The Great Fire of London might be the most famous disaster in the city’s storied history, but there is another city-wide catastrophe which is often forgotten. The Great Stink of 1858 brought London to a standstill as unprecedented hot weather turned the flow of raw human waste into the Thames into a steaming river of extraordinarily foul-smelling sewage. The Sun was literally baking the feces, and the stench became so awful that the members of Parliament were forced to walk out.
The putrid smell of the Great Stink was the catalyst behind the incorporation of a new sewage system built into the banks of the river. However, the houses of Parliament had only recently been rebuilt after a fire in 1834, so they were designed to dump their waste straight into the river below, rather than into the shiny new poop-chute system. The solution to this problem was to install a series of pneumatic sewage ejectors, which use blasts of compressed air to propel the human waste of Westminster up to the newly installed sewage pipes just below ground level.[8] This system still functions today, meaning that if the s—t hits the fan in Parliament, that might not be as bad as it sounds.