Parched City (31 page)

Successful adaptation to the standards of the Water Framework Directive does not mean that the quality of the final water we drink will be any better, at least if the drinking water quality standards remain as they are now. Its real significance as an environmental policy is that the energy expended in treating water should be dramatically reduced and less chemicals should be used in the process. Whether in the current treatment regime or a more resource-efficient system in the future, the notion that such precious potable water should be flushed down toilets seems absurd.

Steve White is not convinced about the notion of separating water supplies into potable and grey water categories, and not just because of the complicated engineering that policy might unleash. He says that some people in his industry believe that grey water use is a backward step and he concurs: ‘How dirty would you allow your water going into your toilet to be? You want to maintain a clean toilet. You don’t want brown water going into your nice white sanitary-ware because then you’ve got a major cleaning job. It looks like you’re not being clean yourself.’ Other forces might be shaping the forward-looking technological vision of his employer, as well as this preference for stain-free ceramics.

Thames Water took a significant technological leap forward when it invested in the construction of the U.K.’s first desalination plant amidst the large-scale regeneration of East London. The Thames Gateway Water Treatment Works started operating in 2011. In the short film on Thames Water’s website publicising the merits of the desalination plant —
Keeping London on Tap
— the only use of water that is specifically mentioned, or visualised, is for drinking.
⁵⁰
Only a plain glass of water represents the corporate product. People are not shown wallowing in
baths, washing their cars, luxuriating in showers or flushing their toilets. None of water’s many industrial applications in the city, such as cement mixing or beer brewing are shown. When we consider such omissions, the glass of drinking water is a rather benign, even misleading, representation of London’s plethora of domestic and industrial water needs and desires.

The frontier of high-tech water engineering fits with the ambitions of Kemble Water Limited, which ‘acquired’ Thames Water in 2006 for £8 billion.
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It is complicated. Kemble Water Limited is actually owned by Kemble Water Holdings, which is itself buoyed up by a consortium of investors. More than fifty per cent of the Kemble Water Holdings consortium includes various factions of the global finance company, the Macquarie Group.
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Part of this group, Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets, is the largest manager of civil infrastructure assets in the world. As Macquarie’s UK arm of the corporation announced in 2011, ‘9.9 per cent of Kemble Water Holdings Limited (Kemble), the ultimate holding company of Thames Water’ was sold to Infinity Investments, according to Macquarie’s website, ‘a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, for an undisclosed sum’.
⁵³

Of course, Thames Water’s investment in desalination fulfils its licensed, regulatory commitment to keep London’s taps flowing but ultimately the investment must also please shareholders. Desalination is clearly at the cutting edge of modern water management and treatment amidst global freshwater and climate change politics. Turning salty water into drinking water is quite simply technological alchemy in a century where water wars have already taken place and future conflicts over freshwater are sadly predicted. The grand technology of the Thames Gateway Water Treatment Works has many critics. Steve White admits that desalination is a ‘horrendously expensive’ water treatment process. External critics are more concerned about the wisdom of simply meeting ever more demand, rather than
managing demand, when London has been classed as ‘seriously water stressed’ along with the rest of southeast England, since 2007.
⁵⁴
Desalination, in the context of London, rather than its usual application only in extremely arid regions of southern Spain and the Middle East, does seem to be a rather extreme move. In 2011, both London’s former Mayor Ken Livingstone and the Green Party’s Darren Johnson argued that Thames Water should be conserving existing water supplies by preventing well-documented leakage.
⁵⁵
The company’s defence, reiterated in its promotional film for the plant was that leakage repairs were exceeding targets but that consequent savings would not meet water demand during a drought — particularly with anticipated population expansion in the intensely regenerated Thames Gateway region.
⁵⁶
Theoretically, desalination should have been in operation during the 2012 drought, so swathes of East Londoners might have been unaware that they were swallowing their first draughts of desalinated water.

