Introduction
The 1871 Water Act and regulations in 1872 and 1873 drove London's water, under the control of eight water companies, from intermittent to constant supply – a recognizably modern system. In 1874, approximately 10 per cent of houses supplied in London had constant water; by 1901, this had risen to approximately 95 per cent.Footnote 1 This has largely been treated as an inevitable, modernizing step in the development of the city's water infrastructure that was held up by obstinate private interests.Footnote 2 Essentially, according to this view, London's population stated a need for constant water, was heard by public bodies and, despite resistance from the water companies to infrastructural reform throughout the nineteenth century, a system was built. In contrast, the present study argues that the transition was a major feat, and the water companies actively worked to achieve it. Hence, their role in the development of London's water infrastructure might be reassessed.
Whereas under intermittent piped supply water was provided at set periods of the day and week to customers, and locally stored for use when needed, a constant supply meant water was available all the time. Constant water was promoted by central government, largely since it was hoped that providing unlimited water would improve health generally and thereby help tackle poverty in the capital.Footnote 3 Yet, as will be argued below, the apparently simple switch from intermittent to constant supply posed considerable challenges for the water companies. While there has been relatively little attention given to this development in the historical literature,Footnote 4 constant water was arguably the largest reorganization of supply from a consumer perspective in London's history, and a significant achievement given the powers that the water companies and their engineers had.Footnote 5 Technical guidelines for a constant system were produced in the 1870s, but were largely permissive or could not be effectively enforced. While this regulatory gap was not necessarily a problem in itself, it made it difficult for the water companies to put in place the system that had been agreed in the parliamentary forum. Infrastructural development was sometimes locally controversial, and water company engineers were reluctant or unable to enter the domicile – other groups (in particular, local sanitary authorities and private plumbers) wielded substantial influence there.
A consequence of a lack of control was that local dissent influenced how the system was extended. The significance of locality in shaping urban structure has been put on the urban history agenda by studies with a post-modern sensibility, emphasizing the ‘tensions and irregularities that create modernity's conditions of existence’,Footnote 6 and by sociological accounts (particularly actor-network perspectives) that have described how actors are aligned to support or resist technological development.Footnote 7 These approaches have generated questions about how urban governance is enacted given a multiplicity of local needs for (and reactions to) intervention, which has in turn focused attention on mechanisms of governmentality. While a traditional Foucauldian approach arguably draws us away from considering local dissimilarity towards thinking about systematic structural forms of social control, an alternative response has been to suggest that such strategies are not imposed in an idealized way and there are many methods of control that are associated with controlling and constraining choice while superficially giving people freedom to act.Footnote 8 This tends to refocus attention on local conditions and actions. For example, a key concept becomes self-regulation, where certain actions have become (culturally) normalized or demonized according to political agendas, and hence the ‘everyday’ is indicative of a wider politics.Footnote 9
The present study will examine the implementation of constant water through this lens of freedom, control and normalization. Constant water developed out of a confrontation between a variety of material, human and environmental agencies: the differing, sometimes contradictory, requirements of central government, local authorities and the general public,Footnote 10 and uncertainty concerning the capacity of water resources to satisfy constant supply.Footnote 11 Water companies implementing constant water were left to negotiate this situation with little support from central government and, in doing so, followed a number of tactics to discipline users and construct a constant water consumer. Hence, the freedom engendered by constant (unlimited) water brought with it new forms of control. The uneasy balance being struck between the rights/responsibilities of consumer, private company and wider society also had specific material effects, in terms of the final form of the system.
In describing the implementation of constant water, the present study uses evidence provided in parliamentary commissions, contemporary engineering publications and newspaper reports and extant water company records. Such sources provide a rich yet incomplete picture of the water system. While details of ideal designs, customer complaints, contracts and billing are obtainable, there is relatively little that describes the system as actually built. The same failings of regulatory mechanisms that plagued the water companies make tracing the history of water technology difficult today. As will be argued, examining domestic arrangements is a particular problem in this context. In order to shed light on domestic technology, the present study examines the first major crisis for London's constant water system, the mid-1890s East London Water Famine. While the Famine is in itself an important moment in the history of London's water, particularly in the context of municipalization and the emergence of a water consumer,Footnote 12 it will predominately be used here in order to show how the intentions of legislators and company engineers translated into local infrastructure.
