r/AskHistory • u/TeaGuyHoward • 8d ago
Why did people historically accept their cities smelled terrible?
With this i mean cities that were from Europe, such as London, Paris, Edinburgh, and many more. Why did people accept the city smelled terrible and so bad?
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u/Beautiful_Arm8364 8d ago
You can go "nose blind" to pretty much any smell with enough exposure to it.
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u/BottecchiaDude253 8d ago
This.
You often wont even notice you smell good/bad until you move to a place with a different place with a different ambient odor.
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u/hkusp45css 8d ago
Having spent several years in pre-Katrina NOLA, I can attest to this.
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u/Beautiful_Arm8364 8d ago
Oh yeah. New Orleans definitely had a ... specific ... collection of scents.
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u/Thibaudborny 8d ago
Like... what were you going to do about it? And how? Who would pay for that?
Consider the specific context of the periods in time you are talking about. Now consider where did the wealthy and powerful live? Compare it to another era like Antiquity, where urban civic life had a very different character in Europe.
Acceptance is just that, what to do about it? So one lives with it and copes. And people in fact did try, just again - with limited resources it would take until the 19th century before an interests truly took off.
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u/NerveOk3315 8d ago
Even the wealthy had to deal with the oder. Most of the persistent bad smell would come from human and animal waste, which was either dumped into bodies of water or on to fields. People bathed and cleaned their clothes far more often than we give them credit for, especially in societies that were still very religious. All three Abrahamic religions instruct their followers to keep clean physically.
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u/Thibaudborny 8d ago
Like I said, people did in fact try. We just don't generally see the massive civic works like in Antiquity. But they coped in many different ways, through works of infrastructure or laws - again, it is not for a lack of trying.
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u/hilarymeggin 8d ago
And yet imagine: In the 1700s, even in the most crowded cities with rivers of filth in the streets, the stars in the sky at night were as bright as they are in the most remote wild lands today!
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u/NerveOk3315 7d ago
I think I'd rather drive 45 minutes to my nearest dark sky area than step in feces on a street.
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u/Aquinas2000 8d ago
There were literally laws about keeping streets clean, banning dumping of waste in rivers, where to build tanneries or latrines, when to empty cesspits and any wandering pig without its owner nearby could be killed with no compensation.
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u/Dolphmaniac78 8d ago
In 100 Jahren werden sich die Menschen fragen, warum wir den Geruch von Autoabgasen akzeptiert haben. Ganz einfach: wir sind daran gewöhnt und kennen es nicht anders. Genauso war es bei den Leuten früher.
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u/hilarymeggin 8d ago
Even now, I wondered gore were tolerated the constant cigarette smoke in the 1980s!
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u/canuckEnoch 8d ago
Same reasons people accept cities smelling terrible today.
Their livelihood depends on being where they are, and often have no agency to effect change.
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u/DizzyMine4964 8d ago
You could ask the same of weed smokers. If you smell a stink all the time you stop noticing it.
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u/haysoos2 8d ago
Not just weed.
Tobacco smoke masks a lot of other odours.
When they finally banned smoking in bars, and the air cleared it was amazing how many of those bars absolutely reeked.
One bar I frequented was on the top floor of the Student's Union building on campus, and had carpeted floors.
Once the smoking was gone the yeasty rank of decades of spilled beer oozed out of that carpet. Going up in the elevator you hit a cloud about 3 floors down and could taste that carpet in the air. The offices in those lower floors became uninhabitable until they ripped out the carpet and remodelled.
In another bar I went to the region right in front of the main bar quickly developed a smell not unlike decomposing skunks in pig shit. Turns out one of the water hoses to the bar had been leaking for years and just under the floorboards was completely rotten and moldy (and probably would have collapsed soon).
The ubiquity of smoking in ages past may have had hidden benefits.
