands of people from dying and the River turning into a slowmoving shitstream.

At the end of it all, they finally stop putting untreated sewerage into rivers and the sewers they built are still serving london today.

So if you are taking a dump in London today, in the reasonable confidence you won't have to drink it- say thanks to Sit Joseph Bazelgette, his sewers, and the taes raised by the metropolitan Board of Works.

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