I’ve just been wal­low­ing in the his­to­ry of filthy Lon­don, cour­tesy of Lee Jack­son’s excel­lent new book, Dirty Old Lon­don: The Vic­to­ri­an Fight Against Filth. It’s a won­der­ful trawl through the his­to­ry of Lon­don’s sew­ers, ceme­ter­ies, and street clean­ers. Did you know that by the 1890s, Lon­don need­ed some 300,000 hors­es to keep it mov­ing and that 1,000 tons of dung were deposit­ed each day on the city’s streets? No won­der its streets were dirty!

Any­way, here’s the first para­graph of my review:

“I have seen the great­est won­der which the world can show to the aston­ished spir­it.” So said the Ger­man poet Hein­rich Heine in 1827, and the won­der he referred to was Lon­don. In the course of the 19th cen­tu­ry, London’s pop­u­la­tion soared from one mil­lion to six mil­lion. This boom­ing cen­tre of com­merce and indus­try was at “the heart of the great­est empire ever known”, but, as Lee Jack­son adds, Lon­don “was also infa­mous­ly filthy”. The Chi­nese ambas­sador turned his nose up at this most dynam­ic city, com­plain­ing it was “too dirty”. He had a point, for this was a place whose infra­struc­ture had scarce­ly changed in cen­turies. Cesspools were over­flow­ing, the ceme­ter­ies were burst­ing with stink­ing corpses, the streets were coat­ed with nox­ious black mud, rot­ting rub­bish clogged its alleys, and its cit­i­zens lived in over­crowd­ed, decrepit build­ings, breath­ing air that was heav­i­ly pol­lut­ed with soot and sul­phurous fumes. This was the filthy real­i­ty of Lon­don for most of its inhab­i­tants.

You can read the rest of my review over on the Guardian’s web­site. Or you could even buy the paper tomor­row.

By the way: Hap­py New Year!