In Our Time - The Great Stink

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the stench from the River Thames in the hot summer of 1858 and how it appalled and terrified Londoners living and working beside it, including those in the new Houses of Parliament which were still under construction. There had been an outbreak of cholera a few years before in which tens of thousands had died, and a popular theory held that foul smells were linked to diseases. The source of the problem was that London's sewage, once carted off to fertilise fields had recently, thanks to the modern flushing systems, started to flow into the river and, thanks to the ebb and flow of the tides, was staying there and warming in the summer sun. The engineer Joseph Bazalgette was given the task to build huge new sewers to intercept the waste, a vast network, so changing the look of London and helping ensure there were no further cholera outbreaks from contaminated water.The image above is from Punch, July 10th 1858 and it has this caption: The 'Silent Highway'-Man. "Your Money or your Life!"WithRosemary Ashton Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College LondonStephen Halliday Author of ‘The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis’AndPaul Dobraszczyk Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, in the summer of 1858, the stench from the River Thames appalled and terrified Londoners living and working beside it, notably those at the Houses of Parliament.

Theories of disease at the time held that the smell itself was effectively toxic a miasma of cholera. It was time to act. Within a decade, the engineer Joseph Basiljet had ensured the Thames was no longer an open sewer, building a vast network of buried sewers, so saving thousands of lives and changing the face of London and inspiring other cities around the world. We'll admit to discuss the Great Stink of 1858 of Paul de Braschik,

lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. Stephen Halliday, author of The Great Stink of London, Sir Joseph Basilgett and the cleansing of the Victorian metropolis, and Rosemary Ashton, Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London. Rosemary, how had London changed in the first part of the 19th century? Well, it had changed rather a lot.

If we take from 1800, for example, to about the 1850s, the population of London rose from about a million to 2.5 million. So that obviously put a huge pressure on house building, and necessarily on sanitation, which is going to be our main subject today. Also, it was a time of many reforms and advances. There were advances, technological advances, for example, in steam. You have the starting of steam presses and steam engines, railways. The great exhibition of 1851 is an example too,

of showing their up-to-date machinery and manufacturers of all nations. and everything was kind of gung-ho and let's move forward. And you had political reform with the Great Reform Act of 1832. The franchise was raised or widened to as many as one in ten male householders, which is not very much, but that was a lot more than it had been. It was a lot more representative. And it was the beginning of lots of more reform during the century. So in a widespread, massive and very effective way, extraordinarily effective,

not those 50 years in terms of the development of the society was charging ahead and ahead of every other city in the world as far as we know. Absolutely. And the only way in which we were lagging behind, or particularly behind most of them, was in the filthy state of our river. By the 1850s, how well known was it to what the Thames was filthy? And what was people's explanation for that? Well, it was widely known. In fact, there had been hot summers and filthy, smelly river

terms for at least 10 years before and there had been a cholera outbreak, a rather bad one in 1854 in the summer then. So there were plenty of people looking at it and trying to solve it. John Snow famously with his Broad Street pump in

1854 in Soho yes, shutting off the pump and finding that lo and behold when the residents of Broad Street were not taking their drinking water from the local pump they didn't die of cholera. Actually, some of the corals were actually drinking the water was poisonous, basically.

Yes, because the water was being fouled by too many people's effluvient now, with this huge increase in number of population, going into the river. It shouldn't have gone into the river, but it was overflowing the sewers and then going straight into the river. But at the same time, the water companies, of which there were seven, I think, private water companies, were drawing the water out and selling it to people to use as drinking water. So it was quite extraordinary, really. And there was an extraordinary response to this. Faraday, one of the greatest signs of the time,

wrote a wonderful letter to the press saying he travelled on above and he couldn't bear it. He knew that this was very bad to do something. Lawyers who were on what was now the embankment. There was an embankment then, but the ends of court was saying, you must do something. The press was very behind doing something.

The press were hugely important and the press, the number of newspapers, had grown exponentially in this same period because of improvements in printing presses and because of the repeal of all the taxes on newspapers so that by the 1855 all the taxes, the stamp tax, the paper tax, all these other taxes which had made newspapers

really too expensive for ordinary people to buy, had all gone. And so you have huge numbers of newspapers, including a lot of penny newspapers for the poorer people, and they were all, all writing, about the state of the Thames. I'm going to Stephen, Herman Halliday.

