Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T22:20:41.023Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Implementation without control: the role of the private water companies in establishing constant water in nineteenth-century London

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2013

JOSEPH HILLIER
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The switch from intermittent to constant water supply in London in the late nineteenth century has attracted little attention. This article argues that this transition, the basis of the modern water system, was a considerable undertaking. System-builders (London's private water companies) faced a permissive regulatory environment and a population that could be ambivalent about constant water. While the water companies tried to encourage standardization through contract agreements and inspection, their lack of domestic access encouraged technical fragmentation. Local socio-political relations influenced the form of the constant water system, with consequences for future consumption practices.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 228 - 246
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Hardy, A., ‘Parish pump to private pipes: London's water supply in the nineteenth century’, in Bynum, W.F. and Porter, R. (eds.), Living and Dying in London, Medical History, Supplement No. 11 (London, 1991), 76–93Google Scholar.

2 E.g. Inwood, S., City of Cities (London, 2005)Google Scholar; Porter, R., London: A Social History (London, 1994)Google ScholarPubMed; Shepherd, F., London 1808–1880: The Infernal Wen (London, 1971)Google Scholar; White, J., London in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2007)Google Scholar.

3 Hillier, J., ‘The rise of constant water in nineteenth-century London’, London Journal, 36 (2011), 37–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Except for Hardy, ‘Parish pump to private pipes’; Hillier, ‘The rise of constant water’; Sunderland, D., ‘“Disgusting to the imagination and destructive of health”’? The metropolitan supply of water, 1820–52’, Urban History, 30 (2003), 359–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 This encourages the view of water company engineers as key actors in the development of London's water system, supporting other modernizing groups in the history of public health; e.g. Hamlin, C., Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800–1854 (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar.

6 Nead, L., Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, 2000), 5Google Scholar; Dobraszczyk, P., ‘Sewers, wood-engravings and the sublime: picturing London's main drainage system in the Illustrated London News, 1859–1862’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 38 (2005), 349–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 E.g. Latour, B., Aramis, or the Love of Technology (trans. Porter, C.) (Cambridge, MA, 1996)Google Scholar.

8 Joyce, P., The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003)Google Scholar.

9 Taylor, V. and Trentman, F., ‘Water and the politics of everyday life in the modern city’, Past and Present, 211 (2011), 199–241CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

10 Throughout this article, I refer to the ‘general public’ as a homogeneous group to simplify the analysis.

11 E.g. Pickering, A., The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science (Chicago, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Trentmann, F. and Taylor, V., ‘From users to consumers: water politics in nineteenth-century London’, in Trentmann, F. (ed.), The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World (Oxford, 2005), 53–79Google Scholar; Taylor and Trentmann, ‘Water and the politics of everyday life’.

13 Hardy, ‘Parish pump to private pipes’.

14 Luckin, B., Pollution and Control: A Social History of the Thames in the Nineteenth Century (Bristol, 1986), 179Google Scholar.

15 Graham-Leigh, J., London's Water Wars: The Competition for London's Water Supply in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2000)Google Scholar.

16 Ibid.

17 Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice.

18 From the 1860s to the 1890s, the water companies almost doubled the amount of water pumped; Trentmann and Taylor, ‘From users to consumers’.

19 Dickinson, H.W., Water Supply of Greater London (London, 1954)Google Scholar.

20 Shepherd, Infernal Wen, 261.

21 British Parliamentary Papers (BPP) 1880, X (329), 153; the Grand Junction Company was an exception, with a rich area that retained intermittent supply.

22 It should be noted that much of the district main system was already constantly supplied with water by the mid-nineteenth century.

23 Marsden, B. and Smith, C., Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 BPP 1880, X (329), 134.

25 BPP 1893, C (7172), 419–20.

26 BPP 1893, C (7172), 475.

27 BPP 1867, IX (399), 98.

28 See Dobraszczyk, ‘Sewers’.

29 BPP 1867 XI (495), 178–9; calculation based on a seven-hour day.

30 These were dug by navvies, ultimately directed by company engineers; for more on working relations, see Hobsbawm, E.J., ‘The nineteenth-century London labour market’, in Glass, R.et al. (eds.), London: Aspects of Change (London, 1964), 3–28Google Scholar.

31 E.g. Swyngedouw, E., Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar.

32 The Builder, 15 Jan. 1848, 36.

33 Notes from the justices of the peace, 24 Apr. 1892, London Metropolitan Archives (LMA): ACC/2558/LA/1/1575.

34 Letter from Bell, Stewards and May (solicitors for the Lambeth Water Company) to Henry Louttit (secretary of Lambeth Water Company), 22 Jul. 1892, LMA: ACC/2558/LA/1/1575.

35 Letter from Bell, Stewards and May to Cann and Sons (solicitors to East Molesey Local Board), 4 May 1892, LMA: ACC/2558/LA/1/1575.

36 Letter from Henry Louttit to Bell, Stewards and May, 13 Jul. 1892, LMA: ACC/2558/LA/1/1575.

37 BPP 1867 XI (495), 178–9; this evidence from a company engineer informed an investigation into whether subterranean tunnels would be appropriate for future infrastructural networks, and was apparently not common knowledge for the water supply commissions.