Construction and local politics
Before the mid-nineteenth century, most piped water was delivered via intermittent supply, with the time the water was turned on varying between water companies. Particularly in poorer areas, several houses could be supplied through one standpipe, although as the nineteenth century progressed communal supply became rarer.Footnote 13 The water companies were ‘[committed] to a capitalistic rather than collective interpretation of responsibility to the capital and its inhabitants’,Footnote 14 but nevertheless instigated improvements without legal obligation,Footnote 15 striving for greater efficiency and profit. Competition for new districts had settled since the 1830s, following territory battles in the early part of the century,Footnote 16 so increasing coverage within existing district boundaries was also important to the water companies.
While the drive for profit fuelled a distrust of the water companies as money-making entities,Footnote 17 the constant water transition occurred in the context of an overall drive towards a universal domestic supply.Footnote 18 Many improvements in pumping technology that facilitated this growth were made under the intermittent system,Footnote 19 and not linked with constant water per se. What was considered a major feature of the constant transition was street-works due to the pipe improvements and extensions necessary to achieve universal constant supply. The details of pipe-laying suggest a co-productive relationship between water and metropolitan politics, with constant water exposing companies to the long-standing negative public attitudes towards them. Local interests were ‘always at war with the companies over the incessant depredation of street pavements for the laying and repairing of pipes’.Footnote 20 Water companies thereby faced a public relations and regulatory conundrum in implementing a system with substantial domestic implications and sometimes limited public support.
By the 1880s, government-contracted engineers were reporting that most water companies ‘have found it in their own interest to introduce constant supply throughout all their districts, and are urging the public authorities to insist upon constant supply’.Footnote 21 First, it was easier and cheaper to manage a common system rather than a patch-work of intermittent and constant supply.Footnote 22 Where the constant system was partially extended, it made sense to convert the whole of the area. Second, constant water extension allowed companies to charge more for water services. Not only was the constant system associated with higher rates, it also provided an opportunity for these charges to be raised in the future. Water companies were able to apply to parliament every five years to increase rates in their districts if they could prove they had in some way improved the service for their rateable properties. The provision of constant water allowed the companies to argue they had improved supplies in line with legislation.
Although constant supply was encouraged by central government and some water companies, and there was ideological commitment in some quarters to infrastructural extension generally to promote modernization and national progress,Footnote 23 local support was inconsistent. The constant service was not compulsory and public bodies that could have enforced constant water on some areas under public health law seemed uninterested in intervening. For example, the Metropolitan Board of Works, which had powers under the 1871 Water Act to enforce a constant service, was labelled the ‘Board of Inaction’ since it consistently failed to exercise its powers.Footnote 24 From 1871 to its demise in 1889, there were no cases of the Board requiring a company to put on a constant supply.Footnote 25 It was not until the 1890s that the London County Council, which took over the Board's responsibilities, acted to compel a constant service,Footnote 26 by which time the constant water transition was well established.
There were three major reasons for the lack of support for the constant system. First, local public bodies were unwilling to install a constant system because of cost. Some parish councils had previously applied for the constant system but reportedly ‘gave up on the idea’ once they realized the price of domestic conversion.Footnote 27 Second, implementing a constant supply was extremely laborious. The further pipes required for extending the service and the replacement pipes needed to withstand the higher water pressures involved brought disruption. This was a common but unpopular feature of life in London at the end of the nineteenth century,Footnote 28 which tended to focus attention on the water companies as private interests and undermine local political support or water improvements. With constant water, the disruption was apparently potentially dramatic: the connection of a house reportedly took approximately two hours, so the connection of an entire street of, for example, 40 houses might take two weeks or more.Footnote 29 Trenches for water pipesFootnote 30 could block streets for the entire period.
