Parched City

First published by Zero Books, 2013
Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,
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Text copyright: Emma M. Jones 2012

ISBN: 978 1 78099 158 0

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

The rights of Emma M. Jones as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Design: Stuart Davies

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Conclusions and Questions

Notes

Researching this book was possible because of the public learning resources in London that I had free access to and the skilled professionals who assisted me at those institutions. Above all, my thanks go to the staff at the City of London’s London Metropolitan Archives where I must pay particular credit to Jane Muncaster, Jeremy Smith and Claire Titley for their sage advice, generously given on many occasions and their patience with numerous queries.

Sincere thanks are also due to The Authors’ Foundation and its 2011 panel of assessors who granted me an award to buy some invaluable writing time. Their professional endorsement was a great vote of confidence that boosted me in the middle of this project.

Thanks also to Capital Radio for permission to quote from an interview with the former Metropolitan Water Board engineers Arthur Durling and George Graham.

For the contemporary chapters, my interviewees were extremely generous with their time and professional knowledge. Warm thanks is given, therefore, to Maria Andrews (formerly of Waste Watch), Megan Ashfield (Populous Architects), Ralph Baber and John E. Mills (The Drinking Fountain Association), Victor Callister (City of London Corporation), Professor Jeni Colbourne (Drinking Water Inspectorate), Kath Dalmeny, Christine Haigh and Jackie Schneider (Sustain), Michael Green (tapwater.org), Jenny Hall (formerly of the Museum of London), Guy Jeremiah (Aquatina/Find-A-Fountain), Jarno Stet (Westminster City Council), and Steve White (Thames Water). I am also appreciative of Cory Environmental Services for allowing me to visit its Materials Recovery Facility in Wandsworth and to the Veolia employees in Westminster who sifted the bins from Piccadilly Circus on my behalf.

Respondents to my call for drinking fountain memories were also very generous in their contributions, so many thanks to them and to the local history societies and colleagues in other organisations who took the time to disseminate my request.

I also want to thank Jakob Horstmann at Zed Books for his advice about publishing and Tariq Goddard of Zer0 Books for such an enthusiastic response to my initial proposal.

Friends have been more than generous with their queries about my progress, even when it was painfully slow, and offered much moral support and plenty of welcome distractions. In particular, my thanks go to Sue Baker, Katie Bradbury, Ally Branley, Kevin Brown, David Cross, Kirsty Cunningham, Rose Dawson, Katherine Davey, Alexandra and James Goddard, Julia Griffin, Helen Griffith, Ashley Kelly, Launa Kennet, James Kidd, Torsten Lange, Emma Reynolds, Dinah Roe, Mark Smith, Jason Vir, Julie Watson and Adam Wilkinson.

Eílish and Gerald Chapman (my much-loved in laws) have both been great sources of support. Thanks also to Dr Bruce Stewart, my learned stepfather, and my brother, Nick Stewart who have given me plenty of votes of confidence.

A very warm thanks is reserved for Declan Jones, my father, for his positive feedback on my initial chapter and his firm belief that I could complete the project. His comment that my writing is “muscular” still baffles me, but I accept it. Sigrid Castle, his partner, also offered generous encouragement.

Above all, there are three women without whose support I simply could not have written this book.

Dr Barbara Penner offered continuous encouragement and intellectual inspiration throughout my project. As an editor, her input was invaluable. I still have no idea how she squeezed in reading drafts of chapters and my manuscript whilst writing her own book (actually, two books!), lecturing and mothering, but I am indebted to her for giving me this time. Look out for her forthcoming book, an architectural history of the modern
Bathroom
(Reaktion).

Sheila Geraghty, my mother, financially supported my first period of my research, which laid the foundation for the rest of the book to be built upon. For that material help, I am extremely fortunate and very grateful indeed. Her moral support throughout the project was unfaltering.

