Parish pump to private pipes: London's water supply in the nineteenth century.

Water is an essential item in our diet, and in many of the procedures which make up our daily lives. A constant supply ofsafe domestic water laid on to our homes, places of work, and places of entertainment has been, until quite recently, an unquestioned convenience of modern life. A hundred and fifty years ago, however, this standard of civilization was little more than a dream, which medical men and sanitary reformers were beginning to work towards; our recent anxieties are of a different order from those which exercised Victorian health reformers. In London, it took almost eighty years ofendeavour before constant piped water was laid on to most homes, and it was not until the 1920s that domestic water supplies could finally be guaranteed free from accidental organic pollution. The problems to be overcome before the dream was implemented were immense, and began with the very sources of London's water, the rivers Thames and Lea, and the surface wells which had supplied homes in the city for centuries. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most Londoners were supplied with domestic water, raw and unfiltered, from one of these sources, either commercially or by their own private efforts. Under either arrangement, supplies were uncertain and intermittent, and water had to be stored in the home, and was generally subject to further domestic pollution. Quality, quantity, and continuity of supply were the issues which were to dominate public health concern with water until the end of the century. In a famous passage published in 1869, William Morris urged his readers to, "dream of London small, and white, and clean, / The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green". Although it is doubtful if London was ever clean, or the Thames clear, it was a powerful image. Morris was brought up in Walthamstow, then a village to the east of London, in the 1 830s: it was, he recorded, a pleasant place, but later became "terribly cocknified and choked up by the jerry builder".' Morris's experience of the changes that accompanied the fantastic growth of city and industry in these years, which was among the factors that shaped his utopian vision, was not unique, but was shared by all who remembered London, or some part of it, from the earlier years of the century. The conditions which provoked the desire for reform were brought about, at least in part,