River Revival: Transforming The Thames

The summer of 1858 was not a good time to be living in London. It was the year of the “Great Stink,” and the city smelled terrible.

- Christine Graf

In an effort to cover up the smell, curtains in the British Parliament building were doused with a mixture of chloride and lime. When that didn’t work, Britain’s supreme legislative body had no choice but to cancel all government meetings.

The smell that brought the city to its knees emanated from the Thames River, a river that flows through the heart of London and empties into the North Sea. The river was a dumping ground for human, animal, and industrial waste, and it had become one of the most contaminated rivers in the entire world. The summer’s heat wave caused the waste to ferment, and this generated a smell that was so bad that people were unable to leave their homes.

It was because of the Great Stink that the British government finally did something to address the Thames River’s pollution problem. After years of ignoring public outcry over the condition of the river, it took Parliament just 18 days to create, pass, and sign into law a bill that was designed to clean up the Thames. Government critics noted that Parliament’s “proximity to the source of the stench” spurred the members into action in a way that “many years of argument and campaigning had failed to do.”

The Thames was relatively clean in the early 1800s, but London’s exponential population growth caused a tremendous increase in sewage — sewage that flowed directly into the Thames.The people of London got their drinking water from the river, and contaminated water caused many deaths. Four outbreaks of cholera killed approximately 40,000 people in the mid-1800's.