London was drinking its own sewage. He built the city a second river, underground — and it still runs.
In the hot summer of 1858 the Thames stank so badly that the curtains of the new Houses of Parliament were soaked in chloride of lime so MPs could bear to sit. The river was London's sewer and, for many, its drinking water; cholera had killed more than 14,000 Londoners in 1848–49 and over 10,000 more in 1853–54. Within eighteen days of the bill being brought in, Parliament handed the problem — and £3 million — to a slight, overworked engineer named Joseph Bazalgette.
What he built is mostly invisible: brick tunnels, egg-shaped in section, that catch the old sewers before they reach the river and run the filth downstream to outfalls east of the city. Most of the men who paid for it believed disease travelled on foul air. They were wrong, and it worked anyway — because it took the sewage out of the water. Much of his system still carries London's waste today.
A life underground
The lifeline
1819
Born 28 March at Enfield, grandson of a French émigré tailor; son of a Royal Navy officer
1847
Breaks down from overwork after the railway mania and is forced to rest
1849
Joins the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, in the middle of a cholera epidemic
1858
The Great Stink. Parliament gives his Board the power and money to build
1875
Knighted, as the main drainage nears completion
1891
Dies 15 March at Wimbledon, aged 71, two years after retiring
By the numbers
The measure of him
1,100
Miles of street sewers feeding the new system
82
Miles of great intercepting sewers, running parallel to the Thames
318M
Bricks laid to build it
18
Days for Parliament to pass the 1858 act, once MPs could smell the river
What he built
The works
1859
Main drainage begins. Three intercepting sewers north of the river, two south, all falling west to east toward outfalls at Beckton and Crossness.
1865
Crossness Pumping Station opened on 4 April by the Prince of Wales: four giant beam engines lifting the south's sewage into a reservoir for release on the ebb tide.
1868
Abbey Mills Pumping Station, the ornate “cathedral of sewage”, lifts the northern low-level sewer on its way to Beckton.
1869–74
Three embankments — Albert (1869), Victoria (1870), Chelsea (1874) — reclaim the muddy foreshore and hide a sewer, and later an Underground line, beneath new riverside roads.
1886–90
New Thames bridges at Putney (1886), Hammersmith (1887) and Battersea (1890), plus new streets such as Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue.
Honoured, then forgotten
Recognition
In his lifetime
Knighted in 1875 for the main drainage of London
President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 1883–84
Chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works for 33 years, 1856–1889
A memorial raised on the Victoria Embankment in 1901: Flumini vincula posuit, “he put the river in chains”
Today
Millions use his tunnels every day without knowing his name
London's last cholera epidemic, in 1866, struck hardest in the East End, the one district not yet connected
The Thames Tideway Tunnel, a 25 km “super sewer” finished in 2025, was built to relieve his overloaded system
Crossness, restored by volunteers, is Grade I listed; one beam engine steams again
The place that made him
The Thames
His sewers are built in an egg shape, narrow end down, so that even a thin flow stays fast enough to scour itself clean. He sized them for the densest population he could foresee, and then, by long tradition, doubled the diameter: one reason they coped with a city that would grow to more than three times its 1858 size.
1858
The Great Stink: Parliament on the riverbank, unable to ignore it
2.8M
Londoners at the 1861 census, all draining into one tidal river
4
Beam engines at Crossness: Victoria, Prince Consort, Albert Edward and Alexandra
“Well, we're only going to do this once, and there's always the unforeseen.”
— Joseph Bazalgette, as traditionally quoted, on doubling the size of his pipes
