London: Water and the Making of the Modern City

Chapter 1. Water and the Making of the Modern British City

1 T he general picture of water supply in Britain before 1800 is varied, consisting of individual private sources, community sources, and small-scale commercial sources operated by single entrepreneurs or small groups more or less satisfying the needs of Britain’s towns. Prior to the explosive urban population growth rates of the nineteenth century, there were far fewer difficulties in ensuring that sufficient clean water entered such towns. Communities could rely on drinking water sources that had been used for centuries: a local river or pond, a house well, and so on. Town corporations and charities usually organized modest shared supplies as well, in the forms of neighborhood wells and cisterns supplied by conduits from hinterland streams or springs, for example. The City of London built a number of conduits leading from countryside springs and streams to public cisterns from the thirteenth century onward.1 Charitable patrons offered a fountain in sixteenth-century Manchester.2 Glasgow’s magistrates provided a scattering of wells in the eighteenth century.3 There were also some enterprising individuals who saw an opportunity to provide a convenient service for profit in early modern towns. One of the oldest and most common forms of water enterprise was the simple water cart. A hardy individual would push or pull a cart holding a large barrel of Y chapter 1 Z Water and the Making of the Modern British City Water and the Making of the Modern British City 2 water drawn from a reliable water source and sell to consumers who could not rely on a well or did not want to trek to it. More complex services involved conveying water from outside towns’ boundaries and even piping water directly to consumers’ buildings. For example, in the mid-seventeenth century, two men undertook to pipe water into Belfast from its nearby hinterland via hollow tree trunks.4 One William Yarnold bought a license from Newcastle’s town council to bore into a local spring in 1697.5 In 1581, the City of London granted one entrepreneur a lease to one of London Bridge’s arches in which he built a waterwheel that pumped Thames water (though it already had a lessthan -spotless reputation) into a rooftop holding tank; it then passed to customers’ premises under pressure in wooden pipes.6 Just as water supply arrangements were haphazard, so was the regulation of water suppliers and supplies. What little regulation existed was decentralized. Some town (corporation) charters included the obligation and right to protect local water supplies from misuse and pollution , for example; in other areas magistrates oversaw water sources by ancient custom.7 However, it was extremely rare that local authorities had a legal obligation to supply water for drinking or sewerage or had the statutory means to enforce their rights.8 Townspeople, then, could not expect a reliably sufficient or pure supply of water. Reliability and purity were threatened by the demographic changes of the first half of the nineteenth century. Britain’s population rapidly expanded in the period, and the numbers of city dwellers grew almost as quickly. The population of England and Wales doubled between 1800 and 1850, with Scotland and Ireland following close behind.9 London’s population nearly doubled between 1800 and 1840, while Leicester’s and Manchester’s populations tripled, rising from 16,953 to 50,806 and 96,000 to 313,000, respectively.10 In 1800, no city besides London could claim 100,000 inhabitants; by 1840 there were five such cities in England.11 By the middle of the period, a larger proportion of Britain’s population lived in towns than in any other Western country .12 Explanations for this increase in population are hotly debated, but among the principal contributors were a high rate of marital fertility in the growing cities and a decreasing death rate abetted by dietary improvements.13 For the first time, too, towns ceased to be places where the death rate outstripped the birth rate; migration to cities, then, added numbers on top of the natural increase.14 The industrial changes of the early nineteenth century invited such migration. There Water and the Making of the Modern British City 3 had been cottage industry, with families producing handicrafts to supplement agricultural work, since time immemorial, but more and more often in the late eighteenth century, entrepreneurs, especially in the textile industry, saw an opportunity to increase productivity by concentrating more and...