Grace Chapman, my partner, has been my emotional anchor. She has patiently listened to my various rants about drinking water over the last two and a half years, and occasionally now gets on the anti-bottled-water soapbox herself. Grace’s comments on the content of early chapters were both sharply critical and encouraging but, most of all, I thank her for putting up with me during grumpy spells and a long period of meagre income on my part. My resourceful cooking skills possibly have something to do with her tolerance.

In spring 2012, Londoners had reason to contemplate their tap water less absentmindedly than usual. Drought is an apocalyptic word. Fears about the official state of drought were muted by the measure to combat it. ‘Hosepipe ban’ has a cosy, suburban twang. This phrase reassures us that, although lawns might turn crispy brown, our drinking water source is not seriously threatened. Since 2007, London’s water stress categorisation by the Environment Agency as ‘serious’ has not translated into a situation where essential water uses are curtailed. Not having drinking water on tap would be unimaginable in this leading world city.

Even if London’s tap water supply was temporarily suspended, the city is well served with an alternative, equally reliable drinking water source. Bottled water flows into London, as steadily as the subterranean pipes through which more than two billion litres of premium treated tap water are pumped daily. There is one significant difference; a standard bottled water brand, such as Coca Cola’s Schweppes Abbey Well (£1.60 for 500ml), is approximately 2462 times more expensive per litre than tap water (this figure is based on a metered supply).
²
Despite that price gulf, London luxuriates in a twin drinking water system for those who are able, and willing, to pay for both supplies. In the twenty-first century city, therefore, the spectre of prolonged thirst seems unlikely. This reality starkly contrasts with the estimated 780 million people elsewhere in the world
who do not have access to a safe, reliable or affordable drinking water supply for their basic hydration or cooking needs.
³
Excessive drinking water choice in this developed world city is yet another example of how we have exceeded the limits of what we need to live well. As the recently updated, seminal, environmental polemic
Limits to Growth
asserts about unsustainable economic growth and modes of production, ‘the world is in overshoot mode’.
⁴
Put simply, we consume and produce more than we need. My real question is how might we change this paradigm, at least for one essential product?

London’s drinking water excess is inherently flawed, both environmentally and ethically. Environmentally, sufficient energy; human resources; materials and money are lavished on the treatment of raw water to produce tap water of a quality that both meets and way exceeds our needs. Tap water standards produce the same consumable whether it is poured into one’s mouth or down one’s toilet, or used to mix cement (for the latter example, apologies to those builders who strive to employ grey water technologies). In 2011, a desalination plant even joined Thames Water’s arsenal to quench Londoners’ thirst. It performs alchemy on the tidal reaches of the river to produce freshwater.

As we know, this resource is increasingly politicised, globally, in the context of climate change, but freshwater is also a pawn between competing economic ideologies and nations. Such machinations determine how water abstraction is licensed through land ownership, how the aquatic environment is managed, how water is distributed and at what cost. In the case of London, we must remember that the water we drink is a corporate product, mostly served up by Thames Water but also, on the outskirts of Greater London, by the multi-national Veolia, and two smaller concerns (Essex and Suffolk Water, Sutton and East Surrey Water). Reins on these corporations’ freedoms exist in the form of the Environment Agency (abstraction and pollution), OFWAT (economic check) and the Drinking Water Inspectorate
(product safety) but it is important to note at the outset of this book that the water industry was privatised in 1989, in England and Wales, as part of a particular economic and political ideology. Few would argue, as we will see, that there were not significant problems with the water, and wastewater, industry prior to privatisation. However, those challenges were outsourced.

Despite Thames Water’s vast water resources, its move to desalination and its impressive coterie of water scientists (even if they are somewhat anonymous), Londoners seek alternative drinking water products and in extraordinary quantities.

Plastic bottles are mass produced, daily, in locations far away from London, filled with water siphoned from underground resources on private land, then transported vast distances to bring drinking water into the city. In quantity, annual bottled water sales for the whole of the UK tally with London’s daily water consumption, as measured by Thames Water (the season does, of course, have an impact). These two billion litres of bottled water equate, however, with extraordinary levels of waste, most of which does not enter the recycling stream, fossil fuel consumption and personal financial waste. Why do the inhabitants of this leading developed world city need bottled water today?

