JAMES GRASBY : It's the height of summer in 1858, but something

rotten is happening in our nation's capital.

LAURA FRENCH: Wealthy people who could afford to leave London up

and left. Those people who couldn't leave had to put up

with it.

JAMES GRASBY : Politicians begin madly scrambling around to find

a solution.

LAURA FRENCH: They did all kinds of things to try and cope, most

notably at the Houses Of Parliament, obviously right by

the river. The MPs did try to leave, they tried to petition to

go to Hampton Court but they weren't allowed.

JAMES GRASBY : The humid air becoming thick and lingering.

LAURA FRENCH: They all moved to work at the back of the house.

They got sheets and soaked them in chloride of lime, which was a

disinfectant, hung all those up at the windows and the doors,

but they couldn't escape the smell.

The smell was absolutely disgusting.

JAMES GRASBY : Have you ever imagined being a fly on the wall

of history? Join me for an inside view of the stories of

people, places and moments that made us.

I'm historian James Grasby. Lean in for a tale from time. Back

When.

Place yourself in Victorian London, a thriving and growing

city very similar to the London we know today.

A cutting-edge city, leading the way for growth and prosperity,

and one which was attracting more and more people every day.

During the 19th century, the population of London is

estimated to have grown from one million to five and a half

million inhabitants.

With the rapid expansion in the population came somewhat of a

foul challenge.

What to do with everyone's poo?

LAURA FRENCH: Up until the year 1815, it was actually illegal to

put sewage in the River Thames.

JAMES GRASBY : This is Laura French. Part of the team at the

Crossness Engines Trust, a heritage charity whose own

history centres around this smelly period of time.

LAURA FRENCH: How London and pretty much all big cities in

the world had coped with human waste up until that point, was

that it was stored in big holes in the ground called cesspits.

If you're a wealthy person, you might have your own cesspit. If

you're a poorer, you might share one with your neighbours.

What would happen is once your cesspit is full, you would call

on the services of the night soil men to come and empty your

cesspit.

Now these men had perhaps one of the most disgusting jobs in

history.

They would come to your house at night, less people around.

They would scoop out all the poo from your cesspit, load it into

barrels and take it away on a horse and cart out to the

countryside.

There they would sell it to farmers to use as fertilizer.

JAMES GRASBY : This is where we begin to see the darker side of

the city in the Victorian period.

LAURA FRENCH: And it worked reasonably well up until the

Industrial Revolution.

Thousands and thousands of people moved into London to work

on the docks, loading and unloading ships.

Lots of fishermen worked the Thames. There were lots of fish

sold in London markets that had been caught in the Thames.

You could even catch salmon in the Thames. But from 1815

onwards, obviously, the number of fish started to drop.

JAMES GRASBY : Slowly, an increase in the capital's sewage

polluting the waterways led to the decline of the fishing

industry.

LAURA FRENCH: The very last salmon was caught in the Thames

in 1833, and certainly by the 1840s, 1850s, the fishing

business in London completely collapsed.

JAMES GRASBY : While London became rich, the average person

and their quality of life fell into extreme poverty and

squalor.

LAURA FRENCH: Accommodation housing for them has been built

very quickly, very cheaply.

These people are mostly moving to the east end of London, areas

like Whitechapel and Bethnal Green.

The housing is very low quality, it's overcrowded. People average

a living about eight or nine people to a room.

As you can imagine, the cesspits start to fill up very, very

quickly, and these people can't afford to get their cesspits

emptied regularly.

Some really lovely stories of some of the houses in East

London, when they were inspected, the basements were

literally just three feet deep in human waste, where the

cesspits overflowed, backyards were just full of human waste.

To try and counteract this, in 1815, the government brought out

a law that said new houses should connect their cesspits up

to what they called London's natural drainage system, which

is essentially the River Thames and the tributaries, rivers and

smaller streams flowing into it.

JAMES GRASBY : The idea was that by dumping sewage into the main

waterway, that it would simply wash away and out of the city.

However, during the 19th century, the Thames was a lot

wider than it is today, meaning that the course of the river was

more shallow and moved at a much slower pace.

LAURA FRENCH: So if you're putting waste out into the

shallow parts, often it wouldn't really go anywhere for a long

time.

And you start to get like banks of solid waste building up,

slowing it down further.

For a long time, you know, it was sewage sitting around, not

really going anywhere. Obviously creating a very bad smell and a

lot of other problems.

JAMES GRASBY : For years, this stinky situation grew and grew

with the river growing more filthy with each day that

passed.

LAURA FRENCH: By the middle of the summer of 1858, it's

estimated the Thames was about 20% raw sewage.

And as you can imagine, it smelt absolutely disgusting.

