April 2, 2025 • 13 mins
It's the height of summer in 1858 and something rotten is lurking in the river Thames.
Historian James Grasby unravels the smelliest side of our recent history as we step back into Victorian London to discover the Great Stink.
Hear how politicians scrambled to keep the stench out of parliament and find out what the smell meant for the working classes.
[Ad] This podcast is sponsored by CEWE, Europe’s leading photo printing company. Every image you capture tells a story. Discover ideas for curating your special memories and creating gifts for loved ones. From the award-winning CEWE PHOTOBOOK to wall art made from your favourite photos.
Start creating your story at www.cewe.co.uk
Production
Presenter: James Grasby
Producer: Jack Glover
Sound Design: Jesus Gomez
Contributors
Laura French (Crossness Engines Trust)
Discover more
This story has been made possible with our friends from the Crossness Engines Trust, for information on visiting and for more of London's murky history please visit: http://crossness.org.uk/
Join us and other environmental charities to help to look after our waterways by visiting https://marchforcleanwater.org/ and https://theriverstrust.org/key-issues/sewage-in-rivers
If you'd like to get in touch with feedback, or have a story connected with the National Trust, you can contact us at podcasts@nationaltrust.org.uk
Hear how politicians scrambled to keep the stench out of parliament and find out what the smell meant for the working classes.
[Ad] This podcast is sponsored by CEWE, Europe’s leading photo printing company. Every image you capture tells a story. Discover ideas for curating your special memories and creating gifts for loved ones. From the award-winning CEWE PHOTOBOOK to wall art made from your favourite photos.
Start creating your story at www.cewe.co.uk
Production
Presenter: James Grasby
Producer: Jack Glover
Sound Design: Jesus Gomez
Contributors
Laura French (Crossness Engines Trust)
Discover more
This story has been made possible with our friends from the Crossness Engines Trust, for information on visiting and for more of London's murky history please visit: http://crossness.org.uk/
Join us and other environmental charities to help to look after our waterways by visiting https://marchforcleanwater.org/ and https://theriverstrust.org/key-issues/sewage-in-rivers
If you'd like to get in touch with feedback, or have a story connected with the National Trust, you can contact us at podcasts@nationaltrust.org.uk
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
JAMES GRASBY (00:38):
It's the height of summer in 1858, but something
rotten is happening in ournation's capital.
LAURA FRENCH (00:46):
Wealthy people who could afford to leave London up
and left. Those people whocouldn't leave had to put up
with it.
JAMES GRASBY (00:53):
Politicians begin madly scrambling around to find
a solution.
LAURA FRENCH (00:58):
They did all kinds of things to try and cope, most
notably at the Houses OfParliament, obviously right by
the river. The MPs did try toleave, they tried to petition to
go to Hampton Court but theyweren't allowed.
JAMES GRASBY (01:09):
The humid air becoming thick and lingering.
LAURA FRENCH (01:13):
They all moved to work at the back of the house.
They got sheets and soaked themin chloride of lime, which was a
disinfectant, hung all those upat the windows and the doors,
but they couldn't escape thesmell.
The smell was absolutelydisgusting.
JAMES GRASBY (01:32):
Have you ever imagined being a fly on the wall
of history? Join me for aninside view of the stories of
people, places and moments thatmade us.
I'm historian James Grasby. Leanin for a tale from time. Back
When.
(01:57):
Place yourself in VictorianLondon, a thriving and growing
city very similar to the Londonwe know today.
A cutting-edge city, leading theway for growth and prosperity,
and one which was attractingmore and more people every day.
During the 19th century, thepopulation of London is
estimated to have grown from onemillion to five and a half
(02:20):
million inhabitants.
With the rapid expansion in thepopulation came somewhat of a
foul challenge.
What to do with everyone's poo?
LAURA FRENCH (02:32):
Up until the year 1815, it was actually illegal to
put sewage in the River Thames.