Third, implementation of the constant system jarred against local power structures, recast them and, indeed, may have altered the meaning of water itself for the general public and their representatives on a local scale. The extension of a new water service could be seen as an inconvenient assertion of central authority just as easily as a social good, and was hence a political act that could be resisted.Footnote 31 Local aspects of this dynamic were not easy to control, and may have added to the levels of disruption. For example, an anonymous correspondent to The Builder in 1848 reported that water company turn-cocks (who controlled the flow of water under the intermittent system) routinely turned on the water to streets where sewer contractors were working. Since public standpipes were often left open under the intermittent system, water would cascade down the streets and flood the sewer trenches. The sewer contractors would have to pay the turn-cocks to switch off the water before work could continue.Footnote 32 Although this anecdote concerned the extension of sewer services not water and we cannot infer that it was a common occurrence, it serves to illustrate that local actors were not disinterested observers in infrastructural change.
It was extremely difficult for the water companies to respond to such issues. As private interests, especially in the context of calls for municipalization throughout the latter nineteenth century, the companies had an uneasy relationship with local actors and political authorities. It was especially hard for them to establish a clear social mandate for change given their profit incentive. Companies were also unable to exert political pressure on public bodies, and were relatively unsupported legally. Constant water legislation had not been complemented by significant alterations in the powers of water companies, meaning local political interests had substantial local clout. While the 1847 and 1863 Waterworks Clauses Acts provided a process to settle disputes between the companies and local authorities – companies had to give notice to the local authority's surveyor before work started, and magistrates ruled on disagreements – in practice local authorities had the power. For example, in the 1890s, the Lambeth Water Company wanted to pass a new water main through East Molesey in order to connect to a new supply source.Footnote 33 The Local Board, however, resisted – possibly as it had planned to build a new sewer in the same area.Footnote 34 The East Molesey Local Board's solicitors argued that surveyors could not be understood to have received full notice of the works until precise plans for the main's route had been received. However, it was not practically possible to set a precise line until the work had begun and the ground was physically inspected.Footnote 35 As the two parties contested the appropriateness of plans offered, the building of the new main was stopped in its tracks.
Infrastructural extension could therefore be a confrontational and challenging process on a local stage for the water companies, before even considering the technical work itself. The companies employed several tactics in order to navigate such difficulties. In the context of a lack of legal powers and continued resilience of local actors, the companies negotiated – for which there is some evidence of success. At East Molesey, for example, the Lambeth Water Company eventually managed to persuade the Board's surveyor personally to inspect street works and enter into the arbitration process.Footnote 36 The water companies seem to have recognized, however, that it was more efficient to avoid issues completely through subtle technical alterations to the water system that could reduce disruption. For example, since at least the 1852 Commission on London's water supply, legislators had made their plans on the basis of one service main per street. Sometimes, though, the water companies chose to lay two mains in parallel along the sides of a street.Footnote 37 This was more expensive, but reduced traffic disruption by leaving the central roadway free from trenches that connected a service main to houses’ communication pipes.
The cost of the constant transition was the final point of contention that needed to be resolved and, as the next section will outline, the companies addressed this in part by shifting the burden to the householders and providing some technical concessions. The water companies hence utilized the powers at their disposal to implement the constant system despite the apathy, and even opposition, of London's authorities and local political bodies. Wider agitation for the extension and conversion of water services did not necessarily translate into local acquiescence to the system-builders, and the water companies thereby experienced some difficulties in implementing the parliamentary vision of London's water system. Yet, even as water companies were utilizing tactics to overcome this, they were also dragged into challenging customers’ domestic technical arrangements – another area where they had extremely limited legal powers. Construction in the streets was controversial, but moving towards domiciles was perhaps even more contested.
Water and control of domestic pace
As emphasized repeatedly by company engineers, the constant water supply required domestic technical control in order to maintain system integrity. Indeed, this was the focus of the 1872 and 1873 regulations. Under the intermittent supply, there was limited central control over domestic arrangements, offset by the restricted amount of water supplied to a house over a 24-hour period meaning households were motivated to reduce leakage (since they could run out). While the intermittent system was not always adequately maintained by private householders, the water companies could be sure that any resulting waste was limited and users were punished by the technology for having inefficient domestic arrangements. In contrast, water could be accessed at any time under the constant supply (users could never run out) and so leakage carried a lower personal penalty. Constant water liberated the user by giving them unrestrained water, chiming with the contemporary pursuit of liberal styles of urban governance.Footnote 38 Nevertheless, as in the wider urban context, assuring this freedom necessitated that the population be disciplined. Constant water was only sustainable (as far as the water companies were concerned) if new constraints were developed for domestic fittings, and if users were compelled to use water in a more prescribed and self-limiting way than previously.