The Thames, Sweet Thames, flow softly while I sing my song. That seems a bit of the past, Stephen. Yes, it certainly was. It was in a terrible state, but from the 1850s, because the sewage of two and a half million people was flowing into it. And, of course, it's a tidal river, so it never went away. It went downstream, came back up. In the meantime, it was being added to,

and so if you had a hot, dry summer, it would be hard for us to imagine just what the smell was like. So the increase in the smell was because of the massive increase in the number of people. Yes, made worse by the hot summer, as Michael Faraday had pointed out in his letter, when he rode of waves of feculence,

by which he meant excrement, washing around the boat on which he was traveling, What had changed, so it was just the mass that has changed? There's nothing else going on, Stephen? No, quite, there's something else had gone on, actually. First of all, until 1815, the public sewers were not for sewage. They were very often open channels in the middle of roads, and they existed purely to take rainwater to the Thames.

And although there was a certain amount of surreptitious use of them for offal and so on, they didn't contain sewage. If I'd been living in London, and wanted to spend a penny, I would have gone to the basement of my house, done what I needed to do in a cesspool, and when it was filled, I would summon a nightsoilman

who would come along at night, quite likely employing women and children, and dig out the contents, load them onto a cart, and take them off and sell them to farmers as fertiliser. Excellent example of recycling. And that system worked perfectly well

until the late 18th, early 19th century, when it collapsed. Partly because of the growth of London, as Rosemary has pointed out, the number of people increased, and the fields moved further away, which was a longer journey for the nightsoilman. It was partly because an alternative form of fertiliser came into existence,

importation of guano solidified bird droppings from South America which made a fortune for the Gibbs family but most particularly because of the introduction and widespread adoption of the water closet that was the real killer because the water closet is an excellent device but when you flush it what you send round the S-Bend is a small quantity of fertiliser

and a much larger quantity of water Why was that bad? Because they were filling up the cesspools 10 times as quickly with mostly liquid, which was leaking into the surrounding water courses. And so in 1815, the authorities said that as from that time, people would be allowed to connect their cesspools to the public sewers. And in 1844, people were required to attach their cesspools to the public sewers. So in the space of about 30 years, instead of little or no sewage flowing into the Thames, you suddenly have the sewage of two and a half million people.

So that was the big change, the water closet. Incidentally, you mentioned the great exhibition, Rosemary. The great exhibition was one of the chief culprits in making the water closet. I know. Because a man called George Jennings. Exhibited one. Well, he offered to install his water closets in the pavilions provided that he could charge a penny for their use.

That's where the spend a penny comes from, isn't it? 827,000 people spent a penny, learned of the advantages of the water closet, and then went home and ordered them. Paul, thank you. Paul, Tramacic, what was the connection, what was thought of the connection between the smell and health, as far as it was understood at that time?

I guess in your introduction you use the word miasma and myasma really was the leading idea of how diseases were transmitted and this is before the advancement of germ theory which really didn't get... So can you explain what a measma was? Well it's really a toxic air emitted mostly by dead or decaying organic matter and excrement was particularly problematic in this respect and it was leading sanitary reformers

like Edwin Chadwick. Tadwick himself asserted that all smell is disease. I mean literally every kind of smell, but that unpleasant smells in particular were somehow symptomatic of diseased environment, places where contagion was most likely. And it's important to remember that at that time, the main problem diseases in cities were typhus and tuberculosis,

which in a way are, spread by poor environments, right? Typhus is body lice, tuberculosis is airborne. The real problem came with cholera. Colour, we know, of course, now is a waterborne disease, but it didn't fit the paradigms established by the most common diseases. So cholera tended to affect people from widely different areas, depending on where they got their water from. You mentioned Chadwick. Could you tell the listeners who Chadwick was? Chadwick was, um, instrument. in establishing the poor law in the 1830s and became a leading reformer more generally, but particularly in the area of sanitation.

And he produced a voluminous report on sanitary conditions of working people in Britain in 1842. And it was only really the ousting of him in the 1850s from the Sewer Commission that Basiljet had more of an easy ride in terms of his rights. prominent. Stephen. He was one of the most prominent advocates of the measmatic theory, wasn't he? He was indeed, yeah.