A search for further details about the desalination plant leads to the DWI’s copy of a public relations strategy for the project, produced by Thames Water. The campaign’s aim, evidently shared with such stakeholders was to ‘move customers from uninformed’, to ‘informed’, to ‘reassured’ then, finally, to ‘accep-tance’.
⁵⁷
The need to shoe-horn sceptics into this narrative might relate to a drinking water practice that had been unorthodox since the Metropolis Water Act was first enforced in 1855: abstracting water from
below
Teddington Lock. We must remind ourselves that the river has 16 nautical miles (29 kilometres) to dilute any effluent from the Mogden Sewage Treatment Works near Isleworth in west London. We might also take comfort from the fact that, Beckton’s unique ‘four-stage’ reverse osmosis technology apparently strips the water so bare in its purification process that it has to be re-mineralised before going into distribution. Quality assurance is needed whilst plans for a Thames Tideway Tunnel, popularly dubbed the ‘super sewer’, necessitate
revealing how much untreated sewage regularly enters the river during periods of high rainfall, due to overflows from London’s combined sewage and rainwater pipes (CSOs). Serious pollution incidents have hit the headlines, for instance in June 2011 when thousands of tonnes of sewage decimated thousands of fish, as reported by BBC News. Less porous ground and more hard surfaces, as the built environment ever grows, contribute to a quantity of rainwater that Bazalgette’s drainage system was not designed to absorb. This situation makes the desalination plant’s location
downstream
of the CSO pipes less appealing. Hopefully, because the desalination plant powers into action only in dry times (according to Thames Water’s public relations literature), its intake is less likely to suck in untreated sewage. After reverse osmosis, the water will still be wholesome, but the desalination works location certainly explains why Thames Water had to craft a tight public relations campaign to convince stakeholders, even within the industry, of the system’s merits. Having heard Steve White and Jeni Colbourne heap praise on the natural processes of water purification, the desalination works seems strangely out of kilter with their philosophy. But desalination is all about quantity, not a modest glass of drinking water.

From large water to little water

Although Thames Water is adept at producing and managing such grand infrastructure, when the company was approached about the relatively minor infrastructural issue of a proposed drinking fountain for the City of London, in 2010, it was flummoxed. The question of public fountains only surfaced recently in Thames Water’s short lifespan. When the project manager for the City’s pilot fountain project contacted Steve White’s colleagues to ensure that all was above the regulatory parapet, White recalls, with some embarrassment, that the fountain project manager was ‘bounced around different depart-ments’. No public water department existed to catch the query.
Decades of dried up fountains had left Thames Water without an up-to-date policy. Consequently, these objects were considered to be a low priority risk on its radar of external contaminants that could tamper with the integrity of the company’s supply. In fact, it was the City’s query that pushed Thames Water into drafting a new policy on the subject.

Steve White enthuses about producing
Policy and Procedure for Drinking Fountains in Public Areas
between 2010–11.
⁵⁸
‘On principle, it’s great. Having water available for people when they’re outside. Fantastic. An impediment to use is one of maintenance and how do you make sure that the water we deliver to that fountain actually stays as clean as we want it to? A lot will depend on what the last person has done with the fountain’ but some of that behaviour, according to White and the City of London’s urban design team ‘beggars belief’. Though he did not supply graphic details, White gave the impression some unsanitary uses were involved. The City’s urban design officers had meticulously done their homework on the design and installation of the fountain with respect to the plumbing and water supply, but maintenance issues are riskier. In order for a new public fountain to meet the regulations, two other parties must sign it off. In a water company’s supply area, it needs to approve the fittings and maintenance to assure the risk of mains pollution is minimal in terms of design, installation and maintenance. This process follows the letter of the law, outlined in the Water Regulations Advisory Scheme (WRAS). The relevant local authority’s environmental health department must also be on board the approval chain to perform its duty in safeguarding public health for fountains on its land and also for any ‘onward distribution system’ on land outside the local authority’s direct control, but on its territory. The Royal Parks is a good example of a case where it must take responsibility as the landowner, yet the local authority also has a duty of care to the public who might consume from a fountain, in Regent’s Park for instance.

If readers are confused by this convoluted regulatory maze so, it seems, were employees of Thames Water. The Chief Inspector of Drinking Water throws some clear light on a water company’s duty as operators: ‘If somebody connects a gizmo, they can do something that gets back and contaminates the wider supply.’ Any fountain that is attached to Thames Water’s mains supply immediately becomes a node in its highly regulated drinking water network. Thames Water could be liable if that supply became infected.

Colbourne is more than aware of the company’s dormant public drinking fountain policy because she was involved in writing one when she worked there herself. The potential for contamination that she highlights falls under specific water fittings regulations.
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In 1999 a new law supplanted the Byelaw Inspections, under which the fountains of the post-war period sprang up and subsequently faded. Responsibility lies with the water company supplying a fountain to inspect a device and ensure that the installation conforms to the fittings standard. Though the owners of all private buildings have to meet plumbing standards for protecting drinking quality water, when that premises is a public place (the definition embraces indoor and outdoor), the water issues become murkier. For instance, the DWI must ensure that environmental health teams in local authorities are abreast of any new installations available for public use.

