BBC - Filthy Cities: A History of Public Sanitation (2011)

Dan Snow gets down and dirty in the murky histories of London, Paris and New York, exploring their filthy histories from the bottom up.
Imagine having to dodge the contents of emptied bedpans or step over rotting corpses on the way to work. That was a reality of city life before technology, public policy, and public values began to focus on the effects of poor sanitation.

Part 1: Medieval London
Believe it or not, the splendor of today's London can be traced back to the mire of the 14th century. This program uncovers the grimy truth as it illustrates just how filthy Britain's capital once was, and how medieval Londoners took desperate measures to combat rubbish buildup.
With detailed computer animation revealing London's streets as they were 700 years ago, the film literally steps into a typical pedestrian's shoes—wooden platforms designed to transcend the mess underfoot. Viewers also learn what it was like to be a medieval muckraker tasked with removing human waste, while the impact of butcher shops and their refuse is also examined.
Finally, the program studies the remains of a plague victim to discover how the catastrophe forced a cleaner London to emerge from the muck of the past.

Part 2: Revolutionary Paris
Just over 200 years ago, Paris was one of the dirtiest cities in Europe. How did that suffocating urban environment give way to what we now know as the City of Light? This program sifts through the story of the French Revolution in the context of urban filth and its close link to social injustice.
Depicting the settings in which thousands of Parisians toiled in toxic industries and suffered grotesque poverty and disease, the film profiles one of the foulest jobs in history—tanning leather—and comes face-to-face with the ultimate killing machine, the guillotine, which exhausted the city’s cemeteries during the Reign of Terror.
A visit to Marie Antoinette's private rooms at the glittering palace of Versailles offers further insight into the deep-rooted inequality that helped spark a bloody, transformative revolution.

Part 3: Industrial New York
Fleeing persecution, poverty, and famine, millions of 19th-century Europeans arrived in a place that seemed worse than what they'd escaped—a seething Manhattan in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. This program uses eye-opening computer reconstructions to envision what waves of immigrants had to accept.
It was a city consumed by filth and corruption, with a massive populace crammed into the slums of Lower Manhattan. The film looks at some of the disease-carrying parasites that thrived in overcrowded tenement buildings and shows what it was like to cook with improvised 19th-century ingredients—clothes dye and floor cleaner—to disguise the taste of fetid meat.
But viewers will also marvel at feats of engineering that transformed the sullied New York landscape into a metropolis worthy of the world's esteem.