Great Stink of London

1858

A hot summer cooked the raw sewage the Thames carried past Westminster. Curtains at the Parliament windows were soaked in lime chloride; MPs fled. Within weeks Bagehot's government authorized Joseph Bazalgette to build a vast system of intercepting sewers - arguably the most consequential public-health project of the century. Bazalgette's network of 83 miles of brick sewers still serves London today, a Victorian monument hidden underfoot.