Bazalgette's Embankment — The Great Stink's Legacy

Joseph Bazalgette’s Victoria Embankment in London was constructed following the 1858 Great Stink to enclose 82 miles of main brick sewers, the Underground Circle line, and a roadway while reclaiming 22 acres of land from the River Thames. Prompted by extreme Thames pollution that forced Parliament to pass sewage legislation in August 1858, Bazalgette doubled his pipe diameter calculations. This design allowed London's sewer system to function into the twenty-first century.

London · from the walk “Steam, Soot & Steel: London's Industrial Revolution” · Generated

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Victoria Embankment, London WC2N 5DN

How did Joseph Bazalgette's Embankment design solve London's Great Stink of 1858?

Take a deep breath right here. Smell that? Nothing, really... just the river, a hint of traffic, the ordinary air of London. But stand in this Exact spot in the summer of eighteen fifty eight, and you would have Retched. You might have fainted. You might have fled.

That summer, the hot weather exacerbated the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent on the banks of the River Thames. Temperatures in the shade averaged thirty four to thirty six degrees Celsius... rising to forty eight in the sun. People reportedly vomited if they went too close to the river. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert attempted a pleasure cruise on the Thames but returned to shore within minutes because the smell was so terrible.

They called it... the Great Stink.

Inside Parliament, curtains and blinds were soaked in chloride of lime to block the smell. It didn't work. Chancellor Benjamin Disraeli reportedly entered a committee room only to flee moments later, handkerchief pressed to his nose. He stood before the House and called the Thames... "a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors."

And the river was right beneath their windows.

Now, here's what makes this spot a monument to the Industrial Revolution. Parliament was forced to legislate to create a new unified sewage system for London. The Bill became law on the second of August, eighteen fifty eight... just eighteen days after it was introduced. The man they turned to was Joseph Bazalgette — the grandson, remarkably, of a French Protestant immigrant who had been principal tailor to the Prince of Wales.

Bazalgette's plan was Audacious. He built one thousand one hundred miles of drains under London's streets, feeding into eighty two miles of new brick-lined sewers. The pumping stations used the biggest steam engines in the world. And you are standing on top of it all. The southernmost intercepting sewer on the north bank was incorporated right into this Embankment... along with the Circle line of the London Underground. One structure, hiding a sewer, a railway, and a road — all reclaimed from the river itself. These stone constructions narrowed the Thames, reclaiming about twenty two acres of land.

But here's the detail that separates genius from mere competence. Bazalgette calculated the pipe diameter needed for London's densest population, gave every citizen the most generous allowance of sewage production... and then Doubled it, saying: "We're only going to do this once and there's always the unforeseen." According to the Institution of Civil Engineers, if he'd used the smaller diameter, the sewers would have overflowed in the nineteen sixties. Instead, they coped into the twenty first century.

And the beautiful irony? The whole scientific premise behind the project was Wrong. They believed bad air — miasma — spread cholera. But by removing sewage from the water supply, Bazalgette accidentally eliminated the Actual cause... the waterborne bacterium. He saved countless lives for the wrong reason.

Now look for his memorial nearby — a bronze bust in white marble, sculpted by George Blackall Simonds, with a Latin inscription above it: "Flumini Vincula Posuit" — He put the river in chains.

Every time you flush a toilet in London... his brickwork carries it away. One hundred and sixty years on. Still working. Still invisible. The greatest industrial triumph you'll never see.

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