What, then, was done to control water use? A peculiarity of London's water supply compared to other cities internationally is that it has never been subject to widespread metering,Footnote 39 which would seem to have been an ideal method to control water use through cost/pricing incentives. That it was not might be explained by two points. First, as far as health campaigners were concerned, unlimited (pure) water had the potential to purify the city and improve public health,Footnote 40 and metering stood in direct opposition to this aim. Indeed, the 1852 Metropolis Water Act made it illegal for the water companies to charge domestic customers on the basis of meter readings, partly to prevent scrimping on water. Second, measurement and metering of consumption was itself a political actFootnote 41 that was difficult for the water companies to pursue given the wider political environment.Footnote 42 Instead, to avoid such issues, the governance of consumption was pursued through structural means. Yet, the way this strategy played out in the context of a lack of legal power generated tension between central control and the rights of householders.
The relationship between water company control and customer freedom was formalized in bureaucracy, constant water contracts, which superficially suggest agreement with company terms. However, extant contracts from the Lambeth Company district suggest that the situation was more complex. The contracts attempted to limit technical variation and differences in consumption practices between households, and were a key strategy used to control water users.Footnote 43 House-owners (predominately, rather than the actual rate-payers if the house was rented) were required to agree to avoid wasting water and to maintain internal fittings and a communication pipe, which the Company promised to supply.Footnote 44 This set-up was good for owners of adjacent properties, since it enabled them to save money by having several properties supplied by one pipe.Footnote 45 The sweetener for the water companies was that forms also ensured that water supply could not be taken away from any of the houses via the removal of communal pipes if the owner sold them, asking customers to declare, ‘I hereby undertake in the event of my disposing of the aforesaid houses, or whenever I may be called upon to do so, to furnish separate communication pipes to each of the houses.’Footnote 46 Future house owners were, therefore, forced to be connected by a contract signed before they had possession.
Nevertheless, the contracts did not automatically mean adherence to water company regulations. Indeed, there is evidence of continued dissent from the constant system design as established in parliament, in that signatories made numerous changes to contracts. The documents sometimes encouraged limited alterations: until new forms appeared in 1884, the number of communication pipes had to be amended if the customer wanted more than one house connected, for example. Yet some contract changes made by customers ran counter to regulations, sometimes involving the deletion of entire sections.Footnote 47 It is not recorded how the Lambeth Company dealt with contract alterations, which were problematic in that they demonstrated reduced compliance. In any case, they suggest some disagreement between company and customer concerning rights, roles and responsibilities, and, especially, the ideal form of the water system.
Such disagreements were also evident in debate surrounding domestic fittings, which were almost completely unregulated. The 1871 Water Act asked for ‘efficient’ fittings, but did not define the term. It was hence difficult to establish who was at fault even when systems went wrong. According to legal representatives for the Metropolitan Board of Works: ‘some plumber puts in what he considers to be an efficient screw-down cock; then there is a squabble over it as to whether it is efficient or not; and then there is a meeting with the local magistrate’.Footnote 48 An answer might have been to empower water companies to allow only fittings they manufactured. This happened sporadically, but was ideologically opposed since it acted against free competition. Another possible approach was to allow company employees to stamp acceptable fittings before installation. However, it was not clear they could be trusted. The chairman of the West Middlesex Water Company, when questioned in a parliamentary commission hearing, stated that his company did not stamp fittings since ‘men are not incorruptible’.Footnote 49 It was eventually decided in the 1873 regulations that fittings could be declared as inefficient by water companies if consistently shown to be wasting water, meaning that their performance could only be assessed post-installation.
