Most of the time Father Thames rolls along, serene. He is 10,000 years
old, after all. But he
is also tidal, throughout most of his London stretch. Salt water mixes
with fresh water. He
is one of the cleanest commercial rivers in the world. For centuries
we have used him for our
drinking water - still do: by the time a pint of water reaches the North
Sea, it has passed through
8 human bodies. But, we have also, for most of London’s life, used
him as our main sewer. By
the 1840s, the water in the river was dead. Well, alive, but with things
you wouldn’t want to
know about! King Cholera and similar watery killers
This resulted in the 1850s in an event called The Big Stink. The stench
from the river during a
hot June was so bad, they tried dumping hundreds of tons of lime into
the river to "sweeten" the
water. The tide would carry the effluent downstream. This meant that
districts like the East
End of London suffered appallingly - in the early 1800s, in an East
End village like Stepney
the average age of death was 13 years. In the 1860s an engineer called
Joseph
Bazelgette built 1300 miles of sewers across London. That one piece
of monumental Victorian engineering added, it has been estimated,
on average 20 years to the life of Londoners
Further links:
Hammersmith
Riverside Walk