JAMES GRASBY (02:38):
This is Laura French. Part of the team at the
Crossness Engines Trust, aheritage charity whose own
history centres around thissmelly period of time.
LAURA FRENCH (02:48):
How London and pretty much all big cities in
the world had coped with humanwaste up until that point, was
that it was stored in big holesin the ground called cesspits.
If you're a wealthy person, youmight have your own cesspit. If
you're a poorer, you might shareone with your neighbours.
What would happen is once yourcesspit is full, you would call
(03:09):
on the services of the nightsoil men to come and empty your
cesspit.
Now these men had perhaps one ofthe most disgusting jobs in
history.
They would come to your house atnight, less people around.
They would scoop out all the poofrom your cesspit, load it into
barrels and take it away on ahorse and cart out to the
(03:32):
countryside.
There they would sell it tofarmers to use as fertilizer.
JAMES GRASBY (03:38):
This is where we begin to see the darker side of
the city in the Victorianperiod.
LAURA FRENCH (03:44):
And it worked reasonably well up until the
Industrial Revolution.
Thousands and thousands ofpeople moved into London to work
on the docks, loading andunloading ships.
Lots of fishermen worked theThames. There were lots of fish
sold in London markets that hadbeen caught in the Thames.
(04:04):
You could even catch salmon inthe Thames. But from 1815
onwards, obviously, the numberof fish started to drop.
JAMES GRASBY (04:13):
Slowly, an increase in the capital's sewage
polluting the waterways led tothe decline of the fishing
industry.
LAURA FRENCH (04:21):
The very last salmon was caught in the Thames
in 1833, and certainly by the1840s, 1850s, the fishing
business in London completelycollapsed.
JAMES GRASBY (04:32):
While London became rich, the average person
and their quality of life fellinto extreme poverty and
squalor.
LAURA FRENCH (04:41):
Accommodation housing for them has been built
very quickly, very cheaply.
These people are mostly movingto the east end of London, areas
like Whitechapel and BethnalGreen.
The housing is very low quality,it's overcrowded. People average
a living about eight or ninepeople to a room.
As you can imagine, the cesspitsstart to fill up very, very
(05:03):
quickly, and these people can'tafford to get their cesspits
emptied regularly.
Some really lovely stories ofsome of the houses in East
London, when they wereinspected, the basements were
literally just three feet deepin human waste, where the
cesspits overflowed, backyardswere just full of human waste.
To try and counteract this, in1815, the government brought out
(05:27):
a law that said new housesshould connect their cesspits up
to what they called London'snatural drainage system, which
is essentially the River Thamesand the tributaries, rivers and
smaller streams flowing into it.
JAMES GRASBY (05:41):
The idea was that by dumping sewage into the main
waterway, that it would simplywash away and out of the city.
However, during the 19thcentury, the Thames was a lot
wider than it is today, meaningthat the course of the river was
more shallow and moved at a muchslower pace.
LAURA FRENCH (05:58):
So if you're putting waste out into the
shallow parts, often it wouldn'treally go anywhere for a long
time.
And you start to get like banksof solid waste building up,
slowing it down further.
For a long time, you know, itwas sewage sitting around, not
really going anywhere. Obviouslycreating a very bad smell and a
lot of other problems.
JAMES GRASBY (06:18):
For years, this stinky situation grew and grew
with the river growing morefilthy with each day that
passed.
LAURA FRENCH (06:26):
By the middle of the summer of 1858, it's
estimated the Thames was about20% raw sewage.
And as you can imagine, it smeltabsolutely disgusting.
JAMES GRASBY (06:36):
The government at the time knew of the problem,
but caught in the tangles ofbureaucracy they were very slow
to act.
LAURA FRENCH (06:45):
For a couple of years, there was a lot of
backwards and forwardsing aboutit.
Basically, Parliament didn'twant to pay for it. But the
Great Stink of 1858 really madethem realise that they had to do
something.
