September 28, 2026 • 12 mins
In London in the summer of 1858, a Great Stink settled over the city. The sewage from its growing population was baking in the streets -- and infiltrating the city's water supply. Learn how this smelly situation led to some incredible sewer engineering still in use today (plus a change in the understanding of how infection works) in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/ridiculous-history-the-great-stink-london.htm
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to BrainStuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey BrainStuff, Lauren
Vogelbaum here. Imagine a summer day with temperatures hovering around
a balmy 90 degrees Fahrenheit or 32 Celsius. Instead of
wearing a cotton t-shirt and shorts and sipping iced coffee,
(00:22):
you're dressed in layers upon layers of clothing. still made
of breathable cotton or linen or muslin, but definitely with
a number of undergarments beneath your suit or dress, which
covers you from ankles to chin. And though you might
dig coffee, ice is an imported luxury, cut from frozen
lakes and shipped into town, so you probably don't have
(00:44):
two cubes to clink together. But either way, whether you're
sitting in a pleasant parlor or bustling around a dank kitchen,
there's a terrible, inescapable stench in the air. Welcome to
Victorian England? The sweltering summer of 1858 in London was
known as the Great Stink. Industrial opportunities had drawn droves
(01:09):
of people into the city, more than doubling the population
since the turn of the century to some two and
a half million. This made London the largest city in
the world, and there was scarcely enough housing to accommodate everyone.
Working-class Londoners stacked themselves in tiny spaces with poor ventilation,
which meant that their homes pulsed with the putrid, mingling
(01:31):
smells of cookery, body odor, industrial byproducts, horse manure, and
human waste. After the Great Exhibition of 1851 showed off fancy,
newfangled flush toilets, the wealthy adopted in-home water closets, some
of which even emptied into sewers to remove waste more efficiently.
(01:52):
But most of the city's population emptied their waste into cesspits,
that is, large or small holes dug into the ground
in alleyways or basements, lined with porous brick so that
the liquid components would seep into the earth. There were
some 200,000 cesspits around the city, filled via channels from
outdoor privies or indoor facilities. Workers called nightmen labored while
(02:17):
the city slept, shoveling out the solid waste and loading
it out to sell as fertilizer to nearby farms. The
nightmen could barely keep up with their task of emptying them.
By day, the cesspits baked under the hot sun, emitting
foul smells. And that's not the worst of it. The
groundwater from the cesspits, the flow of the city's sewers,
(02:40):
and sometimes direct deposits from residents all went straight into
the city's water supply, the River Thames. The issue of
what to do with waste always grows with the population.
In small communities, waste can be left untreated in elements
and allowed to decompose over time. But in packed cities,
(03:00):
the problem literally piles up. To dispose of this waste
requires great physical dedication, major financial resources, and monumental acts
of engineering. There has to be a solution better than
dumping it into the nearest river, especially if that river
is also where you get your fresh water. The city
(03:20):
suffered repeated outbreaks of everything from typhoid fever to tuberculosis
to dysentery through the 1700s to 1800s, but the most
insidious threat to Londoners' health may have been cholera. Cholera
is a disease caused by infection with the bacteria Vibrio cholerae,
which set up shop in humans' small intestine and produce
(03:41):
a toxin that causes such severe diarrhea that an infected
person can die from dehydration within several hours. It's transmitted
when fecal matter from an infected person gets into the
water or food that another person consumes. Although it's been
around since antiquity, its spread throughout the 1800s constituted the
(04:03):
first global pandemic. London got hit hard, first starting with
an outbreak in 1831. But at the time, germ theory,
that is, the idea that diseases can be caused by
microbes like bacteria, didn't really exist. People still thought that miasma,
meaning bad air, often identified by foul smells, caused lots
(04:26):
of illnesses. So, in response to the growing stench of
the city, in 1848, sanitation reformers like Edwin Chadwick worked
to enact better cleaning measures, better ventilation of buildings, and
to drain London's human waste more rapidly. Those first two
things were pretty good, but unfortunately, the latter solution wound
(04:49):
up draining even more human waste straight into the Thames.
By 1849, England and Wales had racked up around 53,000
deaths from cholera. Epidemics kept hitting the city until, in 1854,
a physician by the name of John Snow observed an
outbreak in Soho and traced the deaths to the use
(05:10):
of water from a particular pump on Broad Street. He
basically single-handedly stopped the outbreak by getting the government to
remove the pump's handle. Over the next year, he showed
that cholera didn't strike people who used water from less
polluted sources upstream of the city's sewage. Ironically, that same year, 1854,
(05:30):
an Italian anatomist by the name of Filippo Pacini first
isolated and cultured Vibrio cholerae bacteria, but his research went
largely ignored until after his death. Snow wasn't any luckier.