38 Joyce, The Rule of Freedom.

39 See Goubert, J., The Conquest of Water: The Advent of Health in the Industrial Age (Cambridge, 2003)Google Scholar; Platt, H., Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago, 2000)Google Scholar.

40 Hillier, ‘The rise of constant water’.

41 Gooday, G., Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice (Cambridge, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Loftus, A., ‘Reification and the dictatorship of the water meter’, Antipode, 38 (2006), 1023–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 See e.g. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom.

43 The present study looks to use original contracts and notices in understanding the relationship between company and customer. Many of the available documents are for the Lambeth Company, which controlled an area in the south of London. Lambeth was relatively slow in implementing the constant supply, with only 80% of houses in its district being on constant supply in 1901.

44 The Lambeth Company systematically introduced constant supply in Oct. 1878 (BPP 1893, C (7172)], Appendix A21, 48).

45 The possibility of multiple houses per pipe was included in the 1871 Water Act and the subsequent 1873 regulations.

46 Constant Supply Agreements and Applications for Building Supplies (1880–95), LMA: ACC 2558/LA/4/26–9.

47 Ibid.

48 BPP 1873, XXXVIII (679), 268 (abridged).

49 Evidence of W.H. Wyatt, BPP 1893, C (7172), 56.

50 Parry, J., Water: Its Composition, Collection and Distribution (London, 1881), 96–8Google Scholar.

51 For a summary of these positions, see letter from F.G. Banbury, Times, 17 Mar. 1897, 10.

52 See Trentmann and Taylor, ‘From users to consumers’.

53 Owen, D., The Government of Victorian London: The Metropolitan Board of Works, the Vestries, and the City Corporation (Cambridge, MA, 1982)Google Scholar.

54 Otter, C., The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Applications for building supplies (Lambeth Water Company), LMA: ACC/2558/LA/4/30–3.

56 Ferrules are fittings placed in pipes to limit flow.

57 BPP 1893, C (7172), 32.

58 Ibid., 11.

59 Notice to customers about waste from fittings (Lambeth Company), LMA: ACC2558/LA/4/388.

60 Waste inspectors’ reports (Lambeth) half-year ending 30 Sep. 1891, LMA: ACC/2558/LA/4/13.

61 Waste inspectors’ reports (Lambeth) half-year ending 31 Mar. 1894, LMA: ACC/2558/LA/4/16.

62 BPP 1893, C (7172), 28.

63 Times, 6 Nov. 1883, 3.

64 Times, 11 Sep. 1890, 5.

65 Letter from I.A. Crookenden (secretary to the East London Water Company), Times, 5 Sep. 1896, 9; Report on the East London Water Question, Times, 10 Sep. 1896, 9.

66 Trentmann and Taylor, ‘From users to consumers’.

67 The act was finally passed in 1900, allowing the construction of the Chingford (King George's) Reservoir, finished in 1908 by the Metropolitan Board of Works (Dickinson, Water Supply, 95–101).

68 Report on the water supply in East London, Times, 6 Aug. 1895, 10.

69 Cisterns were included in regulations in the early 1870s and were implicitly legitimated through guidelines for the cleaning of cisterns in the 1891 Public Health (London) Act.

70 Report about the water supply of East London, Times, 6 Aug. 1895, 10.

71 Evidence from Mr Western (sanitary inspector), Report from the Local Government Board Enquiry into the East London Water Famine, Times, 3 Oct. 1895, 14.

72 BPP 1871, IV (257), 4.

73 Teale, T. Pridgin, Dangers to Health: A Pictorial Guide to Domestic Sanitary Defects (New York, 1883), 73Google Scholar.

74 Browne, B.J.H., Water Supply (London, 1880), 43Google Scholar.

75 Parry, Water, 104.

76 Times, 10 Aug. 1891, 14.

77 Hillier, ‘The rise of constant water’.

78 Letter from Thomas Farmer Parkes to Crookenden, 24 Aug. 1896, LMA: ACC/2558/LA/5/49.

79 Leaflet detailing rules as to fittings in the transfer of houses from intermittent to constant supply, LMA: ACC/2558/LA/5/44.

80 Evidence from Dr Bate (medical officer of health to Bethnal Green), Report from the Local Government Board Enquiry into the East London Water Famine, Times, 3 Oct. 1895, 14.

81 Times, 6 Aug. 1895, 10.

82 Report on the East London Water Question, Times, 24 Aug. 1896, 8.

83 Conclusions of the government enquiry into the East London Water Famine, Times, 7 Feb. 1896, 11.

84 Times, 3 Aug. 1896, 9.

85 See www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/england-ways-manage-water-shortage (visited 17 Mar. 2012); WHO/UNICEF, Water for Life: Making it Happen (London, 2001)Google Scholar.

86 A.L. Browne, W. Medd and B. Anderson, ‘Developing novel approaches to tracking domestic water demand under ucertainty – a reflection on the “up-scaling” for social science approaches in the United Kingdom’, Water Resource Management (published online; 2012).

87 Graham, S. and Marvin, S., Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.