Ethically, the commodification of drinking water for exorbitant profits is at odds with the landmark announcement in 2002 by the United Nations, of the human right to ‘affordable’ water, specifically for ‘consumption, cooking, personal and domestic hygienic requirements’ (more recently, the equal recognition of a right to sanitation has joined this revision of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights).
⁵
In industrialised nations and cities such as London these basic water rights are largely fulfilled, except notably for the delivery of affordable hydration to public spaces. Of course, consumers have the right to choose whether or not they purchase
bottled water but when affordable, or even free, drinking water access is not designed into the city outside our domestic environments, or deliberately designed out, that choice is limited.

Capital-sized gulps of the United Kingdom’s bottled water habit are proportionately large due to obvious factors such as population, the capital’s heat island effect and tourism, particularly in the summer months. Most of that gulping and sipping takes place outside private homes and outside buildings adequately served with kitchen sinks like places of work where they are obligatory, or drinking fountains in prisons and schools. In the case of the latter, these resources may have been hard fought for as additions to a school building from local council funds or often from charitable donations. Incredibly, drinking fountains are not compulsory in schools.

Bottled water is a convenience product. It provides easy access to fridge-chilled water and a portable package to transport around the city. When we are truly thirsty, little else will satisfy our craving than plain water. The simple craving for thirst relief, when the tap is out of reach, is one reason for London’s steady demand for bottled water. Increased awareness about healthy eating also makes water a more culturally popular hydration choice than sugary carbonated drinks. Bottled water’s advertising gurus have massaged the healthy hydration choice vigorously in their spin with much success. One international study of consumer attitudes towards bottled water revealed that the product is not necessarily perceived to be safer than tap water, but it is considered by consumers to be healthier and therefore more desirable as part of a lifestyle package.
⁶
This consumer view is not a new one in London.

Historically, connections between health and drinking water quality have played a significant role in the development of a market for bottled water. Roots of attitudes to, and mythology about, London’s drinking water quality run deep, particularly in the fraught nineteenth-century public health debates. A hotly
contested topic was whether cholera and typhoid were caused by the foul air, or ‘miasma’ (think clouds of faecal pollution) emanating from the Thames, or by drinking the river water itself. During that period, public and political imaginations alike dreamed of alternative water sources to the local Metropolitan offer. One grand engineering dream was to siphon supplies from the Welsh mountains in pipes spanning the breadth of the country. This hankering after non-urban and more ‘natural’ water is echoed by a contemporary penchant for drinking water that originates in the wilderness rather than the city. Evian, for instance, features alpine imagery on its labels to remind us of that water’s fifteen-year percolation through the Alps. Of course, stringent scientific tests are performed on that product to ensure that nature has not poisoned it with unsafe levels of naturally occurring chemicals such as arsenic or fluoride. Advertisers have triumphed in focusing our attention on the desirable provenance of ‘natural’ bottled water, rather than making us think about how their products journeyed from pristine sources to our corner shops. Sell-by dates, stamped subtly on the necks of bottles, often state upwards of a year from their appearance on the shelf. Freshness is guaranteed, but this is clearly not the same as drinking from a cool mountain stream as much as the bottle’s label might have us believe.

In comparison to London’s generous flow of tap and bottled water, its third drinking water source is paltry.

Public drinking fountains are curiously uncommon, unlike office water coolers. Links between bottled water consumption and a lack of public tap water access surfaced, in the second half of the Millennium’s first decade, as a subject of environmentalist and urban management debates about how to reduce levels of plastic waste. A tentative fountain renaissance has been stimulated in some quarters as a result. However, the general absence of these amenities as a common feature of a global city, of London’s stature, begs questions about how drinking water
access is controlled and managed. How might free public water be offered in a country where the water industry itself has been privatised? Who should bear responsibility for its provision?