At one point he proposed to build an Eiffel Tower type structure in the middle of London and then by some unspecified means bring down air from the upper regions and circulated in the streets, but that never caught on. Do we know the harm that, let's stay in 1858 was an exceptionally hot summer

and the smell became intolerable for so many people, letters to the press. Do we have any idea how many people were dying because of the pollution of the river? Very difficult to say. I think in a sense it was the fear of a new cholera outbreak. So cholera, the worst cholera outbreak had been in 1854 to 5. How many people are? Oh, 30,000, I think in London alone. Because of that, there was just in people's minds, there was a great fear.

that this would happen again and the smell was somehow symptomatic. The great thing about cholera was it affected all classes, as did typhoid, which was the other waterborne disease, which was a source of anxiety. And the members of Parliament thought that they were being killed by the smell. They were wrong, but that was what galvanised them into giving Basil Jett the money and the authority to go ahead with his scheme. So who was, Rosemary, back to you,

who in about 1858 which in this this history is a key year and became intolerable sort of to be intolerable by people right across the board who was complaining most loudly and who was most influential well the people complaining were the press of course as I've suggested we've talked about before editorials endless editorials letters to the editor you mentioned the lawyer living in temple which was as you say right then on the on the river and he's complaining about being poisoned

And he's also complaining, as a lot of the newspapers were doing, about who's going to do something about this? What are they doing in this do-nothing Parliament that we've got here? Nobody's doing anything. And what about the Metropolitan Board of Works and other commissioners for rivers and water companies? Who's going to do something? Why is nobody doing something? And there was a lot of that kind of anger directed at any person in authority, I suppose. And that came through the press, but I tell what also was important.

And that is that by the 1850s, you had illustrated newspapers. The Illustrated London News was founded in 1841. And of course, it could illustrate. It wasn't always illustrating the filthy Thames. Obviously, it was often showing you, I mean, for example, when the Duke of Wellington died in 1852, you had tremendous open spreadsheets of his funeral procession, beautifully drawn and so on. That was the illustrated London news, but it could also do something about London. London as it was in 1858. And it was founded in 1841 in the same year, Punch, the satirical

magazine, Weekly, Newsby, again weekly came out on Saturdays and it was full of cartoons. And Punch absolutely went mad on the great stink. And you have, I mean, after Faraday's letter that you quoted in 1855, when he says, look, the river's in a mess now in the summer of 1855, it's a brown, opaque fluid. if we continue to neglect it, a hot summer will come. He's looking ahead. A hot summer will come and show the foolishness of our carelessness. And the week after Faraday's letter was published in the time, Punch has a cartoon, which is Mr Faraday standing on a boat

and he's handing his card to Old Father Thames, who's kind of rising up, all dripping filth and so on from the river, and Faraday is holding his nose with his other hand. So you've got those extraordinary visions that Punch gives you every Saturday, a skeleton rowing along the Thames, all these kinds of things. So it's the newspapers who are doing most of the complaining and the pushing and the shoving to get something done. But there are a few people in Parliament as well. They tend to stand up and say, our river is a disgrace to our great nation.

You know, it's the idea, you know, the Spencer that you quoted, Sweet Thames run softly while I end my song. Yes, that's why. They're all saying, you know, our great river, you know, it's a mess, it's awful, it's a disgrace to our nation. So there was that sense that we are supreme among nations, but look at this disgusting disgrace on our doorstep. And I suppose it was those kinds of feelings which finally pushed Parliament to do something. So enter Joseph Baselgett. Stephen, can you briefly tell us where he came from and what he set out to do? Well, he was born in 1819. He was a French descent.

His grandfather had left France, probably to escape service in the French army. He was articled as an engineer to a man called John McNeil, where he did a lot of drainage works in Northern Ireland, so he learned about the flow of liquids. In 1848, he was appointed as deputy chief engineer to the Metropolitan Sewers Commission that was starting to look at the problem of London sewers. actually get to be in a position to be offered the job?

1856 he was appointed as chief engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works, which was London's first Metropolitan Government. He already had experience on the Sewers Commission and he gave us his two referees, Robert Stevenson, the designer of the rocket, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, which is rather like applying for a job as a clergyman

and giving us your referees, Matthew Mark, Mark, Lucas, and John. So he got the job and he had in fact already got a good working knowledge of London's sewage problems because of his position on the Sewers Commission and he came up with a system of three

intercepting sewers on the North Bank and two on the South Bank which start in the West and take sewage collected from streets and houses by gravity to Abbey Mills in West Ham on the North Bank and Cross Ness

near Abbey Wood in Kent on the South Bank and thus prevent all the sewage from getting into the River Thames. But he was held up because Sir Benjamin Hall, who was the government's chief commissioner of works, had in effect the power of veto on the system. And Benjamin Hall

was also responsible for the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament after the fire of 1834. And he didn't want to go down in history. as the man who rebuilt the houses of Parliament for the members to be poisoned by the sewage coming back to London on the incoming tide.