He passed in 1858, some eight years before the medical
establishment would recognize that diseases can indeed be waterborne. But okay,
(05:55):
speaking of 1858, we're still there, and London still stinks
because of this massive cesspit sewage situation. And it turns
out that as much as you shouldn't drink poop water
or eat, for example, lettuce that's been grown using poop water,
as we've all recently found out, what you can smell
(06:17):
can hurt you. A truly terrible odor of this type
isn't just a nuisance. It poses actual health risks. As
human waste decomposes, it produces what's known as sewer gas,
really a combination of gases, some harmless, some less so,
especially with exposure over time. Sewer gas is made up
(06:39):
of mainly methane and carbon dioxide, which are relatively non-toxic,
but also ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, which are both super
irritating in the short term and cause organ damage in
the long term. Risks of inhaling sewer gas include inflamed
eyes and throat, coughing, and even difficulty breathing. Long-term exposure
can cause memory loss, lethargy, dizziness, and, yes, even death.
(07:05):
Sewer gas is also fairly explosive. And no one, from
the poorest of the poor to the wealthiest of the wealthy,
was exempt from the Great Stink. It was so pervasive
that Parliament, seated in its lovely new house along the Thames,
could barely gather its wits to meet. In an oft-reported anecdote,
Parliament's curtains were doused with chloride of lime to mask
(07:28):
the smell. Chloride of lime being the old-timey term for
calcium hypochlorite, which smells strongly of chlorine and is today
used to sanitize swimming pools. If this anecdote is true,
it wouldn't have worked very well. The Great Stink couldn't
be ignored. and Parliament approved a bill for a sewer
(07:48):
system in just 18 days. It was of a scope
that it would take several years to complete, but even
that was an impressive job. It was primarily designed by
one Joseph Bazalgette, the chief engineer of the London Metropolitan
Board of Works. And not just as an elaborate waste-to-diversion system.
(08:09):
Parts of it, like the intricately decorated, Byzantine-inspired pumping stations,
are veritable works of art. Think interiors with grand arches
and columns, scrolling wrought ironwork painted in burgundy, green, and gold,
and floods of natural light to illuminate it all. A
cathedral-like sewage system is definitely out of the budget today,
(08:32):
and what's the likelihood that the government could usher through
a bill aimed at solving a public health crisis in
18 days? The design also included some 1,100 miles of
new or upgraded small understreet drains, that's about 1,800 kilometers,
all feeding into 82 miles of brick-lined sewers, that's 132 kilometers,
(08:55):
themselves washing into large intercepting sewers, four replacing former tributaries
and two laid out on either bank of the Thames.
These were concealed under newly built embankments that changed the
face of the river and the city itself, displacing whole streets.
The project involved some 318 million bricks. The intercepting sewers
(09:19):
were made to flow slowly out east of the city
towards the sea, pumped far enough downstream that the waste
can join up with the Thames estuary, where it can
be released at high tide to be carried out into
open water. Later improvements included rudimentary sewage treatment plants starting
in the 1880s to improve the conditions of the Thames estuary.
(09:40):
After all, without sewage treatment, you're literally just moving problems downstream.
But in the meanwhile, the bulk of the new sewer
system opened for use in 1865. There was another outbreak
of cholera a year later, almost entirely in residents of
neighborhoods that weren't yet connected to the new sewer system
(10:01):
out in London's East End. It was this epidemic that
actually convinced the greater medical establishment that John Snow had
been right all along, that cholera was waterborne. The whole
thing is considered the beginning of the end of miasma theory.
The Baseljet system worked decently well, with continuing upgrades, for
(10:22):
some 150 years, thanks to his forward-thinking anticipation of the
city's growth. But the population is now over 9 million,
and the nature of our waste has changed. In 2017,
a giant mass of human excrement melded with discarded cooking fat,
wet wipes, condoms, and other waste was discovered in a
(10:43):
sewer under Whitechapel. Referred to colloquially as a fatberg, it
weighed some 130 metric tons and measured over 820 feet long,
that's 250 meters. Starting in 2015, work began on a
new super sewer called the Thames Tideway Tunnel to help
prevent sewage overflow into the river, especially during times of
(11:06):
heavy rainfall. It was fully integrated into the existing sewer
system as of 2025. If you're ever around London and
have some time to, uh, waste, you can check out
some of all of this for yourself. A sample of
the Whitechapel Fatberg is part of the permanent collection of
the London Museum. And as a direct result of the
(11:28):
Great Stink, the metro area features gorgeous, historic sewage pumping stations.
Today's episode is based on the article Ridiculous History, The
Great Stink of London on HowStuffWorks.com, written by Candice Gibson.
