Exactly 150 years ago, an exceptionally hot summer reduced the Thames flowing through London to a disgusting trickle. The ‘Great Stink’ off the river was so excruciating that Parliament at Westminster could barely sit. The terrors of cholera were relatively new and almost everyone believed that the fumes were pestilential.
This threat had a concentrating effect on retching MPs’ legislative faculties. The act they rushed through voted an unheard-of public sum – three million pounds sterling – for the transformation of sewerage in London by Sir Joseph Bazalgette, and led to revolutions in local government and public health engineering throughout the industrializing world.1 ‘Laissez-faire,’ declared a contemporary editorial in the Illustrated London News, ‘is an excellent maxim where trade is concerned. But in the manufacture of poisons, laissez-faire is not to be tolerated except by political and municipal idiots.’