So he appointed some consultants called Galton and Simpson who carried out various experiments with floats and there was this long argument about whether Basil Jet was taking the sewage far enough downstream and above all who was going to pay for it because the London MPs argue that the sewage of the metropolis

was an imperial matter and should be paid for by everyone and of course the other MPs said, no, it's your mess, you clear it up. And so the great stink really concentrated minds wonderfully and Disraeli introduced an act of parliament which passed in 10 days, which basically said to Basil Jep,

right, go ahead, do it, do it, do it, it what you think is best, and we'll lend you the money. It's interesting the intervention of Disraeli, who seemed to come out of nowhere, but he was leader of the House of Commons at the time, and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the most eloquent man in Parliament, and his speeches on the Great Stink, and the reason for doing something about this noble river, and talks about history, are magnificent. He was one of a group of MPs who moved into the new buildings overlooking the river

and had to retire with their handkerchief. chief to their noses. So appalling was the smell. I think that's right, but I also think that he saw it as a moment when he could be a star, because when you think about him, he was 53, and he hadn't been in power, the Tories hadn't been in power, for the last 20 years. And he'd really, this was his, he'd briefly, they'd been in power in 1852, just for 10 months when he was first Chancellor of the Exchequer, with Lord Darby as the Tory Prime Minister. And then they were in again. They got in by surprise in February 1858 when Palmerston, the Whig Prime Minister got things wrong.

And so Darby was in charge of the government, and he rather reluctantly appointed Disraeli because Disraeli was not really much liked. He wasn't trusted, and he had a very florid style in Parliament, which not everybody liked. But I think he saw this as his chance to shine because the Prime Minister was in the House of Lords, Lord Darby. There had to be somebody running the show in the Commons. And so that was why Disraeli was made Leader of the Commons. And he really did, I think he showed his determination and a kind of breezy charm in getting this through. Because if you look at the debates in Hansart, you get the same thing that you still get today of someone wanting,

wanting to put forward a motion and lots of other people raising objection and questions. And as we were saying before, who pays, who's going to do it, how do we do it, which engineer are we going to allow to go ahead with the project and is really cut through it, I think. He ignored most of it. He ignored most of it. He cut through it. He won them over. He won them over. It made him well known in very favourable circumstances.

Yes, it did. That's right. Stephen, what did Joseph Buzzard then set about building? Can you give us a precy? There he's got the job. He designed 82 miles of the main intercepting sewers, which in places are larger than the underground railway tunnels, 1,100 miles of street sewers, and of course the embankments to accommodate the sewers.

So he really did change the face of London. And it was described by the observer at the type as the most extensive and wonderful work of modern. times. An astonishing thing to say when you think about all the other things were going on, the Great Western Railway, the Great Eastern Steamship and the Underground Railway. So that was a terrific compliment to the sheer scale and, of course, the importance of the scheme. He also had to deal with all sorts of crackpot schemes that other people came up with. There was a man called Ellis, a solicitor, who wanted to pump London sewage to the top of

Hampstead Heath and let it flow off in all directions to create rich agricultural land. I don't think it would be such a popular place to live if that had been the case. And he had to deal with all these, take them seriously and defend his own scheme, which was eventually built and which of course is still in use. How did it, Paul, how did this capture the imagination of the public? Rosemary's already said about the growth of London's press from the 1830s onwards, particularly illustrated newspapers.

And the Illustrated London News was really key in providing a kind of interface between the building project and the public. But it was a specific kind of public. So illustrated London News was six pence, weekly newspaper, mostly upper middle class readers. But those probably most likely to be perturricular. by the disruption caused by the building work.

And it's important to remember that the building work was a mixture of what's called cut and cover, so literally digging up the streets, laying the sewer and then putting the street back, and tunneling as well. But also that the building of the sewers was happening alongside many other projects in London at the time. So the embankment as well, but also the first underground railway, the Metropolitan Line, was constructed at exactly the same time as the sewers. also Blackfries Bridge, the railways for the first time coming over the Thames. So a huge amount of disruption in London in this period.