BrainStuff is a production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with
(11:49):
HowStuffWorks.com and is produced by Tyler Klang. For more shows
from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to BrainStuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey BrainStuff, Lauren
Vogelbaum here. Imagine a summer day with temperatures hovering around
a balmy 90 degrees Fahrenheit or 32 Celsius. Instead of
wearing a cotton t-shirt and shorts and sipping iced coffee,
(00:22):
you're dressed in layers upon layers of clothing. still made
of breathable cotton or linen or muslin, but definitely with
a number of undergarments beneath your suit or dress, which
covers you from ankles to chin. And though you might
dig coffee, ice is an imported luxury, cut from frozen
lakes and shipped into town, so you probably don't have
(00:44):
two cubes to clink together. But either way, whether you're
sitting in a pleasant parlor or bustling around a dank kitchen,
there's a terrible, inescapable stench in the air. Welcome to
Victorian England? The sweltering summer of 1858 in London was
known as the Great Stink. Industrial opportunities had drawn droves
(01:09):
of people into the city, more than doubling the population
since the turn of the century to some two and
a half million. This made London the largest city in
the world, and there was scarcely enough housing to accommodate everyone.
Working-class Londoners stacked themselves in tiny spaces with poor ventilation,
which meant that their homes pulsed with the putrid, mingling
(01:31):
smells of cookery, body odor, industrial byproducts, horse manure, and
human waste. After the Great Exhibition of 1851 showed off fancy,
newfangled flush toilets, the wealthy adopted in-home water closets, some
of which even emptied into sewers to remove waste more efficiently.
(01:52):
But most of the city's population emptied their waste into cesspits,
that is, large or small holes dug into the ground
in alleyways or basements, lined with porous brick so that
the liquid components would seep into the earth. There were
some 200,000 cesspits around the city, filled via channels from
outdoor privies or indoor facilities. Workers called nightmen labored while
(02:17):
the city slept, shoveling out the solid waste and loading
it out to sell as fertilizer to nearby farms. The
nightmen could barely keep up with their task of emptying them.
By day, the cesspits baked under the hot sun, emitting
foul smells. And that's not the worst of it. The
groundwater from the cesspits, the flow of the city's sewers,
(02:40):
and sometimes direct deposits from residents all went straight into
the city's water supply, the River Thames. The issue of
what to do with waste always grows with the population.
In small communities, waste can be left untreated in elements
and allowed to decompose over time. But in packed cities,
(03:00):
the problem literally piles up. To dispose of this waste
requires great physical dedication, major financial resources, and monumental acts
of engineering. There has to be a solution better than
dumping it into the nearest river, especially if that river
is also where you get your fresh water. The city
(03:20):
suffered repeated outbreaks of everything from typhoid fever to tuberculosis
to dysentery through the 1700s to 1800s, but the most
insidious threat to Londoners' health may have been cholera. Cholera
is a disease caused by infection with the bacteria Vibrio cholerae,
which set up shop in humans' small intestine and produce
(03:41):
a toxin that causes such severe diarrhea that an infected
person can die from dehydration within several hours. It's transmitted
when fecal matter from an infected person gets into the
water or food that another person consumes. Although it's been
around since antiquity, its spread throughout the 1800s constituted the
(04:03):
first global pandemic. London got hit hard, first starting with
an outbreak in 1831. But at the time, germ theory,
that is, the idea that diseases can be caused by
microbes like bacteria, didn't really exist. People still thought that miasma,
meaning bad air, often identified by foul smells, caused lots
(04:26):
of illnesses. So, in response to the growing stench of
the city, in 1848, sanitation reformers like Edwin Chadwick worked
to enact better cleaning measures, better ventilation of buildings, and
to drain London's human waste more rapidly. Those first two
things were pretty good, but unfortunately, the latter solution wound
(04:49):
up draining even more human waste straight into the Thames.
By 1849, England and Wales had racked up around 53,000
deaths from cholera. Epidemics kept hitting the city until, in 1854,
a physician by the name of John Snow observed an
outbreak in Soho and traced the deaths to the use
(05:10):
of water from a particular pump on Broad Street. He
basically single-handedly stopped the outbreak by getting the government to
remove the pump's handle. Over the next year, he showed
that cholera didn't strike people who used water from less
polluted sources upstream of the city's sewage. Ironically, that same year, 1854,
(05:30):
an Italian anatomist by the name of Filippo Pacini first
isolated and cultured Vibrio cholerae bacteria, but his research went
largely ignored until after his death. Snow wasn't any luckier.
