The Great Stink

Misha Glenny and guests discuss a familiar feature of our beaches: seashells, from their astonishing shapes and patterns that teach us about Earth’s oceans, to the ways that humans have treasured shells throughout history. Seashells appear in the mythologies of countless cultures ...  Show more

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the French portrait painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755 - 1842). From her teens she delighted her high society subjects in and around Paris, notably Marie Antoinette who she painted around 30 times, and she invariably found ways to show her sitte ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the stench from the River Thames in the hot summer of 1858 and how it appalled and terrified Londoners living and working beside it, including those in the new Houses of Parliament which were still under construction. There had been an outbreak of ...  Show more

The ‘Great Stink’ - when the stench of untreated human and industrial waste was amplified by a particularly hot Summer - reached a peak on 15th July, 1858, when members of Parliament lead by Benjamin Disraeli rushed through an emergency cleanup bill, kickstarting a transformative ...  Show more

In the summer of 1858, a heatwave dried up the Thames River to a trickle in London. As centuries’ worth of human waste, animal carcasses and other nasty things cooked in the sun, a stench arose that was so horrific it got its own name: The Great Stink.

📝 Get FREE Episode Worksheet 🧐 Take English Level Test 👄 Improve Your Pronunciation In this episode, Charlie invites Martin on the show to talk about the "Great Stink" in London in 1858, focusing on the city's bad sanitation and how Sir Joseph Bazalgette's new sewage system he ...  Show more