JAMES GRASBY (06:57):
That summer, temperatures soared to record
highs, reaching 35 degreesCelsius in the shade, which
increased the intensity of thestench.
The Thames Purification Bill wasproposed in haste by the then
Chancellor, Benjamin Disraeli,and 18 days later, plans were in
motion to begin a mass clean-up.
LAURA FRENCH (07:20):
You know, this was the tipping point that made the
members of parliament, people incharge, realised this situation
couldn't go on.
JAMES GRASBY (07:27):
The task fell to a body called the Metropolitan
Board Of Works and their chiefengineer, Joseph Bazalgette, to
find a solution to fix London'ssewers.
LAURA FRENCH (07:38):
And so Bazalgette had the London sewage system
built. Everyone's cesspits,toilets, houses were starting to
get flushed in toilets by thispoint.
They all fed into theinterceptory sewers. And they
took the sewage well out ofLondon, in South London's case,
down here to Crossness.
By the time the sewage arrived,it's about seven or eight metres
(07:59):
underground. And we have asewage pumping station here that
then lifted the sewage up torelease it into the Thames, well
away from London, well away fromother people.
JAMES GRASBY (08:11):
This could have been where the story concluded.
Poo removed, smell gone andproblem solved.
However, disaster was looming onthe horizon.
What follows next is one of thegreatest single maritime
disasters to occur in theBritish Isles.
LAURA FRENCH (08:29):
On the 3rd of September 1878, a boat called
the Princess Alice set sail fromcentral London.
She was carrying at least 700people on board, mostly families
who were going on a trip downthe Thames into the coast at
Kent and back again.
It was presumably quite a sortof smoggy evening, visibility
(08:54):
wasn't great.
And as the Princess Alice cameround a bend going into London,
there was a boat coming theother way called the Bywell
Castle.
The two boats tried to manoeuvrearound each other, didn't really
work.
The Bywell Castle ended uphitting the Princess Alice side
(09:16):
on, and she sank within fourminutes.
As you can imagine, all 700 pluspeople on board go into the
water. The first few minutes,there is mass panic.
The people in the Bywell Castleare lowering ropes. They're
trying to rescue people and pullthem out of the water.
But within about 10 minutes,everything goes quiet.
(09:43):
And everyone who had not beenrescued had very sadly died.
It was, and still is to thisday, the biggest single loss of
life on Britain's waterways.
We don't know exactly how manypeople died because there was
not an exact passenger list, butit's thought it was at least 650
people.
(10:04):
There was an inquest into whythese people had died so
quickly.
And the rather grim conclusionthey came to was that these
people mostly had not drowned.
They had been asphyxiated by rawsewage.
Because very unfortunately, thepoint of the river where the
boat had sunk was right by whereCrossness and our equivalent on
(10:25):
the north side of the river letthe sewage in and it was very
shortly after the sewage hadbeen released.
JAMES GRASBY (10:32):
A huge public outcry ensued with people all
across the country demandingthat the practice of dumping raw
sewage into the Thames shouldstop immediately.
LAURA FRENCH (10:42):
What then started to happen is that when the
sewage arrived at Crossness itwould be separated into solid
waste and liquid waste.
The liquid waste would befiltered to clean it.
And the solid waste, that wouldbe loaded onto a fleet of
barges, nicknamed Bovril Barges,because their contents are sort
of brown and sticky like Bovril.
(11:04):
And the Bovril barges would goout normally twice a day, every
day, to the middle of the NorthSea and drop their load of waste
in the middle of the sea.
JAMES GRASBY (11:16):
The dumping of waste at sea, another
ill-fitting solution of what todo with the sewage from our
capital.
LAURA FRENCH (11:22):
So that started in 1888 and it finally stopped in
1998. So 110 years of droppingour waste at sea.
JAMES GRASBY (11:33):
Today, more stringent measures are in place.
