6:39am January 4, 2015

“

…In the 19th century, London was damned for having “the dirtiest streets of any city in the civilised world”. The mud of London’s streets was black, too, principally due to the amount of soot in the air. But its main constituent was dung. By the 1890s, London needed some 300,000 horses to keep it moving. That meant 1,000 tons of dung were deposited each day on the streets, not to mention gallons of urine. On top of that, some 30,000 sheep and 4,000 cattle were driven to livestock markets through London every week, sometimes leaving the streets so treacherous that horses and people slipped over.

So appalled was Lady Harberton at the filth that she itemised the ejecta recovered from the train of a woman’s dress after a short stroll along Piccadilly: “2 cigar ends; 9 cigarette ditto; a portion of pork pie; 4 toothpicks; 2 hairpins; 1 stem of a clay pipe; 3 fragments of orange peel; 1 slice of cat’s meat; half a sole of a boot; 1 plug of tobacco (chewed); straw, mud, scraps of paper, and miscellaneous street refuse, ad.lib.”

”

Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth by Lee Jackson – review | Books | The Guardian

(Something to remember when working on that ACD-period Holmes fic…)

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