The public did they resent the fact that he had been given an open book? I don't think that's evident at all in the press. What the press tend to do, and particularly the illustrated London news, is to really scale up their wood engravings, which were the key kind of visual tool they used, and present these really spectacular images of the construction process, often using photographs that Basil Jett had commissioned to document the process. There was a bit of a conversation, I think, between Basil Jeter, the Metropolitan Border Works

and some of the newspapers in terms of getting a kind of message, right, about the system and its value. But Basil Jets had to be over everything, didn't it? Not only the sewers, but also roads, bridges, and on we won't. Yeah, another really important aspect in terms of the public focus of the system were two of the sewage pumping stations, which were an important kind of engineering part of the system in terms of pumping the sewage up from low-lying areas.

But also the ones at Cross Ness and Abbey Mills were highly ornate in terms of their architectural styles, both inside and out, and they were used as places for public ceremonies when the system was opened. Basilgett hired an architect. He consulted with an architect Charles Henry Driver to provide a lot of this ornamental panache to the buildings. They've been restored. The pumping station at Crossness has been restored by a group of volunteers.

And the ironwork is absolutely magnificent. The different colours and the decorations on them. Bearing in mind these are sewage treatment works. which no one has ever going to visit, apart from the people who work there. But at the time, people were rather proud of it, weren't they? At least in the newspapers, the Cathedral on the Marsh. That's right.

Do you think it's related in any way to the fact that, don't forget that you mentioned before Stephen that the Houses of Parliament were burnt down in 1834, and by 1858, Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin's great, confected Houses of Parliament, which we still have now, very elaborate, they were still not quite finished. The Victoria Tower was not quite finished with the House of Lords in it. And it was also in the summer of 1858 that the great clock,

which came to be known as Big Ben after Sir Benjamin Hall, who was really not so much a goodie in this respect, but later he was commemorated by the clock being named after him. The clock was brought along and put up in the summer of 1858. and the whole style of Pugent's interior for the Houses of Parliament and Barry's exterior. Very elaborate gothicy. Do you think that Bazargette and his colleagues were infected by that style and wanting to make another great public building,

even if it was one which was containing and getting rid of sewage? Making a splash, yes, I'm sure they were. They took their public buildings very, very seriously indeed, even when they were devoted to quite basic purposes. It's also important to remember that sewage pumping stations were an entirely new building type. So there were water pumping stations built before this date. But because they're a new building type, there's a sense of which it's about creating a new style of architecture as well,

as style of architecture that is making a statement as well as being very functional as well. So these extraordinary buildings combine, functionality, so you see the enormous steam engines, still in Cross Nest actually, with this extraordinary attention to ornament and decoration as well. Enormous beam engines, I believe the largest that were ever built. And when they were replaced in the 1950s

by a more modern and actually much smaller system, some scrap metal merchants were invited to remove Basil Jets steam engines. and they said they couldn't because they were too big. They just couldn't move them. And some of them are now working again. Yeah, they've restored one at Cross Ness. That's right. They were named after members of the royal family as well.

They were called Victoria, Prince Consort, Alexandra and Albert Edward after the Prince of Wales. In London's waste was now effectively moved downstream. In what ways did that relieve the stench? Stephen, Quite a lot, actually, but it moved it downstream to places like barking and Abbey Wood, which at that time were only very, very thinly inhabited. As time passed and they became inhabited, there became an issue about whether it was acceptable

to have the sewage released there. And there was an accident in 1878 between a pleasure steamer called the Princess Alice and a freighter called the Bywell Castle. and a lot of people ended up in the River Thames at the time when the sewage had just been released. About 609. That's right. So Basil Jet then changed the system

so that the solids and the liquids were separated, if I may put it that way. The liquids were primed with chemicals to remove the smell. The solids were segregated and put on sludge boats which were dumped in the North Sea. and one of them was called the Sir Joseph Basil Jet.

And that arrangement continued until 1998, when a European directive said that this stuff should no longer be dumped in the North Sea. So Thames Water then created a new system whereby the solids and the liquids again are separated. The liquid is treated with chemicals, which stimulates the appetites of microbes, whose idea of a good meal is what we flush down the loo. And the solids are incinerated and turned into ash, which is used for making breeze blocks. What effect did this have, did Basiljad's work have, on the health of the city?