However, our rivers, our shores,our seas are still bearing the
brunt from dumping andpollution, all of which is being
accelerated by changes to ourclimate and unequal access to
resources to help keep ourwaters clean.
The Great Stink is a timelyreminder that looking after
(11:55):
rivers across the United Kingdomis of great concern to us all,
and that left unchecked, wecould all be up a rather famous
creek without a paddle.
Thank you for listening to thisepisode of Back When. Be the
(12:15):
first to hear new stories byfollowing us on your podcast
app.
And don't forget to join in withthe episode by leaving a comment
or sending us a message. All ofthe details can be found in our
episode show notes.
In the meantime, don't forget tocheck out more podcasts from the
National Trust, including ourbrand new nature show, Wild
(12:36):
Tales.
Join Rosie Holdsworth with us inexploring the weird and
wonderful world around us. As wedive into the worlds of elusive
leaping sharks, spider sex, andmore.
Thank you to our friends at theCrossness Engines Trust for
sharing their story with us.
They are celebrating their 160thbirthday this year, and details
(12:59):
on how to visit them can befound in the links for this
episode.
Join us again next time for moretales from time. Back when.
It's the height of summer in 1858, but something
rotten is happening in ournation's capital.
LAURA FRENCH (00:46):
Wealthy people who could afford to leave London up
and left. Those people whocouldn't leave had to put up
with it.
JAMES GRASBY (00:53):
Politicians begin madly scrambling around to find
a solution.
LAURA FRENCH (00:58):
They did all kinds of things to try and cope, most
notably at the Houses OfParliament, obviously right by
the river. The MPs did try toleave, they tried to petition to
go to Hampton Court but theyweren't allowed.
JAMES GRASBY (01:09):
The humid air becoming thick and lingering.
LAURA FRENCH (01:13):
They all moved to work at the back of the house.
They got sheets and soaked themin chloride of lime, which was a
disinfectant, hung all those upat the windows and the doors,
but they couldn't escape thesmell.
The smell was absolutelydisgusting.
JAMES GRASBY (01:32):
Have you ever imagined being a fly on the wall
of history? Join me for aninside view of the stories of
people, places and moments thatmade us.
I'm historian James Grasby. Leanin for a tale from time. Back
When.
(01:57):
Place yourself in VictorianLondon, a thriving and growing
city very similar to the Londonwe know today.
A cutting-edge city, leading theway for growth and prosperity,
and one which was attractingmore and more people every day.
During the 19th century, thepopulation of London is
estimated to have grown from onemillion to five and a half
(02:20):
million inhabitants.
With the rapid expansion in thepopulation came somewhat of a
foul challenge.
What to do with everyone's poo?
LAURA FRENCH (02:32):
Up until the year 1815, it was actually illegal to
put sewage in the River Thames.
JAMES GRASBY (02:38):
This is Laura French. Part of the team at the
Crossness Engines Trust, aheritage charity whose own
history centres around thissmelly period of time.
LAURA FRENCH (02:48):
How London and pretty much all big cities in
the world had coped with humanwaste up until that point, was
that it was stored in big holesin the ground called cesspits.
If you're a wealthy person, youmight have your own cesspit. If
you're a poorer, you might shareone with your neighbours.
What would happen is once yourcesspit is full, you would call
(03:09):
on the services of the nightsoil men to come and empty your
cesspit.
Now these men had perhaps one ofthe most disgusting jobs in
history.
They would come to your house atnight, less people around.
They would scoop out all the poofrom your cesspit, load it into
barrels and take it away on ahorse and cart out to the
(03:32):
countryside.
There they would sell it tofarmers to use as fertilizer.
JAMES GRASBY (03:38):
This is where we begin to see the darker side of
the city in the Victorianperiod.
LAURA FRENCH (03:44):
And it worked reasonably well up until the
Industrial Revolution.
Thousands and thousands ofpeople moved into London to work
on the docks, loading andunloading ships.
