Parched City (32 page)

If a state or a public-private partnership did come to fruition, it would be the first professionally planned scheme of free drinking water in London.

The GLA’s current vision does acknowledge that conventional drinking fountains may not be the sole solution to affordable water access, equally parading the notion of ‘refill stations’. What should the fountains of the twenty-first century look like, who should be responsible for funding them and how might they succeed where others have desiccated? Some recent projects have got the ball rolling and deserve to be mentioned.

Ultimate Designs

During my research for this book, the Royal Parks embarked on an international architecture and drinking fountain quest (there has certainly been a strong zeitgeist propelling this history book into the present tense). Once the Freeman Family Fountain project in Hyde Park was in situ, the Chief Executive of the Royal Parks Foundation, Sara Lom, was hooked on the free drinking
water topic.
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About that time, Tiffany ¦ Co. Foundation had set its sights on the Grade One-listed environs of Hyde Park for a project to mark its tenth anniversary. Following a stroll around Hyde Park with the person from Tiffany’s, Lom consulted the Park managers about the prospect of splashing this cash on more drinking fountains. Hey presto, in 2010 a competition for an ‘ultimate drinking fountain’ was launched to find a design suitable for replication throughout the Royal Parks.
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Under the banner of
Tiffany’s Across the Water
, £1,000,000 was donated for the development of a new drinking fountain template, along with the restoration of 43 historic drinking fountains in the Royal Parks and some decorative water features. In collaboration with the Royal Institute of British Architects, the competition attracted over 150 entries from 26 countries. The specialist design and sanitary-ware expert judges could not settle upon an ultimate design: joint winners had to be declared. Announced in 2011, prizes were awarded to the elegant, elongated bronze
Trumpet
by Moxon Architects and the granite human-and-dog-friendly
Watering Holes
of Robin Monotti Architects.
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In January 2012, the first
Trumpet
was inaugurated with a live fanfare by the Band of Life Guards in Kensington Gardens and a Watering Hole was ready for drinkers to use in Green Park by June. Olympics year was not the reason for these celebrations but it was certainly another motive to get the amenities installed and functioning.

A little trumpeted fact about the Royal Parks is the precedent of an existing drinking fountain restoration in Regent’s Park for the Millennium.
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Originally installed in 1869, the opulent structure of the Readymoney fountain, situated prominently on the main pedestrian thoroughfare of Broad Walk, was bequeathed by a gentleman from India’s Parsee community during the philanthropic fountain craze.
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Back in 2000, anti-bottled water debate was not high on the environmental agenda when climate change was still gaining profile as the issue of the new century. Consequently, this restoration was not heralded for its green credentials. The restored fountain is not just a heritage showpiece. Readymoney dispenses water constantly, particularly on hot days, to Broad Walk’s walkers and bikers. If the
Royal Parks does roll out the ultimate fountains across its hectares of land, the popularity of Regent’s Park facility bodes well for their use. Waste reduction could be significant if drinking fountains prevent bottled water sales in the Royal Parks because 37 million visitors a year reportedly enjoying these environmental lungs.
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In order for large-scale behaviour shift to occur people have to be aware of these amenities. No easy alternatives would help, such as retailers selling bottled water within metres of drinking fountains. On my last trip to Hyde Park, in September 2012, I checked the café outlets and found that they
were well stocked with Harrogate Spa water at £1.60 for 500ml. Parting with this sum for a convenient bottle of chilled, quality-assured, drinking water has simply become habitual. Beyond Hyde Park, retailers who align themselves with environmental policies of waste reduction, or addressing food provenance, often still stock bottled water but of so-called ethical brands. Even for those who claim to be environmentally responsible consumers, purchasing water in a bottle seems to reassure them. Conversely, many café and restaurant staff now make a point of serving tap water to show they are doing their bit to lubricate culture, and therefore, behaviour change. Bottled water is usually still available alongside their offer.

Readymoney drinking fountain, Broad Walk, Regent’s Park, 2010.
Author’s own photograph.

This study could not stretch to learning more about the reasons that motivate complex consumer choices in London today, but it is clear that, outside of commercial retail spaces, tap water access is problematic. Long-term, for free tap water resources to dent the bottled water demand and supply equation, they have to become a basic expectation in public places. In short, drinking fountains or any tap water refill facilities must be plentiful and located where they are most likely to be heavily used and well advertised. Only then can they make their transition from novel to normal.

Tiffany’s and the Royal Parks also hope that its template fountains might crop up in parks and public spaces internationally, as a legacy of their competition. The ultimate drinking fountain quest certainly seems to have breathed fresh inspiration into what twenty-first century drinking fountains might look like, how they function and why they should be supported by public space managers. Enquiries from abroad have started, though Sara Lom is coy about divulging from where. Given Tiffany’s involvement with funding the incredible High Line Park, on a disused railway line in New York, these prototypes could spring up in some equally fantastic locations on Tiffany’s home turf, America.