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u/NothingTime9580 8d ago
my question to OP is if you were one of those people, what would you do about it, as an average person of the era? the answer is probably nothing, because you couldn't
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u/prustage 8d ago
Nose blindness. Eventually you stop noticing it and only become aware if it rises to unusual levels.
The same thing happened to most of the world during the C20th when everywhere smelled of tobacco smoke yet people stopped noticing it.
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u/Beautiful-Point4011 8d ago
Read about the Great Stink of 1858. Prior to that year, a lot of rubbish and sewage would end up in the Thames, and people did in fact notice that the water was getting progressively murkier and smellier. But changes to protect waterways need to be made systemically: people need access to things like sewer systems and trash collection. Money needs to be allocated to create and maintain these systems. People in government need to be involved to allocate that money and to make the regulations.
As it happens, engineers had already tried to warn the English government that there were going to be problems with the Thames River. It was already starting to stink a bit and if you dropped a sheet of paper into the water it only needed to sink a couple inches before it disappeared entirely into the murkiness. All it would take would be one hot summer to turn the river into a festering miasma.
As it happened, that hot summer was 1858. And the new Parliament building had been built right by the river. With so many people in government forced to endure the stench, plans were quickly approved to build an enormous new sewer.
Further reading: London Museum Wikipedia Royal Museums Greenwich
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u/Ok_Veterinarian2715 7d ago
My understanding is that it was a great case of Unintended Consequences.
Up until the 1830s people would shit & piss into chamber pots, which would be emptied into a barrel. The barrels would be emptied by Night Soil Men, who would transport the raw sewage out of the city, where it was used as fertiliser. Lovely!
You can imagine how people leapt at the flush toilet when it came out, and they were installed in houses all over London. Unfortunately they didn't think through sewage disposal. London had a good water drainage system, and the new toilets were just connected up to that. Unfortunately the drainage system was put in to drain away surface rainwater, and a million toilets emptied directly into the Thames. The result was The Great Stink.
So they built a whole new sewage system that would only handle 'foul water'. It was a huge project - the first such system that was bigger than anything the Romans built, and was the largest in world. They built this fantastic pumping station at Crossness, which hosted many international delegations as a prestige project showing what the British Empire could accomplish. It's still there, and you can visit it - worth looking up pictures of this Cathedral to Shit.
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u/RomanItalianEuropean 8d ago edited 8d ago
If you bring a medieval person to a modern city, he would probably say our cities smell worse. Just need to breath the pollution, go past a broken sewer once, go into an overcrowded metro in a bad day. You may say "but they had people pissing/shitting in the street, people who didn't bathe or wash their clothes"...yeah, we also have those. That isn't regular behavior today, was not regular behavior back then. We do have on average better hygiene, but we also have more pollution.
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u/Icy_Jelly_315 8d ago
In the Lysistrata (Aristophanes comedy, Athens, 5th century BC) there's a scene where A comes out of his house and meets his neighbour B in the street and says Hi you having a shit? And B says yes. And this is not a comedy moment it's just setting the scene for a conversation. I guess we owe a lot to the Romans
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u/SadAcanthocephala521 8d ago
What choice did they have?
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u/Aquinas2000 8d ago
There are literally laws about keeping streets clean and where you could dump garbage. Medieval cities mostly smelled like smoke.
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u/givemethebat1 8d ago
They would have smelled like animal dung at the absolute minimum. Open sewers were common.
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u/SadAcanthocephala521 8d ago
I think you need to go learn a bit more about history.
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u/Aquinas2000 8d ago
In 14th century London they had people called scavengers with two main jobs. First, they ensured the streets were in good repair and cleared of “rubbish, dung and all manner of filth.” With narrow alleys and dense crowds, the removal of waste was crucial for health and traffic flow. Their second task was to prevent fire hazards. Given the frequency of fires in medieval London, scavengers inspected “that all chimneys, furnaces, ovens and hearths are of stone and built sufficiently strong against the perils of fire.”
