The Great Stink Crisis
- When
- July–August 1858
- Where
- Central London
Hot weather in July and August 1858 exacerbated sewage smells on the Thames banks, creating a crisis that pushed Parliament to act on London's sanitation.
The Great Stink was an event in Central London during July and August 1858, in which hot weather exacerbated the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent present on the banks of the River Thames. June temperatures in the shade had averaged 34–36 °C, rising to 48 °C in the sun, illustrating the extreme heat of that summer. The miasma from the effluent was thought to transmit contagious disease, and the stench was severe enough that Parliament came to see the river problem as urgent.
Sources
- Great Stink Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-15
- London sewer system Wikipedia, revision of 2026-06-22
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.