Illustrious fountain locations understandably attract benefactors more readily than more banal public environs. Who, for instance, will fund fountains in railway stations? Some are, admittedly, more glamorous than others. In 1949, the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association announced its triumph of installing fountains in London’s mainline train stations. Euston, St Pancras, Victoria, Liverpool Street, Fenchurch Street and King’s Cross all received donated fountains.
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British Rail evidently had more of a penchant for easing this civic provision than its successor, Network Rail. Now, every available square metre of space in railway stations, save platforms and essential thoroughfares, is filled with retail ‘opportunities’. In the freshly regenerated St Pancras, the cathedral-like station is awash with drinking water choices, as long as you are happy to pay for your choice of bottled water brand from the saturated shop shelves. Nowhere in that bastion of modern, world-class, public space is even a small drinking fountain to be found. Under the new canopy of its refurbished neighbour, King’s Cross, the impressive expanse of a spider’s web-like white steel structure is not a shelter for even a minor hydration amenity. Both stations have been re-designed by internationally acclaimed architectural and urban master-planning practices whose work spans other cities of global stature such as Dubai, Moscow and Shanghai.
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In architectural and engineering projects on these scales, the minor detail of a drinking fountain might simply be overlooked or specifically unwanted by clients. Such omissions pose a deep challenge about how to argue the design of this amenity
into
daily life, like they must appear in prisons or are more commonly found in primary schools (the latter is, incredibly, not a legal requirement despite the obvious case for sufficient hydration easing mental concentration).
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Contrast King’s Cross station with a similarly traffic filled public building, which has embedded the need for hydration into its very skin.

Users

On the Find-A-Fountain website’s drinking water map, a blue-grey dot on the Euston Road marks the British Library. The dot represents one of only 28 indoor working fountains logged by volunteer researchers across London (not a lot for a population of millions).
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Each floor of the Library contains two robust, yet elegant, stainless steel fonts. They are set into the walls of the communal areas where the library’s users, known as ‘readers’, frequently pass by. These amenities are required for a building where water cannot be permitted to enter the reading rooms containing rare books. What is so notable about the British Library’s drinking fountains is their integration into the current building, designed by Colin St John Wilson architects. Not clumsily piped in as an afterthought; these fountains are stitched into the fabric of the building. Readers and other visitors can sip perfectly chilled water at the spotless fonts either by using the thin, biodegradable paper cone-shaped cups supplied, or by refilling their own vessels. These fountains are heavily used. Located in close proximity to the building’s toilets, they are just far enough from the loo doors to endow them with entirely sanitary associations. Even so, the British Library’s restaurant, cafés and vending machines continue to stock bottled water choices (sadly like the Royal and Olympic Parks). Given the regular use of the amenities, with short queues often forming, one wonders what would happen if bottled water was totally withdrawn from the building’s shops? A riot?

In the current consumer and retail climate, I wonder if we can ever imagine a shop not selling bottled water? Given that even environmentally progressive retailers opt for ‘ethical’ water brands such as Belu or One water, for instance, to propose the complete absence of the product seems revolutionary. Notably, that revolution has started in Bundanoon, a town in Australia just a couple of hours north of Sydney where shops agreed to stop stocking bottled water in July 2009.
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This move might be the only
way that customers will be forced to think about why they purchase expensive bottles of water and for stockists to think about how its drinking water profits can be met, if needed, some other way.

Back in central London, just west of the British Library along Euston Road, another dot for an indoor fountain on the Find-A- Fountain website represents University College Hospital. Inside the clinical white and mint-green-hued tower, which opened its doors in 2005, a cathedral-scale atrium with equally vast floor-to-ceiling windows permits natural light to flood in. Tucked in the corner of this state-of-the art medical facility’s entrance, an inconspicuous Water Logic mains-fed dispenser cowers. On an early field trip for this book, I find that it is out of cups. When prompted, the receptionist rummaged around in a few cabinets before producing some plastic disposable vessels. While I should commend any free hydration resource — sighting one was extremely rare at the outset of my research in 2010 — it seems remiss of the designers for such a recent building, and its client (the National Health Service), to not have included a purpose-built public water source functionally and symbolically for human health. Also in the University College Hospital atrium, a newsagent is conveniently situated to relieve those thirsty medical professionals, patients or visitors who, unsurprisingly, fail to notice the Water Logic cooler (as I mentioned, it is rather slight in stature). Whilst I was parked on a stainless steel bench observing the mains fed water cooler’s use over half an hour on a warm day, not one person approached it. Conversely, people emerged from the atrium’s in-house newsagent equipped with their choice of bottled water product. Aqua Pura from Cumbria at £0.90 for 500ml, Volvic at £1.20 per litre, or the charmingly named Very English Spring Water from Kent at £1 for a small bottle were all available. Without conducting an intrusive survey, I cannot be sure if their water purchases were a deliberate choice of bottled over tap water, or potentially for the convenience of a
portable container.

Either way, Dame Yves Buckland, Head of the National Consumer Council for Water would lament their choice. In an interview with
The Guardian
back in 2008, she noted that ‘it’s really hard to get a glass of tap water if you’re in a hospital, or if you’re in a railway station. You’re almost compelled to buy bottled water because there’s nothing else available’.
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She is an advocate of the high quality offer we have on tap. Perhaps at least some NHS Primary Care Trust executives or estate managers tuned into the podcast and were inspired by her words, but without a design commensurate with the grand proportions of spaces such as the grand UCH atrium, the mains fed cooler is practically invisible and therefore unlikely to be used. Good design matters and off-the-shelf solutions do not always fit with the space in question, as functionally adept and low maintenance as they may be.

The Hospital example is even more galling because indoor public buildings are ripe for fountain experimentation. Praise must be bestowed on a neighbour of UCH, the Wellcome Trust medical history centre, which has installed two big, striking stainless steel (chilled) tap water fountains in its library in attractive and, importantly, highly visible units. As a tribute to London’s stunning contribution to the sphere of drinking water’s role in health internationally, the Trust might also consider providing such a resource in its busy lobby, perhaps through a commission of a fountain artwork, to draw attention to the drinking water issue symbolically as well as functionally.