Parched City (22 page)

Another strike victor was the bottled water industry. There is significant evidence that this short episode altered Britain’s scale of bottled water production as the temporary panic created an unprecedented demand for the product. Direct as a result of the strike, Highland Spring opened a second source in Scotland and doubled its bottling production.
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A Dartmoor farmer increased his spring’s output from 50 to 1,000 cases and Schweppes confirmed that it had trebled the quantity of Malvern table water in circulation.
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During the fourth week of the strike,
The Guardian
reported on the bottled water sales phenomenon. Tesco’s Finchley branch sold out of a, usually, week-long supply of bottled water in two and a half hours, whilst Buxton’s sales trebled.
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One can imagine bottled water profiteers’ disappointment that the strike was so short-lived. Undoubtedly, the strike’s demand strengthened the previously weak market charted in the Water Research Centre’s survey of British drinking water habits.

Jumping back to 1974, bottled water’s position in the marketplace revitalised the market for elite table waters, similarly to the late-nineteenth century. The strap-line for an Appollinaris advertisement bragged that ‘Polly is being seen in the best gentlemen’s clubs’.
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The same year, Perrier expanded its small U.K. market with a major advertising campaign.
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A decade later £3 million had reportedly been spent promoting the brand.
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As one journalist wrote of the specifically post-strike bottled water boom: ‘Ten years ago, scarcely anyone in this country had heard of Perrier. A bottle might be placed on the bedside table of guests in the better country houses, but to the general public Perrier was
unknown.’
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By the early ‘80s, a popular new health culture extended the purported benefits of intense hydration to a broader, multi-national market. The popularity of keep-fit classes, including aerobics, was on the rise, particularly for western women in global cities such as London. Pop singer Olivia Newton John’s 1981 hit
Physical
was performed in full aerobics kit with choreography. Her ‘fitness’ moves morphed freely with more sexually suggestive gyrations.
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The phenomenal success of
Jane Fonda’s Workout Book
, and video in 1982, on both sides of the Atlantic, further promoted the looking-good-and-feeling-great merits of personal workouts (along with the joys of wearing very shiny leotards). This fitness fever inhabited a broader, western, global space of popular film culture, magazines and music. Post the feminist movement of the late ‘60s and ‘70s, a new generation of women unsettled the male hegemony of the professions, if very slowly in some sectors. Britain’s first female Prime Minister was an obvious example of this shift despite the fact that she was no feminist. Underneath the power suits, women’s professional bodies could remain lean and mean, yet sexually desirable, through aerobics, fitness regimes and dieting.

The bottled water market also grew up alongside the rise of Young Upwardly Mobile Professionals, or Yuppies. Predominantly male, but also female exponents, of this work and play culture were known for flashing their cash. This ‘conspicuous consumption’, as London historian Jerry White defines it exemplified the beneficiaries of neo-liberalism’s brand of free market capitalism installed by Margaret Thatcher’s Government through its economic and social policies.
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Displays of disposable income, in stark contrast to the general mass of Londoners on average or low incomes, or state benefits, was immortalised by comedian Harry Enfield in his
Loadsamoney
sketches. Money to spare was also met in the City of London by a culture change, noted
The Economist:
’…there is far less booze
consumed at lunch than 10 years ago. It is now expected to drink Perrier as an aperitif.’
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This, apparent, shift in consumption pleased the authors of a new guidebook.

‘Drinking Water is fashionable again.’
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So said the authors of 1985’s
The Good Water Guide
. They cited health consciousness and body image as one of the main drivers for the British bottled water renaissance: ‘Mineral water is the health drink discovered by the age that had turned to health foods. It has acquired a sporting image - almost like internal aerobics. …Women are constantly advised to drink more, to avoid problems like cystitis, and here is a calorie-free way to do so.’
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A slim, hardback volume with a glossy jacket
The Good Water Guide
was easily slipped into a handbag or the breast pocket of a suit. Inside its svelte cover, one expects to find lists of fine wines, rather than fine waters. The husband and wife author duo, Maureen and Timothy Green, act as guides for a tour of the elite drinking water world, designed for the British novice. Coincidentally, the Guide hit bookshops just as Britain’s legislation came into line with the EC’s mineral water regulations.
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Bottled water producers must have adored the handy little volume.

