The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis [1999, 2013] by Stephen Halliday

Author:Stephen Halliday [Halliday, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752493787
Publisher: The History Press [repr pbk, ebook]
Published: 1999-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

The Board had slowly, with great reluctance and with a strong rearguard action, come to accept that it could no longer discharge raw sewage into the Thames. A solution which had been greeted with enthusiasm in the 1860s was no longer acceptable in the 1880s, in which period London had grown in population by almost 50 per cent and the previously sparsely inhabited communities of Barking and Plumstead had become substantial metropolitan suburbs instead of the ‘bone boilers and glue works’ described by Bazalgette in 1877.69 A much later historian agreed with the contemporary judgement, quoted above, of the Pall Mall Gazette. Bazalgette, ‘an old and tired man . . . had been with the Board for so long that he had, perhaps, gained an excessive influence over its decisions’, and consequently they were reluctant to make significant changes to the system which he had devised thirty years earlier and for which he had been widely praised.70 His system was nevertheless easily adapted to the process of precipitation and disposal at sea and this practice continued successfully until 1998.71

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