Another point in Thames Water’s drinking fountain policy has significant implications: ’…all water used by the drinking fountain must be metered.’
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Every non-domestic supply the company feeds is metered, therefore whether it is a general private supply including a fountain as one outlet, or a separately-metered supply created for just one fountain, the object’s categorisation as a private water supply is not just a case of property ownership: it is a case of water ownership too. When The City of London Corporation publicised its new drinking
fountain in May 2010, any mention of Thames Water was conspicuously absent. As Victor Callister clarified about the relationship between the object and its contents: ‘We’re buying the water off Thames Water so we’re not necessarily promoting their involvement because we’re just buying a service off them.’
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This is a point on which the success of a free water project, incubated in London’s current Mayoral administration, since September 2010, depends. As Boris Johnson bombastically declared: ‘If this place is generally getting hotter and people are going off buying bottled water I think we should have a new era of public fountains.’
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When Jeni Colbourne was asked if she was aware of the Mayor’s ambitions, this was her response: ‘He’s been wanting to bring back water fountains and all sorts of things, bless him. I don’t have any problem with it at all as long as it’s done in the right way. There’s a right way and a wrong way and as long as it’s done in the right way, great. If they do it in the wrong way, we’ll do something about it to make sure they do it in the right way!’ What, then, would Colbourne view as the wrong way?

So is the free public drinking water revival likely to ensure more free drinking water oases for Londoners? It certainly seems that neither London’s drinking water quality or quantity present any barriers, but who is committed to jumping through the considerable regulatory hoops, footing the bill and ensuring that resources are perpetually maintained? And even if this is achieved, is it possible that Londoners might give up bottled water for good? Do outdoors fountains get used? Are indoor fountains more suitable for London’s needs and climate? How should the drinking fountains of the future be designed?

High quality tap water is embedded in the network of technologies that serve the twenty-first century city. Understandably, our most common experience of accessing that resource is within our homes via our kitchen taps at a fixed price for an unlimited supply (for unmetered customers). The question of that water entering non-domestic spaces, whether private or public, indoors or outdoors, remains a fraught one. As we have seen, the free water access issue has arisen with green activism and politics in the first decade of this century. Even a modest public drinking fountain can therefore represent loaded social attitudes and values in tandem with its mere functional presence.

‘Free access to drinking water across London’, from which the above quote is extracted, is a Mayoral initiative that was launched in 2010 but has had little publicity to date (at least not at the time of writing in October 2012). As we have seen, public water provision is certainly not a new idea. It is worth briefly rewinding through some nodes of the narrative covered in this book’s earlier chapters to establish how distinctions between public and private water evolved.

In the medieval City of London, the Corporation’s involvement in the provision of outdoor water facilities was delivered in a marriage of private finance and public sector management. Conduits depended on the labour of human water carriers to transfer the liquid from public sources to homes and businesses, if it was not consumed outdoors (for instance in the thriving street market on Cheapside). The development of water
pumping technologies in the sixteenth century saw the birth of London’s piped water supply corporations, whose founders invested in the creation of the city’s first network technology (as Mark Jenner pointed out). Though it was a long journey for this distribution system to democratically connect all citizens with even basic provision for domestic and sanitary water uses, piped corporate water
indoors
permanently transformed the basis for why public water sources
outdoors
might also be needed and used in London.

The seventeenth-century parish pump clearly represented the continuation of a free public water resource for consumption at street level, or for transportation into homes. As the private water network grew during the eighteenth century, bottled mineral water became an elite health commodity for the wealthy, or for desperate hypochondriacs. The commodity was dispensed by coffee houses or sold in exclusive shopping districts. This product was not an alternative to ordinary drinking water, even though it is difficult to ascertain how much domestic tap water was used purely for drinking. We do know that the eruption of public concern about London’s piped water quality did not occur until the late 1820s. At that point, groundwater pumps were still a part of daily life for many Londoners.

