Great horse manure crisis of 1894

Many houses in London suffer from damp, one cause of which is "raised ground level" - where higher soil bridges the damp course (if present) and prevents evaporation from the wall base. Why did the ground level get raised? Because inhabitants were collecting horse manure to fertilise their gardens, for several decades after the houses were built.

(The cure is to replace it with gravel next to the wall)

This Wikipedia article seems oddly written to me? The original story about the "great horse manure crisis of 1894" seems to have no known basis in historical record, but the Wikipedia article is written in such a way that this part is sort of obscured. Someone quickly reading through it might be under the impression that the claimed 1898 meeting was poorly documented or something, but going to the cited pieces it's much more fundamental than that.

Reading through everything I get a kind of playful feeling about a lot of it, that it's all a sort of humorous, satirical way of making an important point, but this seems lost in the Wikipedia entry.

I'm not sure why I'm fixated on it... maybe I'm having trouble figuring out if the crisis itself or the backstory to the story is of main interest?

Interesting. How about: the great CO2 crisis of 2023 century? In order to remove the CO2 spewed by machines running on fossil fuels we'll need to introduce more machines that run on fossil fuels...