London: Water and the Making of the Modern City

Conclusion

147 Conclusion This story opens at a moment of change, on the eve of a period when the rapidly expanding urban environment forced a transformation in the nature of British urban government. In the growing industrial towns of the first half of the nineteenth century, industrial waste and the concentration of large populations created acute environmental pressures. In this period, water, a primary necessity for human life, was both hard to obtain and hard to dispose of after use. It was difficult for townspeople to eliminate spent water from their habitations because of inadequate drainage systems and difficult for them to secure clean water in an environment glutted with lingering waste and lacking adequate water supply systems. Existing water companies were notoriously poor at supplying water of good quality and on a dependable basis to a majority of the population. Solving these problems demanded constitutional changes in the urban governments that had come into being—though without many specified powers—through the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. Beginning in that year, councils applied to Parliament to expand their power and financial strength so that they could address water crises and avert disasters such as epidemics . Councils proceeded by buying commercial water operations, expanding their sources of supply, and building drainage systems. The implication of this development for historians is that contingent environmental factors had the power to generate political modifications. The significance of this stage in terms of this narrative is that, from this Conclusion 148 moment, supplying water to the populace was recognized as a primary duty of new local governments. Soon, a segment of the urban elite began to see that water supply held greater importance than just practical considerations, such as preventing disease outbreaks. These elite leaders began to imagine their cities flush with water, with fountains, public baths, and aqueducts that would deliver pristine water from remote hills. They pictured their community’s productivity and population freed from any limits. And they began to envision the poor, long imagined to be unable to clean themselves and their abodes, raised to virtue by a new ease of access to water. These civic leaders coupled environmental pollution with moral pollution, and they took it upon themselves to deliver water to every home, no matter how lowly. They saw themselves as part of a new breed of moral governors. This development marks a turning point in the history of water, a phase when water came to stand for much more than itself—it would become an instrumental force for realizing a new kind of civic society. To fulfill this vision, the majority of cities that took over local water companies quickly augmented the existing systems by building new— often massive—waterworks. These projects further concentrated power in the hands of councils because, to develop new sources of supply, cities appropriated land outside of their limits and had to gain parliamentary sanction to issue stock to finance the purchase of land and pay for construction. A new prevailing model of waterworks, engineers claimed, satisfied all the requirements of the new water supply ideal—it provided pristine, abundant water under constant pressure and available to any location in the city twenty-four hours a day. With that, the new environmental projects and works that delivered this health- and morality-boosting element took on symbolic importance. Modernizing waterworks represented physical environmental change in the urban hinterland that was to have an enlightening effect on the distant city. This profound shift offers a challenge to the long-standing conventional wisdom that modernity tended to proceed at the command of the central state, which executed large-scale projects that generated environmental change or rationalization for the purpose of realizing social change. This case, as well as alternative choices for administering water supply, offers a different mode of modernity and mechanisms of modernization. Britain’s capital faced the same environmental pressures as other Conclusion 149 industrial cities or rather even more, being one of the largest cities in the world. From early in the nineteenth century, London’s would-be reformers fulminated about its water problems, but as the decades passed and provincial towns changed their environments, London accomplished little. Only at the point of an epidemiological gun in the form of looming cholera did London construct a sewage system in the middle of the century. This achievement fulfilled only part of the goal reformers envisioned; in preceding years, they had called for...