This was complicated by the issue of access: domestic space was a private area into which the water companies were not readily admitted, despite their having long been interested with the internal non-standard technology of the domicile through service pricing. The companies’ 1852 Special Acts meant that water rates were formulated on the basis of properties’ annual rental value, sometimes augmented by additional charges depending on domestic set-up. A high-service (where water was delivered above 10 to 20 feet above the pavement) increased rates by up to 25 per cent. Extra domestic appliances, such as toilets and baths, further raised water bills. For each further appliance, for example, the Chelsea, Grand Junction, New River and West Middlesex Companies in the 1870s and 1880s raised an additional annual charge of about a fifth of the base rate (4s, 6s and 8s on houses of £50, £80 and £150 annual rent respectively).Footnote 50 Through this type of rate system, domestic space was kept under limited observation by the water companies.
Yet, more sustained monitoring was contested, with encroachment into what was considered to be the business of householders disliked by laissez-faire ideologists, anti-company interests, political radicals and householders alike as interfering with freedom of choice and privacy.Footnote 51 Privacy was a particularly complex issue, with domestic consumption gendered in terms of women controlling water use in the home and males predominately representing households in public forums and in dialogue with their water providers.Footnote 52 For water companies to look closely at water use entailed entering the complex sphere of domestic relationships, and potentially by-passing male domination of consumption representation. Monitoring was also difficult in the context of a wider argument around the municipalization of the water system. The specific issues that this generated include the distrust of water companies as profiteers, and a sensitivity to infrastructural change as a means to buttress/build up water company holdings. At the same time, there was a growing recognition that government bodies, such as the Metropolitan Board of Works, were proving incapable of effectively managing infrastructural development in London.Footnote 53 The growth of the constant water system was thereby entangled with a wider debate about the role of central public bodies and of private companies, and, more generally, about the form of urban governance being promoted in London,Footnote 54 which tended to problematize consumption monitoring by the water companies.
The restriction of access into homes was compounded by legislation that prevented water companies from employing or recommending plumbers, as this was seen as harming competition. The result was that plumbing could not be controlled by the water companies. Installation was carried out by private plumbers and builders only weakly bound by constant supply regulations. Water systems for properties under construction in the Lambeth Company's area, for example, were regulated only by a section on forms requesting water for building purposes informing builders that information about the ‘Proper size and elevation of Cisterns, the description of Cocks, and diameter of Service Pipes, should be obtained from the [water] Company before the commencement of the Plumber's work’.Footnote 55 In existing houses, the situation was even less controlled, with plumbers acting with virtual impunity.
It was widely recognized, however, that water companies needed to be able to police their customers to prevent waste of water via leakage and misuse. In effect, a constant water user had to be configured. Waste, defined primarily as water being allowed to flow away without being utilized to fulfil a specific need, was a particular concern of company engineers, who argued it had the potential to endanger supplies. In the 1870s, for example, the East London Water Company, which led the way in the provision of constant water, had reportedly been forced to restrict water to its constant supply districts through the use of ferrulesFootnote 56 because domestic waste was so high (a practice that was subsequently banned).Footnote 57 Water companies surveillance ranged from the utilization of hearing sticks and calculations of water level/pressure differences at points outside the home (via meters), to physically entering the domicile through waste inspectors.
By the 1890s, the companies employed teams of specialist waste inspectors to police not only domestic technology but also forms of water use, attempting to reduce what they regarded as frivolous consumption. The inspectors faced a huge challenge – the New River Company, for example, employed 38 such inspectors for an area of several thousand households.Footnote 58 The waste inspectors were backed by some legal powers – anyone found guilty of preventing a waste inspector entering a house was liable to a fine. The Lambeth Company's inspectors issued waste notices of any suspected problems with their fittings and possible repercussions if they did not fix them, including termination of supply.Footnote 59 Francis Bolton's Monthly Water Inspection Report was also sometimes provided, presumably to show that the water companies were not being overly self-serving in their actions. Specific notices were issued to poorer districts in order to address the common practice of leaving taps open at night to avoid pipe-freezing. Waste inspections seem to have saved an enormous amount of water. For the half year ending 30 September 1891 in the Lambeth Company's district, for example, consumption per person per day was approximately 26 gallons before inspection and 15 gallons afterwards.Footnote 60
Inspection was seen as necessary to educate the population about correct water use, and hence it was hoped that notices and regular inspections would eventually not be needed as users became accustomed to the constant supply.Footnote 61 In the meantime, waste inspectors encountered customers following extremely wasteful practices, such as leaving water running through toilets on a 24-hour basis.Footnote 62 The Southwark & Vauxhall Company in 1883 prosecuted a landlord who had not provided the necessary fittings for the constant supply, resulting in an estimated loss of a colossal 6,000 gallons per day of water in his properties.Footnote 63 Another landlord reportedly wasted 600 gallons of water per hour for a month while attempting to avoid the cost of a new tap valued at a half-crown.Footnote 64 With the concept of waste constructed as being produced by the user, and the identification of responsible water practices, a water consumer was manufactured who could be held to account if the expectations of water companies were contradicted. The reshaping of responsibility from the personal/domestic (through the need to manage water in one's cistern) to a more community-based social and technical conformity was a key change from the intermittent system to the constant. As much as the constant system focused engineers and legislators on very local technical conditions, so it brought with it a new general consumer perspective.
