London: Water and the Making of the Modern City

Acknowledgments

vii I thank Amy Broich. I also thank Professors Bill Baker, Laurel Carrington, Jan Dizard, Paula Findlen, Brad Gregory, Dick Judd, Michel LeGall, Martha McNamara , Paul Seaver, Bill TeBrake, and Eric Weitz. I also owe thanks to colleagues Matthew Booker, Dan Cohen, Jared Farmer, Jules Gehrke, Rick Lopez, Chris Otter, Carol Pal, Jonathan Sadowsky, Priya Satia, Lisa Sedrez, Renee Sentilles, Peter Shulman, Rachel St. John, and Rod Wilson. And I thank the Case Western Reserve University Department of History for many reasons. And I owe thanks to Rhea Cabin, Margaret Harris, Don Johnson, Marissa Ross, Kalli Vimr, and Emily Sparks. I owe great debts to Bill Cronon, John Hassan, Chris Hamlin, Martin Melosi, and Dale Porter that go underacknowledged in the body of this book. I thank Stanford University and the Department of History there for all kinds of support, including research travel awards. I thank Greg Call and Amherst College for the same. And I thank Case Western Reserve University, including the W. P. Jones Fund, for research travel support. Thanks are also due the Ursu Family Foundation. And thank you to the University of Pittsburgh Press, including David Baumann, Cynthia Miller, and Ann Walston, as well as freelance editor Maureen Creamer Bemko. This book benefited greatly from the Sanitary Reform of London Collection in the special collections department of the Stanford UniAcknowledgments Acknowledgments viii versity library. These materials contain the Metropolitan Board of Works and Metropolitan Water Board waterworks libraries. As such, the collection includes both Joseph Bazalgette’s working library and the collections of other agencies and corporations replaced by the Metropolitan Water Board. It is an astounding and still underused resource, and the staff of the Stanford library special collections department are an astounding group, too. Renowned archivist Margaret Kimball, now retired, was of critical help. I also thank the staff of the British Library at St. Pancras and Colindale, Historical Manuscripts Commission, London School of Economics Library, Surrey History Centre, National Archives (or Public Record Office, as it was still known when I did much of my work there), New York Public Library, and Wellcome Trust Archives. Special thanks are due the London Metropolitan Archives, where I performed the majority of the research for this book. Peter Stansky, a student of David Owen, a historian of the Metropolitan Board of Works, began his long career as a scholar of Victorian political culture. It seems fitting that I was one of Professor Stansky’s last PhD students. He is as gracious as he is expert, and I continue to learn from him. It might surprise some that Richard White was the other main forebear of this book. I humbly aspire to adequately reward some day his patient teaching. ...