London: Water and the Making of the Modern City

Chapter 5. An Alternative Vision of the Modern City, an Alternative Government of Water

121 F rom the mid-1890s into the new century, the Salisbury government clearly understood that to control the flow of water was to control the flow of power. In their dealings with the London County Council’s attempts to take over water service in the capital, the Conservatives who controlled Britain’s government proved themselves deft practitioners of the craft of water politics. They obstructed the LCC’s bills seeking power to purchase London’s water companies, they opposed the council’s Welsh scheme that would have served the LCC’s vision, and they supported the rival Staines scheme that facilitated private water control. For the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Conservative government’s strategy in dealing with the LCC was simply to thwart its attempts to remake the city through the control and manipulation of water. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, however, the government found that a strategy of negative reaction would no longer suffice. Drought overtook the region, and the water companies that the Conservatives had been protecting simply could not meet London’s needs. London’s Conservative MPs and the Moderates on the county council feared electoral reprisal. The voters demanded action, but the Conservatives could not let the LCC triumph. In their eyes, the LCC Y chapter 5 Z An Alternative Vision of the Modern City, an Alternative Government of Water An Alternative Vision of the Modern City, an Alternative Government of War 122 was led by doctrinaire, ambitious, acquisitive politicos who, if given the chance, would abuse democracy and seize control of land, water, and industry. In these years, Conservatives and dogmatic Liberals were beginning to envisage a future in which private enterprise and property were threatened by the spread of municipal activity. They could not allow London to become a vanguard of collectivization and centralization . They believed the government needed to take action and install its own water administration for London—the Metropolitan Water Board (MWB). Conservatives recognized that a system of environmental administration could influence systems of power. It could reinforce social structures, support economic trends, and obstruct others and could also create authority where none had been before. The leaders of the national government carefully crafted a water administration designed to distribute power where they wanted it in order to realize their own vision for the future of London. In this London, state enterprise would be kept to a minimum, the centralizing tendencies of the LCC rejected in favor of more localized control, and volatile democracy tempered with altruistic oligarchy. Gas, water, locomotion, labor, housing—the core elements of the urban ecosystem—should not fall into the hands of the Fabian and Progressive puppet masters who would manipulate these services for their own revolutionary ends. Instead, they intended control to be placed in a mix of private hands, corporate hands, and, frankly, Conservative hands. This was a modern London to oppose that of the Fabians. Linking Municipalization with the Spread of Collectivization in 1900 In 1899, a group of influential Conservative politicians began to campaign for an official parliamentary inquiry into the growth of municipal enterprise throughout Britain. They pointed out that Parliament would consider in the upcoming session—along with the LCC’s water bills—approximately seventy bills for the establishment or municipalization of various utilities and services, from water to electricity to the manufacture of boilers for civic operations.1 This surfeit was, in their eyes, cause for alarm. “Municipal trading,” wrote the Earl of Wemyss, a longtime MP and formerly a member of the Liberty and Property Defence League, might come to “supersede all private trading.” He considered this prospect a threat to “human progress” itself. He called An Alternative Vision of the Modern City, an Alternative Government of War 123 for a joint committee of the Houses of Parliament to “put a stopper on municipal ambition and the speculating of municipal authorities with the ratepayers’ money.”2 John Lubbock, now Lord Avebury and a former Moderate member of the LCC, joined Wemyss in campaigning for parliamentary hearings, which the Commons and Lords agreed to the next spring, even while the LCC was introducing yet another purchase bill.3 And so in May 1900, the Joint Select Committee on Municipal Trading began to take evidence to determine whether municipal enterprise had expanded too far.4 Witnesses included industrialists, small manufactory owners, municipal figures, town clerks, and other experts. Queries tended to...