Parched City Read Free

subjects connected with water appear in a more specific light and other subjects must also be included. Architecture, culture, economics, environmentalism, law, medicine, politics, even religion, and science all have a bearing on this story. As the medical historian Anne Hardy noted about English water histories: ‘Although various accounts of the history of water technology, and learned articles on the political and administrative aspects of water supply have been written, the history of water in relation to public health remains largely unexplored.’ 8 Benefitting from Hardy’s own response to this dearth of research and building on some of her discoveries about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, my focus on drinking water places the body, human health and the consumer in the foreground of this tale.
    Whether we see drinking water as a commodity or a utility or a basic human right, understanding its nuanced history is vital for informing decisions about how future cities might benefit from referencing lessons of the past. Two scholars of London’s nineteenth century water consumer politics, Frank Trentmann and Vanessa Taylor, frame their research in this way: ‘Water continues to bring together long-standing issues of citizenship, social exclusion, consumer education and human development alongside more recent concerns about sustainability. Historians and social scientists would do well to reintegrate ordinary goods like water into the study of consumer society.’ 9 Considering that ‘ordinary’ good more specifically as
drinking
water raises some questions more prominently than others. When did concerns about water quality for human consumption first arise in London and how have they altered? Is there any truth in the urban myth that eighteenth and nineteenth century Londoners, even children, consciously chose to drink alcohol instead of water because they believed it to be contaminated? When did packaged water first appear as a product? What caused the bottled water market to grow so dramatically in the 1980s?
    Answering these questions would have been impossible without the ground laid by many excellent scholars. In addition to urban water researchers, such as Matthew Gandy, Anne Hardy, Vanessa Taylor and Frank Trentmann, I would particularly cite the social historian John Burnett’s chapter on drinking water in his book
Liquid Pleasures
, published in 1999, as an invaluable reference. As he notes ‘water remains the principle liquid drunk in Britain’, reminding us how physiologically central the substance is to our daily lives. 10 As we know, water forms a large percentage of our matter, a constituent of our very cells, our blood and our vital organs. We can get it from fruit and vegetables and yet we often crave this vital liquid as a sole substance of nourishment.
    This story expands on aspects of Britain’s drinking waterhistory that Burnett illuminates in
Liquid Pleasures
, using London as a further anchor to see how the city shapes our relationship with using, and demanding, pure water refreshment.
    As an architectural historian employing my drinking water sieve to trawl London’s modern history, I want to find out more about how urban spaces were produced in relation to water access, how they were used, how they were experienced and how they have changed over time. This spatial question — private, public and other — is a neglected facet of most existing London water histories. Everyday demands for water in the city have greatly shaped the design, use and experience of our built environment. Built objects and material products such as conduits, pipes, water coolers and sites of water treatment plants can be highly significant in what they tell us about drinking water’s role in our culture and society. Consider, for instance, the curious nineteenth century fountains that pockmark London, with their desiccated pipes and litter-filled bowls. Why were they built and for whose use? What caused