Well, it meant that in 1892, when there was a cholera epidemic in Hamburg, the government put on alert the public health authorities to deal with the forthcoming epidemic in London, and there wasn't one. There were no further epidemics of cholera or other waterborne disease in London after Buzljek completed his system. Rosemary, it's still a wonder, isn't it, that the public were galvanised to get behind such an immense project,

which cost in either, in what present day term, billions. So this fervour to look after the Thames didn't debate after a few weeks. Why think that was? Well, I think that there were always people who were not keen on the money. I suppose I haven't followed it right through for years after, but it does seem that Disraeli and Bassojet, two hugely important individuals between them and with the people working with them, managed to get the public behind them. And on it went.

And of course, the embankments were thought to be beautiful. And Bazoget built the embankments to cover the sewers. the tunnels and the underground tunnel that went as well and the electricity and everything was going on underneath the embankments. But it also, of course, made it easier if you were living by the Thames. I mean, for example, in 1858 during the Great Stink, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was living right next to Blackfriars Bridge and he decamped to his friend William Morris in Red Lion Square, which was far enough away from the river not to be quite so smelly. And Dickens talked about crossing Waterloo Bridge and having a heart and heads, sickening, stomachy pain.

And Dickens, of course, was also very, not antagonistic, but sort of, he looked at scant of all this. And he said, well, you know, everybody's got a plan, but everybody else knows that that plan won't work. And so he took that kind of tone at first. But like everybody else, he came on board, I think, in a way there was no choice. Something had to be done, and it was being done. But London was being made to look more beautiful.

More like some of the other, I mean, Vienna and Paris already had their embankments and they already look in their grand buildings and they looked better. And so London ought to look better. And that was one of the certainly it was a strong feeling amongst members of Parliament that we, for such a, for the most important country in the world, it was disgraceful that we had this mucky old river and mudlarks on the, scavenging on the shores. The children scavenging in the mud, yeah.

Scavenging and so on, all those things. I think it was generally modernising and bringing London up to date. It also did one other good thing, which was it eased the traffic on the Strand. The Strand and its extension Fleet Street were the main thoroughfare across London from west to east, and jolly crowded it was too. So if you are then going to make an embankment, you've got another west to east promenade and place for carriages and so on to go. That's right.

he built the embankment partly for the sewers, partly to accommodate the Underground Railway, partly because it provides an alternative route from Westminster to the Bank of England, and also, of course, Victoria Embankment Gardens, which is a much-needed green space in that part of London. And Gladstone wanted to build offices on them and rent them out and abolish income tax,

which was a noble idea, I suppose. But W.H. Smith got up a petition and ensured that... He of the bookshops. He of the bookshops, also a member of Parliament. And that ensured that Victoria Embankment Gardens remained gardens rather than covered with offices. It's also actually quite interesting to go and visit Victoria Embankment Gardens now, right next to Embankment Underground Station, because you get a sense of what Basiljet did to the river,

he narrowed it and it was much, much narrow when he'd finished. Because you can see quite far back from the embankment that's now there. A watergate is called

York Watergate. It belongs to the people who, the Dukes of York and so on who had their grand mansions along the Strand, the south part of the strand in up to the 18th century, late 18th century.

Somerset House is the last one that still exists. There were these grand houses all the way along, and they all, their gardens went right down into the Thames and they had their water gates where they would get into their boats if they wanted to go up to Richmond or up to Hampton Court to do something at court. And if you look, you will see A, how much deeper down the land was, the ground was,

than it now is, of course, with the embankment, and B, how much wider the river would have been at that time because it goes quite far back. And I suppose that's also one of the reasons why the Thames doesn't freeze over anyway. It is indeed. The strand is called the strand because it used to run by the river, which it no longer does, of course. Paul, Tramashi. Also important, though, to think of the other side of the question is

the embankment caused a lot of displacement of work. So people working on the banks of the Thames were effectively ordered out. The embankment effectively destroyed a lot of working lives as well, even though, of course, it improved the state of the Thames tremendously. So there's always another side. to the question of when something is improved, something else is lost as well. It doesn't just happen, right? It has to be, involves a displacement of other things as well,

even if those things are seen as or cast as unhealthy or insanitary. How was Basilgett himself, as it were, recognized and remoried for his work? Well, he was knighted in 1870s, I think. But actually, the made memorial for Basilgett is the embankment. So there's a plaque of him on the embankment. He dies in 1890. And the embankment, I think, is interesting because it contains this part of the sewage system. But because it's the most visible aspect of it, it becomes the his memorial, if you like, I think, in terms of the visible part of the sewage project.

