The Great Stink – How London Finally Got Its S**t Together

As London swelters through record-breaking June temperatures in 2026, we look back to another scorching June that changed the city forever. In 1858, soaring temperatures turned the Thames into a foul-smelling open sewer, creating the Great Stink and forcing Parliament to approve one of the greatest engineering projects in British history. Walk along the Thames Embankment with me as we visit two historic Westminster pubs that bookend the story of a Victorian public health crisis and discover how Joseph Bazalgette's engineering masterpiece transformed London's riverfront—and why every visitor to London still benefits from it today.

Transcript

It's been a hot start to summer in London. On 25 June 2026 the city reached 36.4°C (97.5°F). 

When the heat settles over London like this, the air stops moving. That thick, still warmth takes you back to another summer, when London reached 35°C (95F) on 16th June 1858.

Picture the most powerful men in the world's largest empire sitting in their brand-new Parliament on the banks of the Thames, holding handkerchiefs to their faces because the river outside had become an open sewer. They seriously discussed abandoning London altogether.

That summer earned a name that's lasted nearly two centuries: The Great Stink.

I'm Expat Andy. This is Publicity—your London travel toolkit, a signal in the travel-information static—and this is a love letter to two pubs at opposite ends of the hot summer that forced London to get its shit together. 

How does a city poison its own river?

By 1858, London was the biggest city on earth, with more than two and a half million people crammed into streets never designed for them.

They'd embraced a modern convenience they were terribly proud of - the flushing water closet.

The problem was where it all went when it was flushed.

Those toilets emptied into cesspits beneath buildings and then from there were emptied directly into the Thames. Worse, the Thames is tidal. Instead of washing out to sea, the sewage rode the tide back and forth past Westminster twice a day, gathering as it went.

Then came the heat.

June 1858 baked the city. The river water level dropped, exposing banks slick with sewage cooking in the sun. The smell got into curtains, clothes and food.

Now none of this was new. London's riverside poor had endured it for decades. But in the summer of 1858 the stench finally reached the one address guaranteed to get something done - the Houses of Parliament.

Blinds facing the river were soaked in chloride of lime to keep the smell out. It barely helped.

Benjamin Disraeli reportedly fled a committee room clutching a fistful of papers in one hand and a handkerchief over his nose. In the Commons he called the Thames,

"A Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors."

Well, you can’t argue with that, can you?

That did not exactly give London's tourism marketers much to work with either.

But it was the turning point. Not because the poor had suffered, but because legislators finally couldn't breathe.

Parliament rushed through a bill in just eighteen days, becoming law on 2 August 1858.

The new law handed money and sweeping powers to the Metropolitan Board of Works, and to its chief engineer - a man already in post with a plan waiting in his drawer.

His name was Joseph Bazalgette.

His solution was elegant. Instead of letting waste pour into the Thames, he built huge “intercepting” sewers running parallel to the river, catching sewage before it reached the water and carrying it miles downstream beyond the city.

To make the lowest sewers work, he buried them inside massive new embankments — Victoria, Albert, and Chelsea - creating grand riverside roads above them.

Hold onto this image - a beautiful riverside boulevard with a hidden river of filth flowing beneath it. The River Effluent, if you will.

We're visiting two pubs today. They sit at opposite ends of this new Thames Embankment, each telling part of the story of the Great Stink. One witnessed the crisis. The other sits above the engineering that solved it.

Hmm. That River Effluent. Isn't that a lovely thought while you're chugging one of London's finest ales above it?

Our first pub is The Red Lion Westminster, at 48 Parliament Street, SW1A 2NH. It’s Grade II Listed, and the closest public house to Parliament in the heart of Westminster, wedged into the narrow ground between the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, the gates of Downing Street, the Cenotaph,  and the Imperial War Museum’s Churchill War Rooms. It’s also right next to Westminster tube station.

There's been a drinking house on this corner since at least 1434, when it was known as Hopping Hall. By the nineteenth century it was The Red Lion, and a young Charles Dickens wrote warmly of its kindly landlady.

The building you see today dates from around 1890, so it wasn't standing during the Great Stink. But the address was.

This was where MPs escaped the smell, grumbled over pints and plotted their response—the unofficial annex to a Parliament in crisis.

The Red Lion has one of my favorite Westminster curiosities: a Division Bell.

When the House of Commons votes, Members physically divide into two lobbies to be counted. 

Bells ring not only inside Parliament but in nearby buildings MPs are known to frequent. 

Several Westminster pubs are still connected, and the Red Lion is one of them. When that bell rings, an MP has just eight minutes to reach the voting lobby. 

Eight minutes.

Finish your pint, grab your coat, run!

Imagine standing here in the summer of 1858. An MP is three-quarters through his ale, collar damp, the river stinking outside. The bell rings. He's running back to vote on finally paying for Bazalgette's sewers.

Somewhere in that system was the vote that gave London back its lungs.

Our second pub is The Morpeth Arms, at 58 Millbank, SW1P 4RW. Also Grade II Listed, it sits less than a mile from Parliament. Built around 1845 as part of Thomas Cubitt's new Pimlico, it already stood here when the Great Stink arrived, looking out over that baking, fetid Thames.

It was built to serve the warders of the Millbank Penitentiary — the vast, awful prison that once stood where Tate Britain stands today. 

