London: Water and the Making of the Modern City

Introduction

ix In 1844, the engineer James Smith explored the alleys and courts of Leeds, stepping through and around the cast-off filth of the poorest of the city’s 170,000 inhabitants. He encountered heaps of waste that lingered for six months and the stench of drains that lacked any flushing water for unknown spans of time.1 Meanwhile, Dr. William Kay scouted Bristol, where only 5,000 of its 130,000 inhabitants enjoyed piped water , the remainder walking long distances to draw from public wells or, more often, simply going without.2 James Martin investigated Leicester, where the sick suffered from a lack of water due to the scarcity of common pumps in working-class neighborhoods.3 Smith, Kay, and Martin were members of the Commission for Inquiring into the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts, an official government investigation of the severity and causes of the health and sanitation problems more and more frequently seen, or smelled, in Britain’s cities; its thirteen commissioners visited Britain’s fifty largest cities and towns, met with local doctors and public health officials, and conducted a survey of each locale’s water supply, water drainage and waste handling, workingclass housing, and other living conditions. They argued that Britain’s cities, their populations having grown extraordinarily in recent decades, had not expanded their water and sewer capacity proportionately; water sources that were sufficient for the populations of previous centuries were stretched to their limits and threatened with the refuse of larger populations. There were few Introduction Introduction x sewers as we know them. Water removal provisions usually aimed to shunt storm water away from structures and did not always include any sort of flushing except by rain. Private companies, which operated most cities’ water supplies, tended to serve wealthier neighborhoods while bypassing the poorest. In the absence of effective central legislation or regulating authorities, these companies could not be forced to provide a constant service, nor were they all obligated to maintain a minimum standard of quality. The result, according to the commissioners’ work in 1844–45, was a precarious situation that they believed threatened the health of millions; epidemic lurked in the poorly disposed waste of the masses, in the water supply tainted with it, and in a supply that threatened to fail at any moment, perhaps in the middle of an outbreak of disease. For the commissioners, it was rather straightforward to identify the intolerable state of affairs: insufficient clean water was being introduced into cities and insufficient polluted water was being extracted from them. In the eyes of investigators, a myriad of other urban problems would be solved if only this hydraulic input/output problem were solved. They contended that working-class dwellings would be cleaner, pure water would replace alcohol as a beverage, and the workers would wash more often, thus inhibiting illness. Correcting the situation was less straightforward. Restructuring cities’ water systems demanded urban governments with clearly defined and broad powers, and these were very rare before the turn of the twentieth century. But the 1844–45 commission and investigations like it, coupled with cholera outbreaks in 1848 and 1853, elicited impassioned newspaper columns, public debate, and, ultimately, environmental action undertaken by urban governments and endorsed by the national government. There was, in short, a transformation in government machinery in order to repair cities’ hydraulic machinery. Cities sought and received the authority and means to purchase private water companies, and they borrowed large sums of money to construct sewers and build new waterworks. Action was widespread and profound even in an age that valued economizing. Between 1841 and 1881, the proportion of municipalities that took responsibility for providing their own water supply doubled, with more than 150 towns and cities adopting municipal water supplies.4 In the same period, increases in the average water consumption per head ranged from around 60 percent to as much as 400 percent.5 The changes in Britain’s urban governments were profound not Introduction xi only for the sheer magnitude of the water system reformation across towns and cities but also because of a new ideal that was prominent in the debate about identifying and solving urban water problems. Many of those who transformed urban water regimes acted on principle as well as pragmatism, basing their action on a vision of what they considered an enlightened—a modern—society and city. From the 1840s onward, a belief developed...