Lots of fishermen worked theThames. There were lots of fish
sold in London markets that hadbeen caught in the Thames.
(04:04):
You could even catch salmon inthe Thames. But from 1815
onwards, obviously, the numberof fish started to drop.
JAMES GRASBY (04:13):
Slowly, an increase in the capital's sewage
polluting the waterways led tothe decline of the fishing
industry.
LAURA FRENCH (04:21):
The very last salmon was caught in the Thames
in 1833, and certainly by the1840s, 1850s, the fishing
business in London completelycollapsed.
JAMES GRASBY (04:32):
While London became rich, the average person
and their quality of life fellinto extreme poverty and
squalor.
LAURA FRENCH (04:41):
Accommodation housing for them has been built
very quickly, very cheaply.
These people are mostly movingto the east end of London, areas
like Whitechapel and BethnalGreen.
The housing is very low quality,it's overcrowded. People average
a living about eight or ninepeople to a room.
As you can imagine, the cesspitsstart to fill up very, very
(05:03):
quickly, and these people can'tafford to get their cesspits
emptied regularly.
Some really lovely stories ofsome of the houses in East
London, when they wereinspected, the basements were
literally just three feet deepin human waste, where the
cesspits overflowed, backyardswere just full of human waste.
To try and counteract this, in1815, the government brought out
(05:27):
a law that said new housesshould connect their cesspits up
to what they called London'snatural drainage system, which
is essentially the River Thamesand the tributaries, rivers and
smaller streams flowing into it.
JAMES GRASBY (05:41):
The idea was that by dumping sewage into the main
waterway, that it would simplywash away and out of the city.
However, during the 19thcentury, the Thames was a lot
wider than it is today, meaningthat the course of the river was
more shallow and moved at a muchslower pace.
LAURA FRENCH (05:58):
So if you're putting waste out into the
shallow parts, often it wouldn'treally go anywhere for a long
time.
And you start to get like banksof solid waste building up,
slowing it down further.
For a long time, you know, itwas sewage sitting around, not
really going anywhere. Obviouslycreating a very bad smell and a
lot of other problems.
JAMES GRASBY (06:18):
For years, this stinky situation grew and grew
with the river growing morefilthy with each day that
passed.
LAURA FRENCH (06:26):
By the middle of the summer of 1858, it's
estimated the Thames was about20% raw sewage.
And as you can imagine, it smeltabsolutely disgusting.
JAMES GRASBY (06:36):
The government at the time knew of the problem,
but caught in the tangles ofbureaucracy they were very slow
to act.
LAURA FRENCH (06:45):
For a couple of years, there was a lot of
backwards and forwardsing aboutit.
Basically, Parliament didn'twant to pay for it. But the
Great Stink of 1858 really madethem realise that they had to do
something.
JAMES GRASBY (06:57):
That summer, temperatures soared to record
highs, reaching 35 degreesCelsius in the shade, which
increased the intensity of thestench.
The Thames Purification Bill wasproposed in haste by the then
Chancellor, Benjamin Disraeli,and 18 days later, plans were in
motion to begin a mass clean-up.
LAURA FRENCH (07:20):
You know, this was the tipping point that made the
members of parliament, people incharge, realised this situation
couldn't go on.
JAMES GRASBY (07:27):
The task fell to a body called the Metropolitan
Board Of Works and their chiefengineer, Joseph Bazalgette, to
find a solution to fix London'ssewers.
LAURA FRENCH (07:38):
And so Bazalgette had the London sewage system
built. Everyone's cesspits,toilets, houses were starting to
get flushed in toilets by thispoint.
They all fed into theinterceptory sewers. And they
took the sewage well out ofLondon, in South London's case,
down here to Crossness.
By the time the sewage arrived,it's about seven or eight metres
(07:59):
underground. And we have asewage pumping station here that
then lifted the sewage up torelease it into the Thames, well
away from London, well away fromother people.
