> I think it is easy to forget just how bad cities in general must have smelt back then.

I refer you to London's "Great Stink" of 1858 during which the smell was so bad that Parliament seriously considered moving to a different city: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink

Well, people either shit in the streets or emptied their piss-pots into them. If you were lucky enough (?) to have access to a communal toilet it was shared with a large number of people and likely just emptied into the street anyway. Everything eventually flowed to the Thames which must have stank. Horse shit everywhere. I'm sure there was dog shit everywhere too. Honestly the smell of feet and armpits was probably tame and "natural" by comparison.

> Well, people either shit in the streets

Bollocks man!

In early Victorian London, like most cites of the time, ones shit was directed into a cesspool. These were regularly emptied by 'nightsoil' men who took the waste away as fertiliser. (The drains in the streets were only for rainwater).

What caused the Great Stink was, paradoxically, the invention of the water closet (the flushing bog to you and me) which massively increased the volume of liquid waste, which was then discharged into the Thames and caused the famous Great Stink.

I can assure you, our Victorian ancestors were not animals that regularly shat in the streets.

On the other hand in the great stink era the waterwheels on London Bridge were industriously injecting into the drinking water supply the same effluent that had just been ejected.

One would have been grateful to be on The New River company's list of clients.

There's an excellent book also called "The Great Stink" on the problem and on Bazalgette's solution of them.

+1 for that book. Fascinating.