Then and until the mid-1850s, the parish pump brand of drinking water was considered by many consumers as superior to piped water, both in flavour and temperature. Post-cholera, the Metropolis Water Act of 1852 gave more of a guarantee that piped water did not contain London’s wastewater, when it could only be drawn from above Teddington Lock and also ‘effec-tually’ filtered. We have also learned that it is somewhat of an urban history myth that alcohol was widely considered to be safer than water by Victorian Londoners, though some may have held that view post-1854’s cholera epidemic and, three decades later, post-germ theory’s discovery. These were moments or spells of concern, rather than pervasive beliefs held over
decades. Certainly, the disrepute that the common street water pump suffered as a result of John Snow’s research into cholera’s ‘mode of communication’ was one plank on which the Metropolitan Free Drinking Fountain Association rested its case for a better-managed form of public hydration in 1859. Even though the true motivation for the charity’s foundation, and swift progress, was to cure the drunkenness of the poor and working classes, its literature reveals a prevailing belief that corporate water was safer than the parish pump (this view failed to hinder John Snow’s evidence about piped water’s role in spreading the disease). Clearly, the construction of London’s revolutionary sewerage system in the 1860s also immeasurably transformed the likelihood of sewage and drinking water mixing. A sanitary problem that did dog this period in the city’s poorest communities was the fact that many people shared communal water butts fed by piped water. Therefore, many different, and some unwashed, hands and vessels potentially mingled to spread disease. 1871 marked a legislative turning point for more equitable domestic water supplies: companies were bound to provide a constant supply (even on Sundays) and landlords had to ensure that plumbing was in place to serve all tenants and all storeys of their buildings.

In the scientific and sanitary revolution that dominated the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century, the ethical debate over water’s control, ownership and quality assurance swelled into a full-blown political campaign. This eventually resulted in piped water’s transition from a corporate good to a rateable public service in 1902. Much of the ethical water question was focused on quality for public health. Achieving guaranteed tap water safety to all London homes was the task of the Metropolitan Water Board’s department of water examination — in the first two decades of the twentieth century — under Dr Alexander Houston. His team’s groundbreaking drinking water research made the provision of health-guaranteed piped water inside
every Londoner’s home an imperative. Sustaining this standard of production was threatened during the economic climate of war, which led to the introduction of chlorination in 1916. London’s example influenced water engineers and examiners in other industrialised nations and the age of high-tech chlorination advanced during the 1920s. In these seismic changes focused on the democratisation of domestic water supplies, it not surprising that the issue of public fountains, at least in London, was not at the forefront of public analysts’ and sanitarians’ minds, or even architects, nor the new discipline of urban planning (in London anyway).

In the 1930s, the bubble jet fountain’s arrival did show a flutter of concern for the extra-domestic tap. Its design offered a more streamlined, modernist approach to the common drinking fountain suited to indoor workspaces, such as the 1937 Factories Act demanded. We also saw a revival of enthusiasm for public water provision post the Second World War, when London’s parks were revamped and socialist ideas were set into the built environment. The last example is the only government-led public fountain policy that I encountered during my research until that of Boris Johnson’s administration. The drinking fountain has therefore somehow managed to connect the political left and right across many decades as a civic idea.

The nascent scheme of Boris Johnson’s administration is heavily dependent on the goodwill and finance of charitable people (that is nothing new). Even though the scheme has not been publicised, those in the drinking fountain or anti-bottled-water campaigning realm are well aware of the Mayor’s project. Some have even tendered to deliver the vision. There is a catch for them. The Greater London Authority’s (GLA) policy document reveals that proposals have been sought from organisations ‘to assist in the delivery of the Mayor’s vision to provide free and easily accessible drinking water to Londoners on the move at no cost to the GLA or participating stakeholders.’
²
Recalling my many conversations with fountain enthusiasts and passionate tap water and anti-bottled-water campaigners over the last two years, I wonder how precariously funded voluntary organisations can benefit from a scheme that offers no finance to support projects? Clearly it would be unwise for an organisation to snub such high profile political support. The attractions of Mayoral endorsement for the voluntary sector’s existing projects offers input from urban planning professionals and powerful publicity opportunities, yet after my research it is apparent to me that creating a viable alternative to the bottled water market in a large city requires significant investment in people, hardware and, potentially, new legislation. An impressive aspect of the GLA’s approach to the issue has been its consultation with various stakeholders, reflecting a respect for the knowledge and experience that already exists and therefore a democratic process, even if the project might well be inherently unsustainable. The niche social sphere of public drinking fountains and free water devotees is not free from its own politics.