JAMES GRASBY (08:11):
This could have been where the story concluded.
Poo removed, smell gone andproblem solved.
However, disaster was looming onthe horizon.
What follows next is one of thegreatest single maritime
disasters to occur in theBritish Isles.
LAURA FRENCH (08:29):
On the 3rd of September 1878, a boat called
the Princess Alice set sail fromcentral London.
She was carrying at least 700people on board, mostly families
who were going on a trip downthe Thames into the coast at
Kent and back again.
It was presumably quite a sortof smoggy evening, visibility
(08:54):
wasn't great.
And as the Princess Alice cameround a bend going into London,
there was a boat coming theother way called the Bywell
Castle.
The two boats tried to manoeuvrearound each other, didn't really
work.
The Bywell Castle ended uphitting the Princess Alice side
(09:16):
on, and she sank within fourminutes.
As you can imagine, all 700 pluspeople on board go into the
water. The first few minutes,there is mass panic.
The people in the Bywell Castleare lowering ropes. They're
trying to rescue people and pullthem out of the water.
But within about 10 minutes,everything goes quiet.
(09:43):
And everyone who had not beenrescued had very sadly died.
It was, and still is to thisday, the biggest single loss of
life on Britain's waterways.
We don't know exactly how manypeople died because there was
not an exact passenger list, butit's thought it was at least 650
people.
(10:04):
There was an inquest into whythese people had died so
quickly.
And the rather grim conclusionthey came to was that these
people mostly had not drowned.
They had been asphyxiated by rawsewage.
Because very unfortunately, thepoint of the river where the
boat had sunk was right by whereCrossness and our equivalent on
(10:25):
the north side of the river letthe sewage in and it was very
shortly after the sewage hadbeen released.
JAMES GRASBY (10:32):
A huge public outcry ensued with people all
across the country demandingthat the practice of dumping raw
sewage into the Thames shouldstop immediately.
LAURA FRENCH (10:42):
What then started to happen is that when the
sewage arrived at Crossness itwould be separated into solid
waste and liquid waste.
The liquid waste would befiltered to clean it.
And the solid waste, that wouldbe loaded onto a fleet of
barges, nicknamed Bovril Barges,because their contents are sort
of brown and sticky like Bovril.
(11:04):
And the Bovril barges would goout normally twice a day, every
day, to the middle of the NorthSea and drop their load of waste
in the middle of the sea.
JAMES GRASBY (11:16):
The dumping of waste at sea, another
ill-fitting solution of what todo with the sewage from our
capital.
LAURA FRENCH (11:22):
So that started in 1888 and it finally stopped in
1998. So 110 years of droppingour waste at sea.
JAMES GRASBY (11:33):
Today, more stringent measures are in place.
However, our rivers, our shores,our seas are still bearing the
brunt from dumping andpollution, all of which is being
accelerated by changes to ourclimate and unequal access to
resources to help keep ourwaters clean.
The Great Stink is a timelyreminder that looking after
(11:55):
rivers across the United Kingdomis of great concern to us all,
and that left unchecked, wecould all be up a rather famous
creek without a paddle.
Thank you for listening to thisepisode of Back When. Be the
(12:15):
first to hear new stories byfollowing us on your podcast
app.
And don't forget to join in withthe episode by leaving a comment
or sending us a message. All ofthe details can be found in our
episode show notes.
In the meantime, don't forget tocheck out more podcasts from the
National Trust, including ourbrand new nature show, Wild
(12:36):
Tales.
Join Rosie Holdsworth with us inexploring the weird and
wonderful world around us. As wedive into the worlds of elusive
leaping sharks, spider sex, andmore.
Thank you to our friends at theCrossness Engines Trust for
sharing their story with us.
They are celebrating their 160thbirthday this year, and details
(12:59):
on how to visit them can befound in the links for this
episode.
Join us again next time for moretales from time. Back when.
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