To summarize, water companies entered domestic space with much resistance and reluctantly on their part. Hindered by competition laws and assertions of the sanctity of private space, the companies could not control what fittings were being installed, who was installing them or how they were being installed. Although they had powers of inspection, these were exercised only after the constant supply had been put in and had an important weakness. If there was no discernible waste, then the companies had no reason to ask exactly what was in the domicile in terms of water technology and how this was set up. This left a potential gap between the ideal constant water system and that actually installed.
The impact of the gap was keenly felt in the East London Water Company district in the 1890s, where the nature of the unrolling of the constant system combined with political and environmental context to produce an event which undermined the constant service itself: a water famine. My aim in the next section is to outline that the supply crisis can be understood to be a result of the domestic regulatory problems outlined above, and to emphasize (in the context of a general lack of evidence) that local relations and politics had an impact on the final form of London's water system.
The East London Water Famine
In the summer of 1895, over a million people in the East End of London experienced a water shortage – the so-called ‘East London Water Famine’. The Famine actually comprised two periods (July to September 1895 and July to late September 1896) with the most severe periods of shortage during the summer seeing supply limited to three hours each day.Footnote 65 The shortage and subsequent public action established the idea of a modern consumer identity, in terms of needs, rights and responsibilities.Footnote 66 It was also the first major challenge to London's constant water system. The details of the Famine present a snapshot of the state of East London's water system after the area had been put on constant supply, and allows us to see just how tenuous the water companies’ control of the system was in the face of a lack of regulatory muscle.
The political backdrop of the Famine highlights the continued difficulties experienced by the water companies in providing water to London. Perhaps the major factor in causing the Famine was a lack of storage on both a service-wide and a domestic scale. It had been recognized in the early 1890s that the East London area was potentially vulnerable to a period of low rainfall due to its reliance on the River Lee and the absence of reserve capacity. Accordingly, clauses of the 1893 East London Water Bill had been intended to allow funds for a reservoir to be raised by the East London Water Company. However, the bill failed to be passed, partly due to resistance from the London County Council (LCC).Footnote 67 The LCC was agitating for municipalization of London's water supply, and this politics may have influenced opposition to the bill. Hence, there was little protection from resource shortages for the water system in East London. At the same time, many of the public were very dependent on consistent supply from their water company due to their domestic technological set-up.
The Famine was a consumption issue as much as an environmental one, being mostly described in terms of a reversion to an intermittent supply (now seen as an insufficient supply).Footnote 68 The customer experience of intermittency was a function of the regulatory difficulties encountered by the water companies: technology that had enabled customers to convert an intermittent to continuous supply in days before a constant supply had been recommended wholesale had been lost. The storage safeguard had been built into the constant system design established in legislation via the inclusion of cisterns – which had been common parts of the intermittent system.Footnote 69 Cisterns protected customers against the cessation of constant supplies, and indeed the East London Water Company issued a notice on 12 July 1895 asking that customers ‘store a reserve while the water is on’.Footnote 70 However, as the Famine played out, it became clear that very few houses that had once been on the intermittent supply had retained their local storage capacity, and new connections had rarely bothered to include a cistern – one sanitary inspector after the first period of shortage estimated that 95 per cent of homes in the East London area were without cisterns.Footnote 71 Where houses had adequate cisterns, the interruption of supplies reportedly had little or no impact on the householders.