According to the Greens, it was tap water consumers in London who were the most likely consumers to benefit from the bottled alternative: ‘The knowledge in London that the local tap water, while safe, has already been recycled seven times, hardly encourages citizens to quaff great draughts.’
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It was notable that the Greens were no doubt legally bound to write that London’s drinking water was technically ‘safe’ for human health. However, they implied that though the municipal source was technically healthy, it was not desirable.

A striking feature of
The Good Water Guide
was its transparent exposure of corporate marketing strategies. For instance, the authors revealed quite plainly that Highland Spring leased one of
its water sources solely for the use of Sainsbury’s. Rebranded Sainsbury’s Scottish Spring, the promotion of this pure water from the Highlands had a specific focus, as the Guide explained: ‘Advertising from Sainsbury’s began to remind the public, and especially Londoners, that, if they wanted to drink a glass of water for the first time, they had better buy it in a bottle.’
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Second-hand water does not have positive associations, however the hydrological fact that all water is re-used was carefully unmentioned in the
Guide
. It preferred a rather ahistorical relationship to London’s civil engineering and public health heritage. Once the sewer and the tap are linked in the imagination, it is not an easy association to banish. Juxtaposing the water siphoned from a pristine Scottish landscape with the industrialised environs of the Thames was a powerful way to influence consumer behaviour - conveniently ignoring the fact that London’s drinking water was not abstracted downstream of its own sewers and had not been for well over a hundred years. Granted, abstraction did occur downstream of other urban centres such as Oxford and Reading but miles from where the treated effluent from these towns was discharged and with appropriate timing. Despite these technicalities, municipal drinking water was simply not in vogue, according to the Greens and bottled waters’ advertisers.

In the mid-to-late ‘80s, the advertising for French mineral waters in Britain leant heavily on associations with non-urban locations.
Cosmopolitan
magazine was one medium through which working urban women could pick up tips for feeling and looking good, whilst achieving optimum career and sexual performance. Though it cannot be claimed that
Cosmopolitan’s
readership was exclusively London-based, suggestions of how readers might spend their weekends, for instance, were invariably focused on the capital. The first mineral water advertisement of the eighties to appear in an issue of the magazine — in a 1986 health and fitness supplement — was for Volvic (owned
by Perrier).
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A full-page advertisement was split into two halves. The top half featured an arresting illustration of the Auvergne volcanic mountain range in France. Below it, the water’s source in the wilderness was embellished with this caption: ‘The 25,000 year old volcano that could help you zip up last year’s jeans.’
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The second half of the page contained text devoted to two themes. One focused on the purity of the water and the second on how dieters could benefit from drinking it.

As the ‘80s progressed, bottled water advertising in
Cosmopolitan
was dominated by Perrier’s Volvic. Advertisements sat amongst others for cigarettes, perfume, fitness regimes and the magazine’s famously candid articles about sex. Perrier’s marketing executives were clearly tailoring their pitches for a sexually liberated readership. In a 1988 campaign, Volvic’s origin was represented by ‘prehistoric fire’ painted directly onto the body of a model whose headless torso was clad only in red paint representing flames, presumably of a volcano, licking up her stomach and breasts.
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By 1989, only one other bottled water brand competed for
Cosmopolitan
readers’ attention. Marketers of Malvern opted for tranquil rather than explosive imagery, matching its ‘Original English Water’ strap-line with a delicate watercolour of a water lily. The last issue of the magazine that decade also had a feature entitled ‘How Will the Eighties Be Remembered?‘
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Bidding good riddance to aerobics and to ‘female newsreaders being regarded as freaks’, the article was illustrated with an image of a domestic tap in mid flow. Categorised in things ‘Loved and Lost’, the photograph was captioned ‘water we‘re happy to drink’. The image’s specific reference is unclear but its overall message was not: tap water was out. In fact, the photograph was likely a reference to a recent and disastrous incident.