And in a sense, once the sewers were completed in 1868, they really do become very invisible. London doesn't have a sewer museum like Brussels and Paris do which provide a kind of public point of interest for the system. They're really, it's an invisible system that's completely inaccessible. Since they moved on, have there no other uses for this sewage? Well, I mean, there were proposals in the 1850s to take the sewage right down into the sewage,

the Thames estuary dozens and dozens of miles and use it to reclaim land. I mean, one of the more unlikely schemes. That's right, the Hope Napier scheme. That's the Hope Napier scheme. But it was given serious attention in Parliament, wasn't it? Yes, and they actually started to build a sewage canal from Bechton out to the Mapline Sands, which are north of South End.

And they thought that, again, rather like Hampstead Heath, they'd turn it into rich agricultural land. And it was even suggested that London beauties in coquettish jackboots, I quote, should come out and see this being done and breathing the refreshing breeze.

It didn't catch on. I just think the Victorians were so much more, you know, there was so much more willing to discuss it and to be, they weren't squeamish about talking about waste in the way that we are today. It's just not

we were talking about it today but you wouldn't bring it up in a dinner party whereas I think the Victorians just they were involved with it much more I think and I think that all comes down to the belief that they were being killed by the smell they were wrong

they were wrong but they did the right thing for the wrong reasons that's true they also of course their everyday life was very much involved don't forget that the motor car had not yet been invented and so how did people get along the busy strand but horses and carriages.

And so there's an awful lot of another kind of excreter coming onto the roads. And here you've got Dickens, who of course is our great novelist of Victorian squalor and poverty, as well as the grander aspects of it. And in Bleak House in 1852, his little figure, Joe, the Crossing Sweeper, is a poor little destitute, illiterate boy,

his job to keep alive is to sweep the streets so that ladies with their long gowns and their nice shoes didn't get dust and dirt on them. But of course it's not just dust and dirt and Dickens knew this, but he was very funny in his novels because he deals with

London's muck also in our mutual friend where the resurrection men, as they were so called, were going out into the filthy Thames at night to pick up dead bodies in order to steal ring and valuables from them. And our mutual friend opens with them, a resurrection man in a boat doing exactly that.

But Dickens always uses metaphor. And so when he talks about dust or filth or whatever, you have to read behind it's not just dust and dirt and ordinary mud. And also in our mutual friend, you've not only got Gaffa Hexum, who is a resurrection man, but you've also got Mr. Boffin, the ghost. and dustman. What's that? Mr. Buffin makes his money from gathering mountains of dust, which he then reparsals and reproduces. And again, you have to think, if you're reading Dickens,

it's not dust, there's a lot of other stuff that is being brought together. And Dickens is very good at doing a kind of sideways shuffle, where he does want you to know really what it's like, but he's also being polite and genteel and pretending, and partly it's sadly. of course, pretending that it's only dust that poor old Joe, the poor little Joe, the crossing spooper has got to sweep out of the way. I can remember in the days of my youth, one of my jobs was to collect the droppings from the milkman's horse to put on our roses. And in fact, in the 1890s, there was a conference held in London to discuss what to do about horse droppings on the streets. And they disbanded after three days because they decided that there was just nothing they could do about it.

And then, of course, along came the motor car. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks for Rosemary Ashton, Stephen Halliday and Paul DeBraschik and our studio engineer Duncan Hannan. Next week we take a break. But we're back on the 12th of January, John Dunn, Poet and Priest. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now,

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did you think you left out that you'd like to have said? We could have said something about the other places for which Basil Jett acted as either a consultant or actually designed the systems. He designed the system for Cambridge, where I live, and also Bristol, Oxford, Glasgow, and interestingly, Budapest.

I mean, Stephen, do you know if they have, issues now with overloading of the system. I don't know. I don't know one way or the other. How have these developments of these fantastic achievement? How has that lasted over the last 150 years? Everybody knows that the dumping of sewage directly into the Thames has become increasingly common in recent years, principally because of London's growth, but also the changing climate, so increasingly heavy rainfall means the sewage system is often overloaded. Basil Jett anticipated growth of London, but he certainly didn't anticipate just how much the population

would grow, but also how much London would expand in terms of its land area. And the capacity of this system had to be increased in subsequent decades, especially the outfall sewers, the main two outfall sewers. But we now have the 16-mile Thames' time. Tideway tunnel being constructed under the Thames by Thames Water as a solution and a very radical and extremely expensive solution to this problem. Costing £4.3 billion, which is actually, I think, about 10 times more expensive than Basil Jets adjusted.

