A big stink at Parliament sounds unremarkable, but exactly 150 years ago the biggest stench of all time had MPs gagging to vote for the biggest environmental project in history.

By 1858, thousands of new WCs all over London were flushing waste into the River Thames. In June a heatwave cooked the foul mess into “the Great Stink”. “Gentility of speech is at an end - it stinks; and whoso once inhales the stink can never forget it and can count himself lucky if he lives to remember it,” the City Press newspaper spluttered.

There was no escape for the newly built House of Commons. Sheets soaked in chloride of lime were hung from windows to try to blot out the smell, and plans were made to move the House out of London.

The Thames was also used for drinking water and thousands died from cholera, typhoid and other water-borne diseases, although it was thought these came from the foul air in what was called a “miasma”.

Times Archive 1858: Old Father Thames

Everything that is abominable in London finds its way into the Thames. We believe this to be the uncleanest, foulest river in the known world

• The sewage question.

• The state of the Thames

Years before the Great Stink, the Commons had passed legislation to build a new sewerage system to clean up the Thames, but this had just led to endless wrangles and infighting. Some 137 schemes were proposed and all were turned down.

The Great Stink changed all that. “Parliament was all but compelled to legislate upon the great London nuisance by the force of sheer stench,” The Times thundered. A new law was passed in 18 days to get a new sewerage system, a phenomenal undertaking costed at £3million. Reassuringly, even then it ended up over budget, at £20 million - around £1.5 billion in today's money - dwarfing Brunel's Great Western Railway, which cost only £8 million.

The brilliant engineer Joseph Bazalgette solved the stench. His design caught the outflow from open sewers and underground rivers before it reached the Thames, diverting it along 82 miles of huge drains, a sewerage superhighway made from more than 300 million bricks, that moved waste downriver so the tides would carry it away. So vast were the new drains that huge banks were built, forming the Victoria, Albert and Chelsea Embankments.

Hundreds of miles of underground street sewers were built. Vast steam-pumping engines housed in Gothic palaces lifted the sewage before it could run into the sea. It was the greatest public construction project of its time, involving new techniques, materials, project management and quality controls. Overseeing it was a powerful Metropolitan Board of Works that eventually evolved into the London County Council, in 1889.

It took 16 years to become fully operational, but Bazalgette's engineering feat worked. As the new system came on stream the stink ended and so did the epidemics. Bazalgette probably saved more lives than any other Victorian public official, and became a celebrity.

Unfortunately the Victorians also left us a rotten water supply system. While Bazalgette was cleaning up the capital's sewage, the pipes that delivered fresh water leaked like sieves. The iron pipework broke and rusted and was particularly brittle in bitterly cold winters. This was just a minor inconvenience so long as rainfall made up the shortfall, but in the 1890s the country was gripped by a long drought, and the problem became controversial. In May 1895 burst pipes left 170,000 houses in Sheffield without water and Reading had 915 mains pipes waiting for repair.

But London was worst hit. More than a million people in East London had their water turned off for most of the day by the East London Waterworks Company, which claimed that “consumers took not the slightest interest in the... careful use of the water and made no provision against drought, frost, or the breaking of the mains”, reminding those who left their taps running that “this waste is distinctly illegal and... a great source of inconvenience to neighbouring consumers”. People were so desperate for water that they had to drink from WC cisterns, or collect bowls of water when the supply was turned on.

Public outrage led to the first consumer protection associations, and eventually spurred politicians into action. The London water companies were taken over by local authorities in 1902. But the fundamental problems remained and water shortages cropped up throughout the 20th century, exacerbated by rising and increasingly affluent populations, which use more WCs, baths, washing machines, gardens, swimming pools and golf courses. Leaky pipes are still with us today. Some 3.5 billion litres of water are lost a day in England and Wales, more than a fifth of the country's supply.

London has the worst leakages and climate change has added to the problem. Our summers are growing drier and hotter. With lower average yearly rainfall than Madrid or Istanbul, the capital is on the brink of another water crisis. London needs the vision of a new Bazalgette and a big budget to fix the problem.

Paul Simons writes the Weather Eye column

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