‘Poison on Tap’
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A major municipal water contamination error had occurred in the
southwest of England the previous year, in Camelford. On 7th August 1988,
The Observer
reported that the source of Cornwall’s poisoned water had been identified a month after the contamination accident.
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Residents’ symptoms of nausea, diarrhoea and mouth burns had previously been inexplicable. 20 tonnes of aluminium sulphate, usually used as a coagulant in water purification, had been delivered into the wrong tank at a water treatment works and been supplied at an unmeasured concentration to 20,000 households. The South-West Water Authority defended the negligence found by a subsequent government enquiry, claiming that the incident had occurred because of spending cuts forced by preparations for the industry’s privatisation.
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Camelford continued to attract high profile news coverage because of an ongoing campaign to prove the likely long-term health impacts on those who consumed aluminium sulphate-laced tap water. The local residents’ campaign succeeded in securing a criminal investigation of the water authority in January 1989.
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Days after this victory, the Environment Secretary Nicholas Ridley announced that £1.5 billion was to be invested in improving water quality standards before privatisation.
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Though this figure sounds impressive, it was a third of what the water expert Dr Judith Rees had calculated to be required, in her research on behalf of Friends of the Earth.
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Mr Ridley’s promised investment did not achieve immediate results. In spring 1989, with the water industry’s privatisation looming, the Government received an order from the European Community to conform to the Water Quality Directive’s terms, or face prosecution at the European Court.
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Legislation was yet to be passed on national water quality standards despite the Directive’s stipulation that EU member states should have complied by 1985. This embarrassment for the Government was not missed by the authors of a book that would imminently be published: ‘As we go to press, the whole privatization scheme
appears to be threatened by Britain’s failure to meet EEC standards for drinking — and bathing — water cleanliness.’
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The book was entitled
Britain’s Poisoned Water
.

Like the Good Water Guide,
Britain’s Poisoned Water
was co-authored by a wife-and-husband team, but this time by the environmental campaigning journalists Frances and Phil Craig. As its polemical title suggests, the book’s thesis posited that significant doubt and negative evidence marred the safety of Britain’s tap water. And as a work of investigative journalism, it was unsparing in its scathing critique of the state of the water industry and the state of Britain’s drinking water. Several interviews with anonymous or former water industry insiders added to the credibility of the expose’s information sources. It was clearly designed to shock and politically mobilise consumers: ‘…almost half of readers with young families may well be slowly poising their children every time they give them a drink. The poison is lead, and it comes out of the kitchen tap.’
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On this issue, Frances and Phil Craig noted that a 1983 Royal Commission investigation into the lead problem had advised an action plan, but decried the fact that little had been done about Britain’s poisonous plumbing since then.

The concise Penguin pocketbook volume saliently covered the drinking water-related health concerns that were hanging over the tap: Alzheimer’s disease (aluminium), children’s brain development (lead) and a host of cancers (nitrates and pesticides). In the case of the latter, the authors admitted that evidence was thin on the ground. Apart from casting blame on the water industry’s failings as a result of disinvestment and some of its questionable practices, the book laid out broader concerns about environmental pollution. For instance, from a groundwater perspective, the authors exposed that: ‘Already 10 per cent of Britain’s underground aquifers are no longer used for drinking water because of heavy contamination with dangerous chemicals thought to have leaked, in part, from waste dumps.’
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Man-made chemicals from
post-war industrial farming fertilisers and weed-killers, used on a motorways-and-railway-tracks scale, were other water polluting culprits that
Britain’s Poisoned Water
pointed out to its general readership. For readers (possibly of an environmentalist bent) who were not already aware, Frances and Phil Craig reminded them: ‘In December 1986 Friends of the Earth formally reported the United Kingdom government to the EEC for refusing to obey European drinking water law.’
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In fact, there was still no coherent law, though there should have been, about drinking water quality relating to the European standards in the United Kingdom, and this failing was potentially jeopardising the terms the U.K.’s membership of the EEC. The anti-tap-water environmental zeitgeist continued to shadow the road to water privatisation. For instance, the Friends of the Earth publication authored by Dr Judith Rees also pointed out ‘the monitoring void’ for drinking water that was on the cards with a privatised water industry, with only the economic regulator OFWAT checking its economic practices.
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