This wide riverside road and the gardens beside it are the Victoria Embankment, and none of this land is natural. It's built on top of the river. To understand why, you have to go back to the summer of eighteen fifty-eight, when London smelled so bad the government nearly ran away.
They called it the Great Stink. It was a heatwave, the Thames was essentially an open sewer, and the whole thing cooked. The smell was so violent that people vomited on the riverbank. Inside Parliament — whose windows look straight onto the water — they soaked the curtains in chloride of lime just to breathe, and they seriously debated abandoning London and moving the entire government to Oxford. One MP called the river a Stygian pool, reeking with intolerable horrors. Which, for a man complaining about a smell, is a real commitment to vocabulary.
And it worked, because nothing motivates a government like personally suffering. They'd ignored the sewage problem for years. Once it was in their curtains, they
passed the funding in about eighteen days and handed the job to an engineer named Joseph Bazalgette. That's Baz-al-jet. He's the most important Londoner you've never heard of, and he's about to become your favorite.
Bazalgette designed a network of eighty-two miles of massive main sewers, fed by more than a thousand miles of smaller ones, built out of three hundred and eighteen million bricks. B
