Victoria Embankment Gardens

You are standing in a place that owes its existence to a desperate effort to cure the city of its foulest affliction. In the middle of the nineteenth century, London suffered from the Great Stink, an overwhelming stench caused by raw sewage pouring directly into the Thames. Civil engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette designed a massive embankment project to reclaim the marshy riverbank and contain a sophisticated new sewer system behind grand granite walls. Where the river once lapped at the foundations of riverside mansions, this land was filled with earth excavated during the construction of the early Underground railway lines.