Parched City (4 page)

By 1585, water was being pumped from Morris’s wheel-based technology directly into the houses of paying clients; London Bridge Waterworks was in business. It was the first mechanically transported water to enter private houses in the capital. The only limitation of the new convenience was the distance that the waterwheel could propel water, so customers had to be resident in the near vicinity of the Thames, and naturally with sufficient income, to enjoy this luxurious supply. John Stow’s praise for Morris’ enterprise seemed somewhat muted, describing it merely as ‘Thames water conueyed into mens houses by pipes of leade from a most artificial forcier’.
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London’s social stratification of water access had certainly entered a new phase, but what is known of its consumption and use? Though Morris did specify that his machinery was pumping water from the bottom of the river, it is unlikely that the contents of the Thames was considered to be palatable for cooking with or for drinking neat. Also, as he was extracting water from the tidal part of Thames it would have had some measure of salinity. Perhaps his engineers worked with the tides to reduce the salt content? Still, its use for bathing is plausible. Perhaps even a degree of salinity was embraced for that purpose. It could also have been used as a laundry resource, but it is unlikely that river water was consumed as a beverage. Naturally, the river was a dumping ground for all manner of waste and a busy shipping highway but the idea of using it as a source for pressurised piped water had caught on. Bevis Bulmer installed his pumps in 1593 at Broken Wharf, a little further upstream.
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For wealthy householders, pumped water could be used for one set of functions in abundance, whilst water bearers could still be dispatched to fetch superior water from conduits for ‘sweeter’ water needs.

Morris’s civil engineering innovation would become normalised as the convenience and profitability of water’s private supply was demonstrated. The next private water entrepreneur borrowed a bit from Morris and mixed it with a dash of the first conduit philosophy, producing convenient domestic water on tap, but of a purer quality and salt free. Work on the New River’s construction commenced in 1606.
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The New River was a man-made channel conducting water from underground springs in the Hertfordshire countryside north of London to Islington in the expanding suburbs. After many years of development, with funding from City goldsmith Hugh Myddleton, its opening festivities took place in 1613.
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A statue of the entrepreneur still graces the junction of Upper Street and Essex Road in Islington and a Georgian square is named after him. The New River charter protected the water
quality, from which no doubt its profitability could be assured: ‘No person to cast into the rover any earth, carrion, nor wash clothes or annoyeth the current, nor convey any sink into the same or lay any pipe to draw off the water, nor dig any ditch, pond, pitt or trench nor plant tress within 5 yards of the river.’
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If these terms were monitored and upheld, one can imagine that the notion of drinking from this pure new water source might have been entertained more readily than the Thames. Piped, corporate supplies’ introduction was followed by more illicit forms of water extraction, which were not appreciated by the London’s community of water bearers.

Quills

Undercover, unsanctioned tapping of pipes feeding the conduits was a form of private water supply that mimicked the premise of the new corporate water, but the big difference was that its users had no bill to pay, or a ‘fine’ as the New River’s charge was called.
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In 1621 the water-bearer ‘brotherhood’ presented a petition to Parliament, protesting that the appropriation of conduit water for private use was affecting their business, because ‘most of the said water is taken, and kept from the said Conduits in London, by many priuate branches and Cockes, cut and taken out of the pipes, which are layed to conuey the same and laid into priuate houses and dwellings, both without and within the City…and many times suffered to runne at waste, to the generall grieuance of all good Citizens’.
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The brotherhood’s frustration was understandable. Some quills tapping the conduit supplies were blatantly illegal, whilst others were sanctioned for the supply of some influential householders, by the Corporation itself.
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Quoting the law governing the management and use of the conduits, the water bearers believed that this private appropriation of public supply contravened the statute book. In particular, they pointed a collective finger at a plumber on the City’s payroll, one Mr Randoll who, ‘out of fifteen branches
running into private houses’ had apparently confessed to laying three of them personally.
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It sounded as if some palms may have been well greased to extract such favours. Corrupt water siphoning was not the water bearers only problem. Their ‘broth-erhood’ was also unsettled by the arrival of rogue bearers onto London’s water scene. They claimed that these imposters were serving single institutions, such as Newgate Prison, and therefore unevenly draining the supplies of certain conduits.

Such petty disputes were eclipsed by the devastation caused by the Great Fire of London in 1666, in which 13,200 homes were decimated. Casualties of London’s water infrastructure in the
1666 fire included Peter Morris’s wooden waterwheel and the Great Cheapside Conduit’s structure was also gutted. Like all professions, the water bearers and their dependents — a community of four thousand people in total –must have experienced the effects of the fire’s devastation on London’s social as well as its built fabric. Reconstruction of London Bridge Waterworks soon began and Cheapside was also rebuilt in some form. The illicit practice of quill-laying also resumed. In 1677 Thomas Duncomb swore in an affidavit to the Corporation of the City of London that he did ‘dig a trench in the night time’ to divert a supply from Lamb’s Conduit to a publican’s brewhouse.
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Fresh water seller
, ca. 1688. Marcellus Laroon (1653–1702) City of
London, London Metropolitan Archives.

