The Great Stink

 

The Great Stink

 

Tuesday 8th June

 

£79pp

 

Fast Track

West Street Leighton Buzzard

Brook Street Tring

Gadebridge Park Hemel Hempstead

 

Please bring a packed lunch with you for this trip.

 

 

Two thousand years ago the Romans enjoyed indoor plumbing but until a couple of hundred years ago Londoners were still emptying their chamber pots out of the window.

In 1858 the long hot summer turned into The Great Stink with the Thames little more than an open sewer. Something had to be done.

 

 

We begin in central London tracking London’s lost rivers, cruise the Thames to Greenwich and drive across the old Thames marshes to the extraordinary

Cathedral of Sewage built to house the Crossness Engines.

 

 

On the short and flat walk to Westminster Pier we'll hearl the story of spending a penny from Roman times to the coming of the flush loo.

 It's a story of London’s lost rivers and the coming of the flush loo leading to The Great Stink and we'll show you how Victorian engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette created the Victoria and Albert Embankments and achieved one of the most remarkable feats of civil engineering ever seen.

 

 On Bazalgette’s Victoria Embankment, we board a Thames Pleasure Cruiser to Greenwich. You must bring packed lunches today to eat during the cruise.

 

From Greenwich the coach whisks us further east past Woolwich to the Thames Marshes and the Cathedral of Sewage.

With bacteria yet to be discovered or understood Bazalgette believed the danger lay in the miasma – the stink. The new sewers simply delivered London’s waste to Crossness to be stored before being pumped back into the river for the high tide to sweep it out to sea. 

 

Discover some of Britain's most spectacular ornamental Victorian cast ironwork and possibly the world’s largest surviving beam engines.

There’s a museum and a social story here too – the workers lived on site in terraced cottages built right above the massive sewage storage tank.

Mesh at the windows kept the flies at bay. It must have stunk to high Heaven!

 

 

 

Requests for particular seats on the coach can be made when booking and we will do our best to accommodate these requests, but allocations are made on a first come first served basis, dependent upon customer mobility. We reserve the right to change your seat and allocate you a different one for operational reasons. On single bookings, we reserve the right to alter your seating to maximize the seating available. We accept no liability in the event of any such change.

Not masses of walking and suitable for wheelchair & scooter users.

 

 

Terms and Conditions Crossness