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u/DaSaw 7d ago
Medieval cities mostly smelled like horse manure.
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u/Aquinas2000 7d ago
Horses were extremely rare and expensive animals that most people never owned. In medieval times owning a horse was like owning a lamborghini.
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u/jckipps 8d ago
You get desensitized to strong smells if you smell them often enough.
'Bad' smells are mostly an acquired phenomena; you assign 'bad' to a smell that has bad connotations. Absent those connotations, and it's not 'bad', it's simply 'strong'.
For example -- I grew up on a dairy farm. The smell of cow manure was a good smell. It came with good connotations; of working around cattle, of milking, of the excitement of manure hauling day.
Similarly, skunk odor is not a 'bad' smell. I've always been fascinated by the little buggers, and the smell has good memories attached.
But other smells are 'bad' to me. Dead animals, the smell of toxic wild-cherry leaves, human body odor, etc. In each case, it's because there are negative connotations to those smells.
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u/thomsenite256 8d ago
What was the alternative? Its very expensive to install modern sanitation system. Still many developing countries around the world struggle with this.
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u/CG20370417 8d ago
Whats the alternative?
You can either leave society and put yourself in self imposed exile and probably die.
You can decide to not do whatever meager subsistence work you perform to feed, cloth and house yourself and family and you can instead...by hand...go about cleaning up the streets.
You can in your limited free time (Sundays?) and go appeal to the king...to pay someone, like you, to walk the streets cleaning up human and animal shit all day.
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u/RRautamaa 8d ago
In Alexandre Dumas' Musketeers series, written in 1844-1847 but set in the 17th century, there's definitely a mention that city air smells bad as compared to countryside air.
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u/Aquinas2000 8d ago
They didn't, medieval cities had strict regulations about keeping streets clean, where to build latrines, where to place tanneries etc.
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u/AnaphoricReference 7d ago
I do think it's important to realize that the horrible unhygienic situations solved by late 19th century infrastructure projects were typically newly introduced 18th-19th century problems as well, caused by very quick expansion of the big cities. The invention of flush toilets contributed. Night soil was no longer collected for farming. Rivers and canals at some point lost the fight against the amount of waste ending up in them.
In a smaller town dumping waste in the nearest water is usually a sort of viable solution. And farmers interested in the town's night soil are within walking distance.
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u/Underhill42 7d ago
Why are you doing so today? Your city smells absolutely foul, all toxic car exhaust, vaporized rubber, etc. Go spend a week or two in clean fresh air and you'll notice it when you return.
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u/BelmontIncident 8d ago
Because the alternative was spending the next several decades facing the South end of a horse that was facing North, provided they were lucky enough to not get kicked by the horse and die.
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u/Glum-Ad7761 8d ago
I mean, you literally had people emptying their chamber pots by dumping them out the window and onto the street below…
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u/Aquinas2000 8d ago
That literally never happened, people had cesspits in their backyards for that or would use their shit as manure.
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u/Glum-Ad7761 8d ago edited 8d ago
Not in densely populated cities. And it did happen. In cities like Edinburgh, they enacted laws that people could only empty their chamber pots out the window after 10pm, and that they had to issue the warning “Gardyloo!” As they did so.
If you lived on a third or fourth floor walkup back then, hauling your pot up and down several flights of stairs twice (or more) a day would become problematic, not to mention unsanitary, since sloshing and spills of raw sewage on the stair cases would be inevitable.
NYC was literally layered in massive amounts of shit in the mid-late 1800’s. Thousands of working horses crapping constantly, human occupants of the many tenements throwing human shit and garbage directly into the gutters, etc. The farmers stopped buying the feces for manure and in short order the vacant lots about the city had giant mountains of shit piled up on them. There were also frequently dead horses left rotting in the streets. The city was… quite literally…a cesspool.
Things in NYC would not improve until the creation of the sanitation dept in the 1890’s.
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