The pub's name probably honors Viscount Morpeth, later the 7th Earl of Carlisle, a leading Whig politician. It's a fitting coincidence. As a minister, Morpeth helped steer Britain's first major Public Health Act through Parliament in 1848 - a decade before the Great Stink forced London to build its modern sewer system.

This pub quietly carries the name of a man who'd already been trying to clean up Britain's filth while the river outside was getting steadily worse.

From nearby river steps, convicts were shipped to Australia until 1867.

The cellar still contains old holding cells, and if you ask nicely, staff will often show them to you—including the hatch through which prisoners once received their food.

Upstairs is The Spying Room, overlooking the creepy headquarters of MI6.

It's a pub steeped in stories.

But its most important story lies beneath your feet.

Running beneath Millbank is one of Bazalgette's low-level intercepting sewers, quietly carrying west London's waste eastward, away from the Thames.

A mile upstream, near Chelsea Bridge, the Grade II Listed Western Pumping Station built in 1875 lifts that underground river high enough for gravity to carry it onwards.

At the far ends of the system Bazalgette built two astonishing pumping stations: 

The Grade II* Listed Abbey Mills Pumping Station finished in 1868 Abbey Mills to the north and the Grade I Listed Crossness Pumping Station, opened in 1865, to the south. Monumental Victorian buildings created for one gloriously unglamorous purpose—moving sewage.

Most of Bazalgette's masterpiece is invisible. You can't tour a working sewer, or visit the Western Pumping Station.

But you can visit Crossness, and you absolutely should.

For decades it sat derelict on London's eastern marshes until the Crossness Engines Trust painstakingly restored it. Today one of its giant beam engines, Prince Consort, steams again on selected open days.

Watching that fifty-ton flywheel turn beneath brilliantly restored Victorian ironwork is extraordinary.

Architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner called it "a Victorian cathedral of ironwork."

For once, the hype is deserved.

What I especially love is that only half the engine house has been restored. One side gleams in a riot of Victorian colors; the other remains unrestored. The contrast is dramatic—what the British would call chalk and cheese.

If you decide to visit, it's in Abbey Wood, southeast London. The Elizabeth Line will drop you at Abbey Wood station,  and then you’ll have to pick up a local bus, and then a little bit of a walk through a local neighborhood to complete the journey to get there. As always, check ahead for opening times and for all bus and train and transport schedules. The engines only steam on selected days, and you should visit then because that's when Crossness really comes alive.

There's even a delightful narrow-gauge steam railway that carries visitors from the entrance to the pumping station itself.

This is what I mean when I say a pub is a decoder ring for its neighborhood.

The Red Lion tells the story of panic and politics—the summer Parliament finally acted.

The Morpeth Arms tells the story of the solution—the hidden engineering that transformed London and then quietly disappeared beneath its streets.

Underground, however, a problem was slowly building. Bazalgette did not separate stormwater from sewage, so in a city already pushing his system to the maximum, periodic heavy rainfall draining into overloaded sewer pipes caused the system to overflow into the Thames again. This has been causing a catastrophic effect on Thames water quality as one can imagine. 

This brings us to 2025 when London completed the Thames Tideway Tunnel, a 25-kilometre super sewer designed to intercept the overflows Bazalgette's Victorian system could no longer cope with.

His network had been built for about two million Londoners.

Today the city has more than nine million.

That’s a lot of flushes!

The Tideway Tunnel doesn't replace Bazalgette's work; it completes it, preventing millions of tons of untreated sewage from spilling into the Thames during heavy rain.

Now as we know, London does get its fair share of rain.

The result is a cleaner river and the promised return of wildlife that has long disappeared – salmon, eel, and otters.

So, when you're walking beside the Thames today, enjoying the salmon, the eels, and the otters, remember you're looking at a river that almost killed the city—and at the engineering that saved it.

Take the time to walk the Embankment.

Look at the grand buildings sitting high above the road. Before Bazalgette, those buildings were at the water’s edge.

The clue is in the name of the road that runs parallel to the embankment – The Strand or Stronde — Middle English for the beach or shore.

Stop at the Grade I Listed Somerset House and consider that it once stood directly on the Thames, with boats entering through its great arch. 

Today a road and Bazalgette's sewer separate Somerset House from the water.

The Grade I Listed York Watergate now stands stranded in the Embankment Gardens, more than a hundred meters from the river it was built to meet.

The old shoreline – it’s still there, hiding in plain sight.

Near the Golden Jubilee Bridges you'll find the only public memorial to Joseph Bazalgette, carrying the inscription: He put the river in chains.

Walk a little further and you'll pass Cleopatra’s Needle, 

Vulliamy’s sphinxes, sturgeon lampposts, the camel-and-sphinx benches, and the cast-iron dragons marking the boundary of the City of London.

You don't have to walk the whole Embankment.

Just walk between our two pubs.

It's about a mile linking the place where Parliament finally couldn't breathe with the engineering that gave London back its lungs.

Stand there today and the contrast is striking.

Westminster is power, politics and tourists.

Pimlico is quiet streets and elegant stucco.

The Thames—and Bazalgette's hidden river beneath it—bind them together.

Two pubs.

Two hot summers.

One stinky.

One unfolding before us.

The summer of 1858 was when London finally got its shit together. Literally.

For that, we owe Parliament and Joseph Bazalgette a tremendous debt.

Hey, smart, savvy listeners, I'm Expat Andy, your Host and Producer.

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