John Mills, Chairman of the Drinking Fountain Association since 1982 (the current incarnation of the Victorian fountain charity), sounds a note of caution about the recent interest in public water. ‘Yes, suddenly everyone wants drinking fountains; Boris and then the Lord Mayor and all the local authorities. They think they’re going to do it for nothing. It comes and goes’, he professes knowingly.
³
Mills is well aware that the delivery of any drinking fountain is not cheap in terms of materials, project management, maintenance, or even water supply (at least perma-nently). As an architect, Mills has designed drinking fountains in his day job. His architecture practice installed many a vandal-proof fountain for its client the Home Office, in Her Majesty’s prisons. They are one of the few buildings where drinking fountains must be provided by law. In his voluntary capacity, Mills also works on local fountain builds or restorations (when I meet him, he takes me into a room adjacent to his office where he
is tinkering with adjustments to a stainless steel outdoor fountain prototype). He feels that community-led fountain projects often succeed where the public sector fails. ‘The local authorities are a bit disinterested [in drinking fountains]’, he states candidly. If this assertion is largely true, it does not bode well for Johnson’s vision. Both historical and contemporary examples, however, do testify to the influence of personalities on the fate of free water missions. Sustaining these projects until they become a social norm after initial passions have abated is more of a concern, from my evidence.

Before his re-election in 2012, the Mayor of London declined my request for an interview to discuss his drinking water vision. Some context for the scheme is provided in his administration’s London Plan (2011) and in the environmental policy, ‘Securing London’s Water Future’. The latter policy reiterates that if free drinking water does spring up, it will do so ‘at no cost to the taxpayer’.
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As precedents, the policy cites six public fountains that the GLA has recently facilitated to some degree, though not paid for directly.
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It is a modest number but a move in the right direction. A sudden proliferation of fountains in public realm design projects is unlikely, when the London Plan states that ‘social infrastructure’, in which drinking fountains are bracketed, should be incorporated into public realm design ‘where appropriate’.
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Appropriate is a rather loose term to interpret.

The GLA’s vague note signals the limits of where the organisation can prescribe the detailed design of places it does not govern. Limits on the state’s authority over the design and management of the public realm is partly a product of neo-liberal ideology that surrendered so much ‘public space’ to the marketplace. More recently, state agencies are fond of sub-contracting the maintenance of the public realm out various service providers. Civic oases are few and far between, regardless of their managers. Importantly in the ‘free’ (or affordable) water
access debate, thinking of the often-blurred boundaries that morph between public or private and indoor or outdoor is critical. Spatial nuances matter. For instance, in a model where free drinking water access is mapped on a website and navigated on the internet, or with a mobile phone application and promoted via social media, another layer of public space mediates between the actual café or park fountain, whether privately or publicly owned. Like tapwater.org, Find-A-Fountain and similar international schemes, for example Blue W in Canada, private sector sympathy for free tap water access may provide a more pervasive solution than a public sector revival of civic drinking fountains; precisely because businesses occupy such a large percentage of the extra-domestic spaces we use. One can also see the attraction for businesses to brush up against progressive social movements, or even tout their involvement as a corporate social responsibility exercise. It goes without saying that businesses, business owners and employees are no homogenous mass. Their influence on how the city looks, feels and works is enormous. Individuals’ politics and influence play an important role in determining alliances. Whilst a water access lottery can create dynamic surprises, it also provides no guarantee that a café which joins a free water map will sustain this arrangement if it proves not to suit the business, or if the management, or even ownership, changes hands. Weighing up the evidence amassed during this book’s research, I believe this is a gamble for a public drinking water solution that actually requires legislation to force the hand of
both
corporations and the public sector. Systemic change is needed to alter the built environment, just as campaigners for better public toilet facilities advocate.

Despite the surrender of much ‘public’ space to commercial ownership, the public sector still retains a great deal of power over the design, use and management of vast swathes of London’s public realm (even by sub-contracts). Mayoral control over the daily operation of Transport for London and therefore
the London Underground presents one example of a vast public spatial network that is ripe for a free drinking water trial. As we learned in chapter nine, the Hydrachill tap water vending machine promoters did not succeed in their mission. Embedded in the unit’s design is the inherent contradiction of charging (even nominally) for tap water access, coupled with a pretty undemocratic approach to tackling the broader question of drinking water access on the London Underground, by mooting only one design possibility. Yet these environmental campaigners raised a pertinent question about a powerful strategic target. Architects, planners, product designers, station managers, Thames Water and Tube users would all need to be involved in a sophisticated consultation process. Reminders for Tube passengers to carry bottles of water during hot weather could be rebranded to promote refill facilities within stations or even on platforms (rather than boost spring or mineral water sales).