JAMES GRASBY : The government at the time knew of the problem,

but caught in the tangles of bureaucracy they were very slow

to act.

LAURA FRENCH: For a couple of years, there was a lot of

backwards and forwardsing about it.

Basically, Parliament didn't want to pay for it. But the

Great Stink of 1858 really made them realise that they had to do

something.

JAMES GRASBY : That summer, temperatures soared to record

highs, reaching 35 degrees Celsius in the shade, which

increased the intensity of the stench.

The Thames Purification Bill was proposed in haste by the then

Chancellor, Benjamin Disraeli, and 18 days later, plans were in

motion to begin a mass clean-up.

LAURA FRENCH: You know, this was the tipping point that made the

members of parliament, people in charge, realised this situation

couldn't go on.

JAMES GRASBY : The task fell to a body called the Metropolitan

Board Of Works and their chief engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, to

find a solution to fix London's sewers.

LAURA FRENCH: And so Bazalgette had the London sewage system

built. Everyone's cesspits, toilets, houses were starting to

get flushed in toilets by this point.

They all fed into the interceptory sewers. And they

took the sewage well out of London, in South London's case,

down here to Crossness.

By the time the sewage arrived, it's about seven or eight metres

underground. And we have a sewage pumping station here that

then lifted the sewage up to release it into the Thames, well

away from London, well away from other people.

JAMES GRASBY : This could have been where the story concluded.

Poo removed, smell gone and problem solved.

However, disaster was looming on the horizon.

What follows next is one of the greatest single maritime

disasters to occur in the British Isles.

LAURA FRENCH: On the 3rd of September 1878, a boat called

the Princess Alice set sail from central London.

She was carrying at least 700 people on board, mostly families

who were going on a trip down the Thames into the coast at

Kent and back again.

It was presumably quite a sort of smoggy evening, visibility

wasn't great.

And as the Princess Alice came round a bend going into London,

there was a boat coming the other way called the Bywell

Castle.

The two boats tried to manoeuvre around each other, didn't really

work.

The Bywell Castle ended up hitting the Princess Alice side

on, and she sank within four minutes.

As you can imagine, all 700 plus people on board go into the

water. The first few minutes, there is mass panic.

The people in the Bywell Castle are lowering ropes. They're

trying to rescue people and pull them out of the water.

But within about 10 minutes, everything goes quiet.

And everyone who had not been rescued had very sadly died.

It was, and still is to this day, the biggest single loss of

life on Britain's waterways.

We don't know exactly how many people died because there was

not an exact passenger list, but it's thought it was at least 650

people.

There was an inquest into why these people had died so

quickly.

And the rather grim conclusion they came to was that these

people mostly had not drowned.

They had been asphyxiated by raw sewage.

Because very unfortunately, the point of the river where the

boat had sunk was right by where Crossness and our equivalent on

the north side of the river let the sewage in and it was very

shortly after the sewage had been released.

JAMES GRASBY : A huge public outcry ensued with people all

across the country demanding that the practice of dumping raw

sewage into the Thames should stop immediately.

LAURA FRENCH: What then started to happen is that when the

sewage arrived at Crossness it would be separated into solid

waste and liquid waste.

The liquid waste would be filtered to clean it.

And the solid waste, that would be loaded onto a fleet of

barges, nicknamed Bovril Barges, because their contents are sort

of brown and sticky like Bovril.

And the Bovril barges would go out normally twice a day, every

day, to the middle of the North Sea and drop their load of waste

in the middle of the sea.

JAMES GRASBY : The dumping of waste at sea, another

ill-fitting solution of what to do with the sewage from our

capital.

LAURA FRENCH: So that started in 1888 and it finally stopped in

1998. So 110 years of dropping our waste at sea.

JAMES GRASBY : Today, more stringent measures are in place.

However, our rivers, our shores, our seas are still bearing the

brunt from dumping and pollution, all of which is being

accelerated by changes to our climate and unequal access to

resources to help keep our waters clean.

The Great Stink is a timely reminder that looking after

rivers across the United Kingdom is of great concern to us all,

and that left unchecked, we could all be up a rather famous

creek without a paddle.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Back When. Be the

first to hear new stories by following us on your podcast

app.

And don't forget to join in with the episode by leaving a comment

or sending us a message. All of the details can be found in our

episode show notes.

In the meantime, don't forget to check out more podcasts from the

National Trust, including our brand new nature show, Wild

Tales.

Join Rosie Holdsworth with us in exploring the weird and

wonderful world around us. As we dive into the worlds of elusive

leaping sharks, spider sex, and more.

Thank you to our friends at the Crossness Engines Trust for

sharing their story with us.

They are celebrating their 160th birthday this year, and details

on how to visit them can be found in the links for this

episode.

Join us again next time for more tales from time. Back when.