Victorian London built its wealth on the backs of a population living in filth just streets away from the era's showcase progress. This History Hit documentary lays out the conditions in the city's worst slums, where overcrowding, poor sanitation, and disease were routine, and traces how the 1858 "Great Stink", when the Thames grew so foul that Parliament could barely function, forced the city to confront its public health crisis and eventually build a modern sewer system. It follows families through the workhouse system, the grim institutions meant to manage poverty that often split parents from children and offered little beyond hard labor in exchange for shelter. The film also looks at the artists and illustrators who chose to depict this misery honestly rather than prettify it, giving historians a visual record of lives otherwise left out of official accounts. Interviews with historians and period images and engravings anchor the account, building a picture of a city whose glittering reputation depended on conditions most Victorians preferred not to see.