By 1698, some tensions between the conduit and piped water systems were apparent in a petition issued by Cheapside’s residents and water-bearers to the City of London Corporation. The residents claimed that they were in ‘great distress for want of water because several of them have their kitchens two and three pairs of stairs high, which is beyond the power of the New River or Thames Water men to raise their water so high’.
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And the water bearers claimed that if any water was available at the Cheapside Conduit, they could earn a wage and serve the needs of those whom the private water companies were failing. This tension characterised how public and commercial water supplies rubbed against each other in early modern London. Mark Jenner points out how the new water corporations ‘individuated and privatised households, reducing their involvement in the hurlyburly of the public water sources, but they were also the first network technologies, binding thousands of households into a common system’.
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These shifts in the equality of water access in London had a contemporary resonance with the influential political theories of John Locke. In his
Second Treatise on Civil Government
in 1690, Locke argued that what had been produced by the ‘spontaneous hand of nature’ was altered when it was mixed with labour.
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As
he elaborated: ’…though the water running in the fountain be every one’s, yet who can doubt that in the pitcher is his only who drew it out? His labour hath taken out of the hands of Nature where it was common.’
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Certainly evidence suggests that the conduits’ contents were prized on the basis of a quality cooking and drinking product, so in their case labour mixed with the value of a particular grade of water. Maintaining the infrastructure that assured the continual flow of high quality water contributed to its cost as a civic water source.

Cordial and Healthful Waters

From a drinking water perspective specifically, by the end of the seventeenth century an elite commodity entered English culture. The social historian Phyllis Hembry charts how the fashion for hot mineral water bathing enjoyed by Elizabeth I, escalated into the health-related Grand Tour. This activity grew in popularity amongst the gentry between 1585 and 1659. As the historian Alexandra Walsham has argued, the Reformation’s suppression of the association between water and healing did not last for long and both the church and the state participated in the culture of reviving a therapeutic water culture.
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Endorsed by medical men for internal as well as external physical benefits, drinking spa water became a fashionable, healthy habit. Back in England, Hembry explains how in the early sixteenth century a ‘shortage of places for bathing led to a movement for drinking cold mineral water’.
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Bath’s famous Pump Room, for instance, started trading drinking water cures in 1706, though its water was thermal.
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Bottled, English spa waters soon emerged as a new product that could be supped remotely from the spa.

London’s coffee houses, well established as centres for social and political discourse by the early eighteenth century, presented themselves as ideal shop fronts for purveyors of bottled water. A roaring trade in both English and Continental spa waters was in motion by the 1730s.
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Hembry’s research mapped London as the
centre of bottled water demand. A dozen bottles of mineral water from Bath could be purchased for 7s.6d. (approximately £30, or £2.50 a bottle in modern currency).
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This new market was clearly highly profitable, so it is not surprising that many miraculously healthy springs were ‘discovered’ around London later in the century by wily entrepreneurs. Public ownership of natural water sources was fast becoming a quaint old idea.

A whole host of popular entertainment developed around London’s own ‘spas’, for which season tickets could be purchased.
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Spring water could be enjoyed at the spas themselves but products such as the Hampstead Flask ensured that healthy waters could also be enjoyed remotely from the spas for thruppence (or about £1 today).
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As Georgian culture segued into the aesthetics of the Regency period, spas morphed into ‘pleasure gardens’. Though water drinking was the rasion d’être of these leisurely places, they were by no means alcohol free. Drinking water alone would not have occasioned such festivities for which the London ‘Spaws’ became renowned. New tastes in alcohol were also being explored.

Eliza Smith’s renowned cookbook
The Compleat Housewife
, first published in 1729, contained a panoply of recipes involved, or based on, water. The growth in the popularity of distillation meant that a whole host of ‘cordial’ waters could be brewed at home. Smith listed recipes galore to cure all manner of ailments, including giddiness of the head and revival from near-death. Her medicinal recipes’ ingredients reveal their high alcohol content. Smith’s instructions for brewing ‘lemon wine’, which could pass for ‘citron water’ if a disguise was required, included a generous two quarts of brandy.
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‘Plague water’ was also infused with a gallon of white wine. As homemade medicines, which were commonly administered by women in the seventeenth and, well into, the eighteenth century,
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some of the cordial waters were intended as cures for serious maladies such as breast cancer, or to aid labour during stillbirths.
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Despite the amount of alcohol in
the concoctions, Smith specified that spring water should be used as a base. Her specification fitted with the fashion for taking mineral water as a healthy remedy and shows how drinking water’s value as a commodity was increasingly tied to its provenance. Spring water consumption by the gentle-womanly and middle class readers of
The Compleat Housewife
was part and parcel of the material comfort their classes enjoyed, but it sounds like a small bottle could have gone a long way. The apparently refined use of distillation, however, was not a practice enjoyed by all Londoners.

‘Gin mania‘, as the social historian John Burnett calls it, gripped London from 1720–51. As he writes: ‘The immediate causes of the epidemic were the ease of manufacture by hundreds of small distillers, the low duty of 2d. a gallon, and the absence of any requirement for a retail licence. In 1725 there were a reported 6,187 premises selling spirits in London, excluding the City and Southwark, and in Westminster and St Giles one in every four houses were said to be dram shops.’
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The inner city neighbourhood of St Giles was portrayed by William Hogarth in
Gin Lane
(1751), as part of a campaign against the spirit’s negative social consequences. His engraving famously depicts the debauchery unleashed by the cheap liquor on London’s poorer inhabitants. In Hogarth’s engraving a mother is shown nodding off with a dreamy, drunken smile on her face, as her baby is falling to the ground from her breast. Other details in the image depict financial ruin-by-gin and death-by-gin, whilst the pawnbroker and undertaker profit.
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