London: Water and the Making of the Modern City

Chapter 2. Great Expectations: The First Efforts to Reform London with Water

31 T he present arrangements of water supply are defective in ‘plenty, purity, pressure, and price,’” wrote one commentator regarding London in 1849.1 Another added, “We ought, by this time, to have learned that the very foundation of moral training in a London tenement is a pipe of wholesome water from the top to the bottom of the house.”2 For London’s would-be reformers, just as it was for the campaigners of Glasgow, Manchester, and Liverpool, social reform was synonymous with urban environmental reform. In the same years in which Glaswegians stood in long lines to draw water from a scattering of pumps and citizens of York suffered muddy tap water, Londoners complained of “water-companies who give us bad water in a bad way.”3 And, at the same time that the activists of Bradford argued that the progress of “public morality” could be measured by the extent to which local government took responsibility for putting water in the hands of the poor, so did many in London equate “sanitary amelioration ” with “moral progress.”4 The reformist ideals expressed in hinterland towns by so many were also voiced in London, and the pressures so many towns experienced were even more strongly felt in London. Between 1800 and 1880, London added around 44,000 inhabitants per year, or 3.5 million new Y chapter 2 Z Great Expectations The First Efforts to Reform London with Water “ Great Expectations 32 residents. Its growth rate was greater than that of most other towns and on a far greater scale.5 None of the rapidly growing industrial cities such as Manchester or Birmingham ever grew to more than approximately 1.0 million persons.6 The river that London straddled and on which it depended for its water supply was at least as polluted by industry and sewage as Glasgow’s Clyde or Manchester’s Irwell. And when cholera invaded Britain in 1831, 1848, 1853, and 1865, London suffered more deaths than any other town in the kingdom, approximately 20, 25, 55, and 40 percent of all cholera deaths in those respective years.7 The first British towns to take control of their water supplies and build new, improved waterworks began their efforts in 1840, but fifty years later London still had done nothing. The experiences of London offer a sharp contrast to those of other towns. Hinterland towns rejected the idea of improving supplies by regulating privately owned water companies and instead took over the companies’ operations, while in London’s case, Parliament made attempts at regulation. Whereas in the hinterlands, local water sources were routinely abandoned after being deemed unbefitting an improved community, a royal commission pronounced the Thames a suitable water source for London. And while provincial centers employed John Frederic La Trobe-Bateman and other prominent engineers to create often monumental waterworks , a royal commission rejected a colossal scheme that Bateman offered to London. Outside of London, local governments transformed water systems in the name of modernizing their towns—with the simple acquiescence of Parliament through easily passed private acts. Because London lacked a municipal government structure parallel to that of Manchester, Liverpool , or Birmingham, for example, the capital could look only to Parliament for help with its water crisis. The ancient City of London, which made up only a fraction of the area and population of the metropolis, enjoyed a relatively effective administration, but the area beyond the limits of its medieval walls—more than a hundred square miles by the mid-nineteenth century—did not. The most basic functions of urban maintenance were carried out with patchy efficacy by parish patricians. Despite suffering the same environmental problems that other industrializing towns experienced, and despite many in London sharing the same ideals of improving lives through environmental reform, the numerous limited local authorities could never hope to accomplish a Loch Katrine or Vyrnwy scheme. Great Expectations 33 Twice in the second half of the nineteenth century—with the creation of the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) and the London County Council (LCC)—Parliament granted London the right to govern itself as a whole and with a degree of real power. When it did, Londoners proved as anxious to reform their environment as the residents of any British city. Indeed, when first granted a relatively central body in the MBW in 1855, London built itself monumental waterworks. But while provincial towns tended to undertake large...