10 Unbelievable Details Surrounding London During The Victorian Era

6 /10 The Smell Of Human Waste

London had 200,000 cesspools all around the city, but they were not enough to contain the excrement of millions of people. The introduction of water closets led to the cesspools being quickly filled up.

All the sewage that should have stayed inside the underground container was overflowing into the cellars and inevitably onto the streets.

By 1849, at least 3,000 homes in London suffered from the stench of human waste. Of course, the awful smell did not discriminate at all. Even grand establishments, including Buckingham Palace, couldn’t escape the polluted air.

5 /10 Elongated Cesspool

London’s ancient sewers were designed for rainwater, not wastewater. But amidst the overflowing sewage, people began connecting their cesspools to the sewers illegally.

River Thames, where all the sewers drained, turned into the world’s most giant glorified open cesspool.

Since water companies took their water from the river, their customers unknowingly received diluted human excrement for laundering, cooking, and drinking.

Despite regular outbreaks of cholera, health risks from drinking dirty water were not yet fully understood. People were more concerned about the stench because they believed that awful smells, not the water, could spread disease.

4 /10 Effluvia Of Death

The disease claimed more lives in a city where population growth seemed unstoppable, and sanitation remained troubling. London was overcrowded, and so were its urban graveyards.

While the cellars, the streets, the river, and the sewers all smelled filthy, the urban cemetery was the worst. One medical officer in London described the smell as an odor of death.

Rooms for new corpses were hard to come by, so the coffins were stacked on top of each other in 20ft deep shafts, the topmost being mere inches from the surface.

Long-buried corpses were often disturbed to make room for newcomers.

3 /10 Miasmatic Filth

One gravedigger described that the smell of a cesspool was rose-water in comparison to the stench of graves. The disposal of the dead had been a long-standing problem in 19th century London.

Burial was the norm as cremation was still a peculiar foreign custom. When there was nowhere else to move the existing coffins, gravediggers had little choice but to do sloppy exhumations.

Bones were scattered among the tombstones, and smashed coffins were just another type of commodity sold as firewood. By the 1940s, urban graveyards were primarily considered a danger to public health.

2 /10 The Great Unwashed

From about 1830 to the rest of the century, the working-class of London earned themselves a condescending nickname of the “great unwashed” for the apparent reason.

Staying clean was a real struggle in Victorian London because no one had access to clean water. Bathrooms were not a common feature in houses until the second half of the 19th century.

Bathing was a luxury affordable only to the wealthy minority. Everyone had to either buy water from pub owners by the bucket or fetch it from the parish pump. The poor had to make do with washing their faces and hands.

1 /10 Canopy Of Vapor

The air in London was so polluted that the city became known as “The Big Smoke.” The only atmosphere people knew it was the gray canopy of vapor that covered the entire city.

At times, people struggled to breathe, and opening the window only meant letting the soot in.

Despite years of crusades against the foul stench, some Londoners were not convinced that smoke carried equally harmful health risks.

Every color turned black in the streets of Victorian London. Things started to improve when, eventually, the house sewer system was designed so that it could be connected to the domestic chimney.