Yes, it's exactly a thousand times more expensive than Basil Jet built, allow it, but without allowing for inflation. But extraordinary, that in a sense that this project is not generating the same kind of attention. You know, given the scale of it, it's largely invisible, I think. We have these structures along the Thames that you can see. But it's certainly not generating anything like the enthusiasm or the public attention that Basiljet System did. Yes, the newspapers at the time, the Illustrated London News, as Rosemary has said,

but also other newspapers like the Mariliban Mercury, and the Times were continually running features on the system. Yeah, I mean, they were very much pro-reformist agenda. And whether or not that is they have a stronger kind of political influence on newspapers in that period, or whether just simply the kind of attitudes and culture towards infrastructure has changed because it's become so commonplace. I think the point that needs to be made about the problems

of sewage overflow into the Thames now is that most modern developments will have two separate systems. If you build a housing estate now, you'll have one system for the wastewater whose volumes can be predicted with considerable certainty, practically by the hour, and a separate system for rainwater,

which you can't predict. But of course, in Baseljet's time, he had to build one system to accommodate both. And you couldn't possibly build a system that would accommodate summer storms, for example. So he had these 57, what it were known as, combined sewer overflows so that he was allowed to spill a mixture of water and sewage

into the River Thames. He estimated it would be 12 times a year. It's now more like 50. times a year, partly because of the Great of London, and of course above all, the existence of far more hard standing. If rain falls

on a garden, some of it evaporates, some of it is taken up by the roots of the plants, and some of it makes its way into underground streams. But once you put hard standing, a supermarket, car park, or somewhere to park

a car, it runs straight into the sewers and overwhelms them. I wonder if, I'm just following on from that, the fact that we don't seem to be hearing an awful lot about the Tideway Tunnel unless we take trouble to go on the website, which you can do, and have a look and see what they're doing. I wonder if there isn't a political point here, a difference between the mid-Victorian period,

the middle of the 19th century, and the late 20th and early 21st century in politics. you know, undertaking, I know it was difficult and Disraeli had to overcome opposition and there were always people sniping and as Paul said, of course some people were actually discombobulated by the building of the embankments and the changing of the layout.

But it was a huge project which obviously Disraeli as the political runner of this knew really very well that he was very unlikely to be in power still when it was all, he wasn't in fact when it was all going through and finishing. And so, and I think the Victorians did, it's akin to all the other things we were saying, all the things that were going on, advances in everything.

And people were, they didn't say, let's not worry about the expense, because we know they did worry and some people objected. But they did seem to feel, and it seems apparent that they took the country with him in as much as you can tell what the country in general thought, it does seem as if there was this attitude, yes, we'll make the decision and we'll jolly well do it and we'll do the best we can. And while we're doing the embankments, we'll incorporate the new underground system, the first underground system in the world, which happens also to be built at the same time. And, you know, it just seemed to me it's different now and has been different for quite a long time. I wonder if you could ever do that again.

In fact, the Thames Tideway Tunnel attracted a great deal of opposition from local communities. whereas the Victorians had this strongly held belief that they were being killed by the smell. And that concentrates the mines wonderfully. I think the question of sewage recycling is still an interesting one, right? Because although Chadwick and his zeal for flushing combined with water closets

makes it effectively impossible to use sewage as an agricultural fertiliser, to me it's in the background of, like the end result of sewage systems that effectively intercept and remove the problem elsewhere is that you're still not really thinking about sewage is anything more than just a waste product. Yes, though in fact quite a lot.

I mean, my local sewage works here actually turns the solids into brick-sized pieces of fertiliser. So we're really going back to the time of the nightsoilman. It's just that they're using in modern, sewage treatment works, a mixture of physics, chemistry and biology to remove the pollutants and turn the solids into fertiliser again. And it will be interesting to see how far that can be taken, you know, way from incineration, I guess, which is the London's solution now rather than dumping it in the sea.

And how far it can kind of come back to this re-evaluation of what this thing is. Well, thank you all very much. this is Marion Keys. And this is Tara Flynn. We host a podcast you might like for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds called Now You're Asking. Each week we take real listeners questions about life. Love. Lauserey. Cats. Dogs. Pickets. Or the lack of. Anything really. And apply our worldly wisdom in a way which we hope will help. But also hopefully entertain. Join us why don't you. Search up Now You're asking on BBC Sounds. Tankin'ew.