The Great Stink Of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette
and the cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis In 1892 cholera struck Hamburg, killing 8,605 people. The British government was alarmed. Four earlier cholera epidemics had killed forty thousand Londoners and on each occasion the disease had been brought to the city by passengers arriving from foreign ports. The government created a committee to deal with the 1892 epidemic.

Sir Joseph Bazalgette, about 1865

The epidemic never happened because of the work of Sir Joseph Bazalgette (1819-91). Bazalgette was one of the greatest of Victorian engineers who, between 1856 and 1889, built more of London than anyone else before or since in his role as Chief Engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works. The sewers, pumping stations and treatment works that he built are still keeping the capital clean. Before Bazalgette's time London's sewage flowed into the Thames from which it leaked into adjacent springs, wells and other sources of drinking water: hence the cholera epidemics.

In the hot summer of 1858, the stench from the Thames was so bad that Members of Parliament fled from the rooms adjacent to the river and Benjamin Disraeli rushed from the debating chamber, handkerchief to nose. The press called the crisis The Great Stink. Disraeli introduced to Parliament a Bill which gave Bazalgette the authority to construct the intercepting sewers which he had designed but which had been held up by government bureaucrats. The Great Stink concentrated MPs' minds wonderfully. The Bill passed into law within sixteen days and Bazalgette began work immediately.

Over the next sixteen years Bazalgette built 82 miles of main intercepting sewers, eleven hundred miles of street sewers, four pumping stations and the two treatment works at Beckton and Crossness which Thames Water still operates. The system has been extended and updated as London has expanded and Bazalgette's huge steam pumps have been replaced by modern electrically powered systems at Beckton and Crossness, where Bazalgette's magnificent buildings are being restored by the Crossness Engines Trust.

Bazalgette did much else besides. He built the Victoria Embankment between Westminster and Blackfriars Bridges to house the Northern low level sewer and the underground railway. It also provided a much-needed route from Westminster to the City to bypass the grossly overcrowded Strand, Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill. Much of the thirty-seven acres which he reclaimed from the river by this great work was used to create Victoria Embankment Gardens. Gladstone was so impressed by the work that he attempted to claim it as a site for government offices but the ensuing public uproar, orchestrated by W.H.Smith. M.P., ensured that Embankment Gardens remained a pleasant green space in a congested part of London. Bazalgette also built the Chelsea Embankment, from Battersea Bridge to Chelsea Bridge; and the Albert Embankment on which St Thomas's hospital now stands.

He re-housed forty thousand Londoners from tenements which he demolished to create famous London streets like Charing Cross Road, Garrick Street, Northumberland Avenue and Shaftesbury Avenue. He built the present Hammersmith, Putney and Battersea bridges. Towards the end of his career Bazalgette identified the need for river crossings below London Bridge, resulting in the creation of the Woolwich Free Ferry and the design of the Blackwall tunnel. He also proposed a high level bridge near the Tower of London. The City Corporation attacked the proposal on the grounds that it was not necessary while the vestry of St Olave's on the opposite bank, complained that it would be used by hordes of East Enders and thereby "have a prejudicial effect on the value of a large amount of property in the parish". The crossing was nevertheless built and opened in 1894, three years after Bazalgette's death, as Tower Bridge.

This artist's impression of the Victoria Embankment near Charing Cross appeared in the Illustrated London News, June, 1867. It shows the underground railway (now the Circle Line); the low level sewer; a duct for water, gas and later electricity; and a projected pneumatic railway beneath the Thames which was never built.

Bazalgette created more of London, above and below ground, than anyone else. But his greatest claim to fame is the system of sewers which banished cholera for ever and which, in the care of Thames Water, still serve the capital.

This material is based on Stephen Halliday's book The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metroplis, now available in paperback

"A scholarly, readable and well-illustrated book" - Good Book Guide

"Halliday writes with the relish of one who savours his subject and has deeply researched it…splendidly illustrated" - Ruth Rendell, Sunday Times

	The Great Stink
Sutton Publishing
Hardback: 221 pgs, 20 May, 1999
ISBN:0750919752, List Price:£19.99
Paperback: 221 pgs, 15 Feb, 2001
ISBN:0750925809, List Price:£9.99
Stephen Halliday's splendidly illustrated account of Bazalgette and his work, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis (Sutton, 1999) is available direct from the publisher at the special price of £8.00 (p.&p. free in the U.K., overseas customers add £5); contact Haynes Publishing, Sparkford, Yeovil, Somerset, BA22 7JJ, telephone orders 01963 442030, fax. 01963 440001). Please quote reference GS/01. Normal price £9.99.