ShortHand: The Great Stink

**Hannah Maguire** (0:13)
Back in ye olden days, and quite a lot of now, life in London kind of stuck, literally. But in the sweltering summer of 1858, the entire city was brought to its knees by a truly unbearable stench rising off the River Thames.
One that not only had Londoners holding their hankies to their face, but sparked widespread hysteria that everyone was literally going to die.
Writers despaired at the state of the nation, Parliament nearly abandoned ship, and worst of all, it even ruined Queen Victoria's date night. The so-called Great Stink led to a monumental overhauling of the city's plumbing infrastructure, creating the very same sewer system that serves RedHanded HQ today. Ready to take a dive down the U-bend of history into London's sewers? You've got no choice. Hold your noses. This is the very smelly ShortHand.

**Suruthi Bala** (1:11)
First, let's give you some context about London's dubious sanitation system prior to the infamous summer of 1858
Starting way back in the Middle Ages, when the very first sewers were constructed, these weren't actually built to deal with human waste. Instead, they were basically open drainage ditches designed to divert rainwater and prevent the city from flooding. And when it came to our own movements, well, let's just say it was a lot more rustic. Outdoor cubicles called privies were essentially just holes in the ground, with waste building up in cesspits beneath. In what surely takes the prize for one of the grimmest old and timey jobs, night soil men would then periodically collect this material to be used as fertiliser. These cesspits were obviously gross, but as for the River Thames, Jewel of London, it wasn't yet the filthy swamp it would later become known as.

**Hannah Maguire** (2:08)
But everything changed when the industrial revolution rolled along, bringing with it soot, smog, and boatloads of waste. Naughty coal guzzling factories, often located along the riverside, were now dumping their industrial effluent pretty much directly into the Thames. And with people flocking to urban areas for work in the early 1800s, London's population tripled from one to three million in just half a century.
Needless to say, those extra arses led to a whole lot more waste. Now, you might assume the invention of the flush toilet, which took off in popularity after 1851's grand exhibition, would help clean things up, but ironically, it actually made things a lot worse. Thousands of households were suddenly flushing human waste into sewers that had never been designed to carry it, which all ended up flowing straight into the river. And to make things even worse, the Thames herself is tidal, which means that anything that goes into it doesn't just politely make its way out to sea, like a great brown boomerang, it comes back.

**Suruthi Bala** (3:17)
Now unsurprisingly, all of this led to the river Thames becoming pretty bloody grim. By the height of the Victorian era, it was notorious for its opaque brown colour, along with random floating bits of unidentified filth it was best not to think too much about. Piles upon piles of sludge built up along the riverside, some of them up to six feet high, which as you can imagine, didn't smell too great. So while the Thames were still a vital thoroughfare through London, as well as a bustling hub for industry and trade, it was gaining an increasingly grim reputation. Because what had once been heralded as the vital lifeblood of Britain's mighty empire, was now basically just a glorified sewer. Popular writers like Charles Dickens painted the Thames as a reeking cesspool, and pretty much everyone agreed that it couldn't be doing anyone's health much good.
Now, their actual scientific understanding of what was going on wasn't quite how we'd understand it today, but we'll come back to that in a bit.

**Hannah Maguire** (4:17)
Still, even as public outrage grew, nobody had much of a clue about how to go about cleaning up the river. And the government was in no rush to claim responsibility. And since the communities who actually lived and worked directly on the inner city banks, fishermen, lightermen, mudlarks, etc. were working class, there wasn't a whole load of urgency going on. While chemicals including chalk lime and carboic acid were poured into the water in 1857 in a vague attempt to neutralise the stench, this unfortunately did sweet fuck all. So with no one stepping up to properly tackle this literal shower of shite, the grimness of the River Thames just became one of those things.
But not for much longer.

**Suruthi Bala** (5:04)
Because if Victorian Londoners thought things were bad, they hadn't seen, or rather smelled, anything yet. In the summer of 1858, a mighty heat wave hit London. And holding your nose just wasn't going to cut it anymore. That July and August, temperatures consistently soared above 30 degrees Celsius. A bit like the long hot summer that we're sweating through in London this year. A prolonged dry spell meant the river's water levels dropped, while the heaps of sludgy waste only got taller. And when you take all that already putrid waste and bake it under the sun?