The disappearance of the cistern from domestic water systems can be explained by the regulatory landscape. The water companies had very limited control over domestic technology, and the real power on a local level was held by sanitation authorities (set up in earnest in 1875). The sanitation authorities were compelled by the act to ensure their areas had an adequate water supply, and hence they had been drawn into intervening with domestic water systems according to how they interpreted the law. The 1871 Water Act focused attention on cisterns since it contained the clause that if the health of the locality was impaired by the ‘unwholesomeness of [polluted] water in consequence of its being improperly stored’ a constant system would be enforced by the principal secretaries of state.Footnote 72 While this enforcement clause was later removed by the 1875 Water Act, it had established that storage was a potential source of ill-health and inadequate water.
Cisterns in London were viewed by many commentators as generally being in a poor state due to ineffective plumbing, which water companies were in a weak position to protect against. Mostly, the concern followed a miasmic theory of disease. Thomas Pridgin Teale, a public health expert and surgeon, noted that deficiencies in internal plumbing (mostly un-trapped waste-pipes) could let miasma into houses, and based his conception of unhealthy plumbing arrangements predominately on stopping polluted air.Footnote 73 This principle also applied to unhealthy cisterns. In the late 1870s, the New River Company's engineer estimated that as many as two-thirds of cisterns in London had waste-pipes directly connected with the house's sewage pipe.Footnote 74 In one case, ‘When the cover was removed to examine the cistern, the stench was almost intolerable: the trap contained no water, and the overflow was therefore simply a communication-pipe between the sewers and the interior of the cistern.’Footnote 75 Another individual wrote to The Times that his waste inspector was a ‘bumbler’ and that he had been told by his local parish vestry that the plumbing of three-quarters of the houses on his street were in a potentially dangerous state.Footnote 76
Faced with such a situation, the local sanitation authorities were alert to the potential dangers of poor storage, and empowered (indeed, compelled) by law to act. Removal rather than replacement of poor-quality cisterns was cheaper for all involved, particularly since newer quality control regulations had effectively raised the cost of legal cisterns.Footnote 77 Where found, cisterns were hence taken away. However, evidence suggests that such action occurred without the knowledge of water companies.
This led to a disconnection between wider resource and local infrastructural management. The East London Water Company itself was apparently uncertain as to how many cisterns were actually in use during the 1895/96 Famine, and the situation seems to have been the same across London. The secretary of the East London Company wrote in 1896 to the Lambeth Water Company asking whether cisterns were installed in the Lambeth Company's district. The reply expressed uncertainty, stating that ‘[we] have never insisted on a proper storage cistern being fixed before giving a constant supply and I doubt if we have any power to do so’.Footnote 78 The Lambeth Company had, in fact, circulated regulations regarding the conversion from intermittent to constant supply, but were not able to enforce their technical advice. Although these were largely a reiteration of the 1871 Water Act, there had been one addition (printed in red): ‘Owners and occupiers are strongly advised in all cases to retain in use the existing cisterns, as in times of severe frost, &c., they afford a store of water.’Footnote 79 Whether cisterns had been retained or installed could not be ascertained by waste inspection reports, the main company domestic surveillance strategy. These noted the number of houses inspected, daily averages of houses per inspector, number of effective fittings and compliance rate, but not the state of internal delivery technology. The companies were, therefore, effectively blind to what was going on within the domicile.
The eradication of poor cisterns, in combination with the imposition of a constant system, reportedly improved public health.Footnote 80 Yet it also increased customers’ dependence on uninterrupted constant supply, leaving them ‘without any means for storage in the day of need and [teaching] them to be careless and wasteful’.Footnote 81 In the wake of the East London Water Famine, where local storage was sorely needed, the sanitation authorities were duly criticized as having done nothing to anticipate leaks and faults, or prepare for the event that whole areas might be required to go back onto intermittent supply if water shortages occurred. Much as had been argued by company engineers in parliament two decades before, commentators stated that the ‘proper remedy for bad cisterns is good ones, not none at all’.Footnote 82 The government enquiry into the Famine subsequently stated that ‘for the protection of the consumer against unavoidable temporary intermissions of the supply . . . there would be a distinct advantage in having properly-designed means for storage of water in houses’.Footnote 83 This was a futile recommendation, which was never realized.
