Book titles are tricky things – serving multiple purposes. Broich's ambitious title is shortened on the spine of this slim volume to just ‘London’. The sub-title also suggests a much larger work, and in many ways I wish it had been. It would have been more helpful and accurate to specify the period – essentially Victorian – or the predominant focus on water policy. So the reader who begins this book hoping to understand London's achievement of an adequate water supply (in both quality and quantity), and perhaps even how water was seen and used by Londoners, is going to feel slightly short-changed. The book ends at April 1903 on the eve of the creation of the Metropolitan Water Board (MWB). London, viewed in terms of its water supply, was still far from modern: a significant number of properties did not receive a constant and pressurized supply, and often the upper floors had no piped supply at all. There were sporadic disease scares caused by failures in the filtration system, and beneath London's streets lay a jumble of pipes belonging to the eight private water companies that were about to be brought into public ownership.

In many British towns and cities in the mid-nineteenth century the threat of epidemic diseases (Broich oddly shortens to ‘epidemic’) was used by local authorities to gain parliamentary approval to buy out – municipalize – private water companies whose primary concern with generating a good dividend for their shareholders was increasingly seen as incompatible with providing water as a public good. Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham and most other large municipalities took control of their water supplies and usually then began monumental engineering projects to bring remote, unpolluted upland water to their residents. Ratepayers complained, but were persuaded that these civic investments would have wider social as well as economic paybacks.

London was different. There was no single ‘local’ authority for the whole urban area, but responsibilities were divided between ancient parish vestries and ad hoc organizations, such as the MWB created in 1855. With rapid population growth, the eight private water companies found their river and well sources increasingly polluted. The MWB was finally pushed by the appalling condition of the Thames to commission Joseph Bazalgette's magnificent embankment sewer system to transport waste well to the east of the conurbation and discharge it from holding tanks on the strong out-flowing tide. However, it was not given authority to tackle the water issue.

Broich is concerned with two related questions: why ‘London’ did not more quickly buy out the private water companies, and why proposals for a remote waterworks scheme were rejected. He posits that water policy was consciously about much more than quality and quantity, and intended as a mechanism to modernize the metropolis. His explanations are bound up with the fortunes of London's government, especially the creation in 1889 of the London County Council (LCC), which sought to consolidate urban administration. However, the LCC was controlled by the ‘Progressives’. Broich suggests their plans to gain control of the water supply were deliberately stymied by the national conservative government because it would make the LCC too powerful and assist the Progressives’ ambition to re-create London as a ‘commune’. The bold prose of Broich's hypothesizing sits uneasily with his somewhat limited analysis of related issues. He would have benefited from looking beyond the immediate politics of water management to the wider political economy of nineteenth-century urban investment. It is telling that he chooses not to examine the activities of the Local Government Board that sanctioned the huge loans necessary for water engineering projects and other urban infrastructure, and loomed behind many of the parliamentary debates. It would have been helpful also to have had more discussion on the role of water engineers and scientists and their interactions with metropolitan administrators. Although John Hassan and Chris Hamlin's work in this area is referenced, Broich makes relatively little use of it. His intimation that both the delay in buying out the private companies and the rejection of the Welsh water scheme resulted in a different type of modernization is not convincingly developed.

But I return to my opening grumbles – the dislocation between title and content, and also the compression of ambitious and complicated arguments into a relatively small book, which has resulted in a superficial narrative on the development of British public health and ‘modernity’. To end the story when London ‘finally’ achieves a dedicated water authority in 1903, and to devote less than a page of the conclusion to the twentieth century (struggles in the 1930s to supply 8.6 million Londoners; end of the MWB in 1973; re-privatization in 1989) is a missed opportunity. Broich leaves us with thirsty for a longer and different sort of history.