He passed in 1858, some eight years before the medical
establishment would recognize that diseases can indeed be waterborne. But okay,
(05:55):
speaking of 1858, we're still there, and London still stinks
because of this massive cesspit sewage situation. And it turns
out that as much as you shouldn't drink poop water
or eat, for example, lettuce that's been grown using poop water,
as we've all recently found out, what you can smell
(06:17):
can hurt you. A truly terrible odor of this type
isn't just a nuisance. It poses actual health risks. As
human waste decomposes, it produces what's known as sewer gas,
really a combination of gases, some harmless, some less so,
especially with exposure over time. Sewer gas is made up
(06:39):
of mainly methane and carbon dioxide, which are relatively non-toxic,
but also ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, which are both super
irritating in the short term and cause organ damage in
the long term. Risks of inhaling sewer gas include inflamed
eyes and throat, coughing, and even difficulty breathing. Long-term exposure
can cause memory loss, lethargy, dizziness, and, yes, even death.
(07:05):
Sewer gas is also fairly explosive. And no one, from
the poorest of the poor to the wealthiest of the wealthy,
was exempt from the Great Stink. It was so pervasive
that Parliament, seated in its lovely new house along the Thames,
could barely gather its wits to meet. In an oft-reported anecdote,
Parliament's curtains were doused with chloride of lime to mask
(07:28):
the smell. Chloride of lime being the old-timey term for
calcium hypochlorite, which smells strongly of chlorine and is today
used to sanitize swimming pools. If this anecdote is true,
it wouldn't have worked very well. The Great Stink couldn't
be ignored. and Parliament approved a bill for a sewer
(07:48):
system in just 18 days. It was of a scope
that it would take several years to complete, but even
that was an impressive job. It was primarily designed by
one Joseph Bazalgette, the chief engineer of the London Metropolitan
Board of Works. And not just as an elaborate waste-to-diversion system.
(08:09):
Parts of it, like the intricately decorated, Byzantine-inspired pumping stations,
are veritable works of art. Think interiors with grand arches
and columns, scrolling wrought ironwork painted in burgundy, green, and gold,
and floods of natural light to illuminate it all. A
cathedral-like sewage system is definitely out of the budget today,
(08:32):
and what's the likelihood that the government could usher through
a bill aimed at solving a public health crisis in
18 days? The design also included some 1,100 miles of
new or upgraded small understreet drains, that's about 1,800 kilometers,
all feeding into 82 miles of brick-lined sewers, that's 132 kilometers,
(08:55):
themselves washing into large intercepting sewers, four replacing former tributaries
and two laid out on either bank of the Thames.
These were concealed under newly built embankments that changed the
face of the river and the city itself, displacing whole streets.
The project involved some 318 million bricks. The intercepting sewers
(09:19):
were made to flow slowly out east of the city
towards the sea, pumped far enough downstream that the waste
can join up with the Thames estuary, where it can
be released at high tide to be carried out into
open water. Later improvements included rudimentary sewage treatment plants starting
in the 1880s to improve the conditions of the Thames estuary.
(09:40):
After all, without sewage treatment, you're literally just moving problems downstream.
But in the meanwhile, the bulk of the new sewer
system opened for use in 1865. There was another outbreak
of cholera a year later, almost entirely in residents of
neighborhoods that weren't yet connected to the new sewer system
(10:01):
out in London's East End. It was this epidemic that
actually convinced the greater medical establishment that John Snow had
been right all along, that cholera was waterborne. The whole
thing is considered the beginning of the end of miasma theory.
The Baseljet system worked decently well, with continuing upgrades, for
(10:22):
some 150 years, thanks to his forward-thinking anticipation of the
city's growth. But the population is now over 9 million,
and the nature of our waste has changed. In 2017,
a giant mass of human excrement melded with discarded cooking fat,
wet wipes, condoms, and other waste was discovered in a
(10:43):
sewer under Whitechapel. Referred to colloquially as a fatberg, it
weighed some 130 metric tons and measured over 820 feet long,
that's 250 meters. Starting in 2015, work began on a
new super sewer called the Thames Tideway Tunnel to help
prevent sewage overflow into the river, especially during times of
(11:06):
heavy rainfall. It was fully integrated into the existing sewer
system as of 2025. If you're ever around London and
have some time to, uh, waste, you can check out
some of all of this for yourself. A sample of
the Whitechapel Fatberg is part of the permanent collection of
the London Museum. And as a direct result of the
(11:28):
Great Stink, the metro area features gorgeous, historic sewage pumping stations.
Today's episode is based on the article Ridiculous History, The
Great Stink of London on HowStuffWorks.com, written by Candice Gibson.
BrainStuff is a production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with
(11:49):
HowStuffWorks.com and is produced by Tyler Klang. For more shows
from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
BrainStuff News
Host
Lauren Vogelbaum
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