Hi everyone, and welcome back to Britain Under the Microscope. 欢迎回来【闲话英伦】. Hi, 安澜.

Hi, Lulu, hi everyone.

So what are we going to talk about today?

As many of you know, I've recently gone back to London. And I was walking around London and I just suddenly thought it might be interesting to talk a little bit about how London developed, and in particular, how it used to smell.

How it used to smell?

Yes.

Okay.

So I was walking along the Thames and it got me thinking about medieval London and Victorian London and what it was like back then.

In London today is pretty clean I would say, especially considering it's a bustling metropolis.

Yes, I wouldn't say it's like the cleanest city in the world, but actually there's so many trees in London that technically according to the United Nations’ own standards, London is technically a forest.

All right. One thing that did get me is that the Thames, everyone knows the Thames泰晤士河, Thames is… I don't know if it's dirty or… the color is just it's very brown.

It is very brown. But actually it's a very clean river. The reason why it's so brown is because it's a tidal river. It's close to the sea, it’s an estuary. So lots of the mud and the soil is being washed down the Thames; and also you have the tides coming in from the sea.

So basically, it's more muddy than anything else.

So it's not contaminated or polluted, it’s just the mud.

No, no, there's lots of fish that actually are able to live in the Thames.

But you mentioned that London used to smell, when was that?

It got really, really bad in the Victorian age. And if you go back, imagine that you're walking down the street in London in the mid-19th century, the first thing you would have noticed was the mud.

So there were no like pavements?

There were pavements, but the actual main road was covered in mud. Now, most of that mud though, was not actually mud. It was dung.

From the horses?

From the horses. In the 1890s, the city's horses were producing 1,000 tons of dung a day.

Wow, they sure crap a lot.

Yes, the horses. You can imagine back then there were young children who were paid to try and scoop up as much of the dung as possible to free up the traffic, and they'll sell that dung to farmers.

Yet the other thing about the Victorian times, Victorian London, was that there were a lot of child laborers.

Yeah, and there's also a lot of poor people. In some areas, particularly more affluent areas, wealthier areas of London, there used to be men that would stand by the roadside and you would pay them. So what they would do is when you wanted across the road, they will shovel the dung out of your pathway. And they were essentially like human traffic crossings.

They had to shuffle the dung away, the manure away, so that you can walk. Otherwise you just walking on horse shit.

Pretty much, and also back then as well the reason why I said it was really, really bad was because London grew incredibly quickly. Sewage was rudimentary, and there weren't many sewers instead cesspits were used.

所以那个时候下水管道是没有的, 或者说基本上非常basic.

Yeah.

And they just have cesspit for all the sewage.

And it used to get really, really bad because you had to pay people to climb in and dig out the cesspit, they were called night soil men.

Isn't it quite dangerous? I mean, it happens, especially in the rural areas, I think not that long ago. If you had this cesspit and then if people fall into it, they could really die.

A lot of them did. It was a profitable work because they would sell the waste to farmers. And there was also a rule that you could find… wherever you found you kept. So if there's any loose change or coins or jewelry that dropped in and it was yours, but it was very, very dangerous work. And also you have to pay them. So you can imagine if you didn't have that much money or you were a bit cheap, what would happen?

So you have to dig your own cesspit, otherwise ...

In some cases, there’re some kind of really bad neighbors, what they would do is kind of scoop some of it out and throw it into your neighbor’s cesspit.

Okay, but this cesspit where does it go? Some of it will go to the farmers?

The other, the rest of it would go into the Thames.

The Thames back then would have been really smelly then.

Yeah. The first public toilet were actually on London Bridge so that the waste went straight into the Thames.

So the Thames was basically just sewage water.

Pretty much. It was kind of somewhat helped by the fact the River Thames is tidal, so the tide will come in and it will come out again.

Wash it off.

Will wash it off, but that only really worked up to a point. If there were not that many people; and you have to think that there was no fridges back then. So animals for consumption like sheep, cows, they had to be butchered in London and the remains were chucked into the river.

Okay, so when they kill animals, they also chuck the remains into the river. So the river is filled with human waste and blood and guts and all of that.

Yes.

Wow. How long did this last and how could people live in that condition?

It finally became completely unbearable in 1858, it was a really hot summer. The Thames water level went quite low because ...

Heat waves.

Yeah, it was a heat wave. There was not enough rain because of the heat, the waste was exposed and just baked in the sun. That year it was called the Great Stink.

Literally means it was so smelly.

The smell was so bad in the new House of the Parliament couldn't meet, they actually ran out of the building because they couldn't stand the smell.

I would imagine if the parliament were to meet, they were to govern or solve problems. So how would they solve this problem?

It was always a problem, but because it started to affect the parliament building. They in a very, very short period of time, a couple of weeks, they come up with a new law. They finally gave funding for a proper sewer to be built. That sewer is still in use today, it’s called the Embankment.

That's what Embankment means.

The Embankment runs along the river, and now it's quite a grand road overlooking the river. And it's one of the main roads in central London, but partly it was a sewer and partly it was an underground line.

Every time I was taking the underground, there was one station called the Embankment.

So that's how the problem was finally solved. And they actually accidentally found the reason for why people were dying of cholera.

They never connect the dots.

They didn't connect the dots originally. Because back there, they just thought that disease was caught by bad air or miasma. But when they created the Embankment and the sewer, they started to realize, hang on, not so many people die in cholera. They finally realized that cholera was a water borne disease.

They finally realized that proper sewer system can save lives.

Exactly.

You talked a lot about this water related contamination. The other thing that I've heard is people will say foggy old London, 伦敦是雾都. But back then it wasn't really fog. It was also smog.

It was smog. That's because most of the heating was coal fired and also most of the coal fired plants were in London. So London still had lots of issues with smog and they actually culminated in the Great Smog of 1952.

It killed a lot of people on one day.

Over a 4-day period, it probably killed 12,000 people.

They died directly from the great smog.

Yeah, because it was so noxious, it was so bad that it actually seeped into people's homes. And lots of people became very, very ill.

And it was after that, then you had the Clean Air Act.

That's right. So London still has problems with air pollution, but it's a different kind of air pollution and also it never ever got as bad as that.

Yeah. Which really makes you think, every great city in the world pretty much went through similar process of development. Yeah, no city is the way it looks today in the history. For example, I live in Beijing and living in Beijing all these years and then maybe 7 or 8 years ago, smog was really really bad.

I still remember.

But you've noticed recently it has improved so much.

I remember when I first came to Beijing that generally it was always not good or terrible.

The air quality.

But nowadays it's very rare to get that really, really bad days. It's remarkable achievement.

Hopefully today's topic gave you another perspective on this great city London. And if you have witnessed changes over the years in your own city, leave us a comment in the comment section so we can discuss.

So until then.

We'll see you next time.

Bye.