The control of urban water supply is an instrument of great power and wealth that evolved with Britain’s industrialisation and imperial expansion. London’s domestic water pipes were laid by many private corporations and remained in their ownership until 1902.

In Matthew Gandy’s account of the role of water engineering and supply in lubricating New York’s economic and geographical growth, he asserts: ‘The history of cities can be read as a history of water.’
⁷
Many readings of London’s rich, convoluted and controversial water history exist. This book does not aim to retell those civil engineering narratives, which thoroughly document the evolution of how London’s water supply is managed and distributed. By amending Gandy’s statement slightly to ‘the history of cities can be read a history of
drinking
water’, we have a finer sieve through which to filter and extract a more specific history of London’s water. This both simplifies and complicates the water picture. By inserting drinking before the more generic subject of freshwater, some subjects connected with water appear in a more specific light and other subjects must also be included. Architecture, culture, economics, environmentalism, law, medicine, politics, even religion, and science all have a bearing on this story. As the medical historian Anne Hardy noted about English water histories: ‘Although various accounts of the history of water technology, and learned articles on the political and administrative aspects of water supply have been written, the history of water in relation to public health remains largely unexplored.’
⁸
Benefitting from Hardy’s own response to this dearth of research and building on some of her discoveries about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, my focus on drinking water places the body, human health and the consumer in the foreground of this tale.

Whether we see drinking water as a commodity or a utility or a basic human right, understanding its nuanced history is vital for informing decisions about how future cities might benefit from referencing lessons of the past. Two scholars of London’s nineteenth century water consumer politics, Frank Trentmann and Vanessa Taylor, frame their research in this way: ‘Water continues to bring together long-standing issues of citizenship, social exclusion, consumer education and human development alongside more recent concerns about sustainability. Historians and social scientists would do well to reintegrate ordinary goods like water into the study of consumer society.’
⁹
Considering that ‘ordinary’ good more specifically as
drinking
water raises some questions more prominently than others. When did concerns about water quality for human consumption first arise in London and how have they altered? Is there any truth in the urban myth that eighteenth and nineteenth century Londoners, even children, consciously chose to drink alcohol instead of water because they believed it to be contaminated? When did packaged water first appear as a product? What caused the bottled water market to grow so dramatically in the 1980s?

Answering these questions would have been impossible without the ground laid by many excellent scholars. In addition to urban water researchers, such as Matthew Gandy, Anne Hardy, Vanessa Taylor and Frank Trentmann, I would particularly cite the social historian John Burnett’s chapter on drinking water in his book
Liquid Pleasures
, published in 1999, as an invaluable reference. As he notes ‘water remains the principle liquid drunk in Britain’, reminding us how physiologically central the substance is to our daily lives.
¹⁰
As we know, water forms a large percentage of our matter, a constituent of our very cells, our blood and our vital organs. We can get it from fruit and vegetables and yet we often crave this vital liquid as a sole substance of nourishment.

This story expands on aspects of Britain’s drinking water
history that Burnett illuminates in
Liquid Pleasures
, using London as a further anchor to see how the city shapes our relationship with using, and demanding, pure water refreshment.

As an architectural historian employing my drinking water sieve to trawl London’s modern history, I want to find out more about how urban spaces were produced in relation to water access, how they were used, how they were experienced and how they have changed over time. This spatial question — private, public and other — is a neglected facet of most existing London water histories. Everyday demands for water in the city have greatly shaped the design, use and experience of our built environment. Built objects and material products such as conduits, pipes, water coolers and sites of water treatment plants can be highly significant in what they tell us about drinking water’s role in our culture and society. Consider, for instance, the curious nineteenth century fountains that pockmark London, with their desiccated pipes and litter-filled bowls. Why were they built and for whose use? What caused them to fall into disrepair? And how does the contemporary privatisation and commercialisation of the public realm affect the production of similar civic amenities?