Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Why in the 1850s was the excrement of thousands of people being deposited straight into the River Thames. How lethal were

Victorian Britain's cholera outbreaks? And why is Joseph Basilgett one of the most heroic figures in

London's history? Here in conversation with Spencer Mizzin, Rosemary Ashton answers the most

pressing questions on an infamous pollution

event caused by soaring temperatures and huge amounts of human waste.

The Great Stink of 1858, it's certainly a distinctive name for a historical event,

but of course it wasn't particularly pleasant to live

through. So I wonder if you could start by, given our listeners, an introduction to the Great

Stink, what exactly was going on here? Well, what was going on was that you had, in the summer of

1858, the hottest summer yet recorded, the hot weather

and above the 75 or, you know, Fahrenheit, would be quite hot. And the whole of June and into

July was in those temperatures and above. And one day, it's the 16th of June, the hottest temperature ever recorded in London,

which was 35 degrees centigrade or 94.5 Fahrenheit, which, of course, now we've gone past,

but we know why we've gone past it for reasons not dissimilar to those that occurred then,

i.e. we've got climate change now. What they then

had was hot weather confounded by the great stink of the River Thames, which was a sewer. That's what

had happened to the Thames. It was full of human sewage. And it had been so for some time, obviously,

but it got worse and worse as the weather got hotter.

And so the stench caused all sorts of things not to happen.

For example, pleasure boats for tourists going up and down the River Thames had to stop because nobody could bear it.

People living by the Thames, which was unembanked, so you've got to imagine it low,

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