The East London Water Famine highlights that the water companies had very limited control over the domestic particulars of the constant system. Just as street works put companies in opposition to local interests that forced legal and technological negotiation, so they were at a disadvantage to local sanitation authorities, which had been empowered to take action. The danger of unregulated builders and plumbers installing domestic water technology was realized in the removal of cisterns. The presence or absence of these devices indicates that there were at least two different domestic system configurations. While we have very limited evidence, anecdotal reports of commentators (such as Pridgin Teale) encourage the view that there may have been others. Hence, the lack of regulatory control meant that the final water system was not as envisaged by water company engineers, and was not necessarily suited to London's natural resources or its population's water needs as recognized in parliament.
Conclusion
The present study described the difficulties faced by the water companies in delivering constant water in the context of a lack of regulatory control, which have tended to be underestimated by historians. While tactics (contract agreements and inspection) were employed to limit waste and encourage technical convergence, company engineers ultimately struggled to overcome the problem of accessing the domicile. The loss of control over domestic technology exposed the infrastructure to a crisis like the East London Water Famine. Having driven the constant water changeover, water companies were, therefore, in a vulnerable position at the end of the nineteenth century – the constant switch was largely complete, there was continuing distrust of private ownership of water supply, and domestic system expertise was largely held by private plumbers and sanitation authorities. We might speculate, although further work would be required reliably to establish such a link, that this vulnerability may have been a contributory factor in the successful drive to municipalize the water supply in 1902.
Although nominally London had been mostly brought under a single constant service by the late 1890s, different domestic technical arrangements existed. Previous histories of London's water have tended to gloss over this heterogeneity; however, it has potentially important implications for how we view the development of water in London. The counter-intuitive point that a potentially fragmented system was the basis of a modern unified water supply deserves explanation, and tends to focus attention on a marginalized group in London's water history, private plumbers. It also underlines the importance of further work to understand how households actually utilized water on an everyday basis, and how constant water may have altered these practices.
Taking a wider perspective, the manner of the constant takeover had consequences for the management of water resources and the relationship of the urban population with the environment. A Times editorial in 1896 stated that water was ‘one of the most precious gifts of nature, which . . . is [householders’] duty to economize . . . water is not manufactured by the companies, and cannot be produced by them at will’.Footnote 84 Yet the construction of the constant water system arguably encouraged the opposite view. Not only, contrary to legislation, were cisterns removed, thereby taking away a means by which householders could monitor their own use, but a constant supply also encouraged the illusion of water as an unlimited resource, and configured users in this mould. Concepts of waste and efficiency became very important in municipal management in a system that eschewed metering, and the liberation of supply necessitated the disciplining of users. There was, implicitly at least, an agreement that if users consumed water in a ‘responsible’ way, water companies had to find water for them – hence, consumption desires trumped supply difficulties.
System failures, as in East London, thereby both expose fragile technical arrangements and highlight how far the public had come to rely on the water companies supplying uninterrupted water. Yet effective resource management was made difficult by the combination of public apathy about the effects of unrestrained consumption on wider water resources, and resistance to water providers controlling domestic use. Coping with these features remains a major challenge in London and globally, encouraging the view that constant water may not be sustainable in cities worldwide in the face of water shortages and climate change.Footnote 85 In particular, constant supply restricts the adaptive capacity of water systems. Demand management at the household level has been widely recognized as an adaptation option for mitigating water shortages,Footnote 86 but the imperative to provide constant water impedes investigation of supply management strategies – i.e. limiting how much water is provided in the first place. Seeing the continuing urban pursuit of constant supply as a normative expectation (or ‘modern infrastructural ideal’)Footnote 87 rather than an inevitable development encourages the view that it might be reconsidered. Yet, generalizing lessons from London's history, there is a key challenge to be overcome: a consequence of the apparent freedom enabled by unlimited supply has been the trapping (technologically and socio-culturally) of users in a constant mode of consumption.
