London- a late bloomer in the water department

No one in the western world really questions whether water provision is best suited to the public or private spheres. Being hooked up to city water and sewer is unanimously considered a good thing. Was it always that way? Well- no. Londoners purchased water from private suppliers through the end of the nineteenth century.

John Broich gives an excellent history of how the desire for water provision shaped London.

His account tells how secondary cities in the British Isles adopted a municipal water system decades before the great capital on the Thames. In fact, the continued delays in accomplishing this civic feat help exemplify the many facets of interests and the levers in play. There are issues of pollution and health concerns, there are networks of private providers, and the wealthy who buy their way to what they want. There is petty jealousy and the pride of belonging to an international city. And most astonishing, there is no government structure to handle such infrastructure outside of the walls of ancient London.

For provincial water reformers, the principles on which the administration of water was based-as well as the engineering principles on which water provision was based-were meant to make their cities more modern in the sense expressed by Avery, the Birmingham councilor.

“When water is under the control of private companies, the chief desire of the directors is to obtain good dividends,” said a Bradford town councilor in 1852. “When the Town Council possesses the works,” he continued, “their chief object is to make the works instrumental to the promotion of cleanliness, the health, and the comfort of all classes of citizens.”57

Water administration by a directly representative body was to provide an obvious contrast to the commercial companies that made independent decisions about water quality, abundance, and price based on the profit motive.

It is an excellent story depicting the nature of what is public and what is private. For a literary companion piece, consider reading Dickens’s Bleak House.