Ooh that smell! This is a classic episode, Ridiculous Historians, thank you for joining us.

Have you ever been to London folks? I think, uh, no, you and I, I'm Ben. We've both been to London and we had a pretty great time

You know I haven't been in London since I was a very small child my mom used to tell me that I pooped my pants on every

Heath in the city of London town.

That's the way she tells that story.

I can neither confirm nor deny that.

But there was a time in London where it smelled as though everyone had pooped their pants all the time.

Yeah, the city smelled so so bad and it wasn't it wasn't like walking in New York today.

New York has a cavalcade of amazing and terrible smells

Right.

That's right. You know it kind of comes and goes you catch it in little waves the great stink of London was so

absolutely stinky that essentially it was due to what we'll get into in the

episode but it was due to a lack of the kinds of things that many of us take for granted today like things like sanitation

things like sewage you know infrastructure etc but there were all kinds of theories

as to what was causing the stink

and what was it doing to people.

Everything from the measma theory,

which I really like, you know, this idea of like it was this disease cloud, I guess.

That was what it was actually also the water was poison because it had lots of poop in it. Dead bodies, think of money Python,

bring out your dead, you know, just piles of, I mean this is a little bit of a different era but this is the 1800 in

London and they had a problem and boy did they need someone to help them solve it

check out the hook while the DJ revolves it. Let's get a width of London in the 1800s.

...