WATER FOR LONDON

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LX, Issue 24, 28 March 1939, Page 7

WATER FOR LONDON

FIGHTING THE THREAT OF

PLAGUE

Another chapter in what has been called the romance of London's water supply was entered upon when Mr Walter Elliot, the Minister of Health, opened the new laboratories of the Metropolitan Water Board in Rosebery Avenue. There ceaseless guard against water-borne diseases, such as typhoid and cholera, will be kept. The development of the world's largest water supply from Norman times provides an absorbing study. Down to the thirteenth century there was no difficulty. Thames water was abundant and excellent (prentices -complained of too much salmon in their diet), and in every street and lane there were wells and springs to which Londoners were wont to resort with pail and pitcher, and the water-car-riers, or "cobs," were familiar figures, even in much later times than these. Later on, water was conducted from suburban springs to public cisterns and fountains known as conduits, and, judging from an old engraving, "tittle-tattle at the conduit" was a popular pastime. For several centuries the city corporation was responsible for the water supply, largely by this system of conduits, for as London had spread the Thames was converted from a sparkling salmon stream into a "glorified sewer." Down to the beginning of last century water was drawn for domestic use without filtration from as low down as London Bridge, and it was not until 1852, following successive outbreaks of cholera, that Parliament ordained that the then existing water 'companies should not resort to the

river below Teddington Weir, and that its water must be filtered. Towards the end of the sixteenth century a Dutchman called Peter Morrys sset up a pump, worked by a water wheel, in one of the arches of old London Bridge, and he so convinced the city fathers that he was given a lease of 500 years to take water from the Thames in this way. The Morrys family sold their interests to a private company more than a century later, but in respect of their lease the Metropolitan Water Board still pays an annuity of £3750, and will continue to do so until the year 2082. London was roused by the Great Plague to look for a better water supply, and thus it was that Sir Hugh Myddelton, a London goldsmith, entered upon his great achievement of cutting the New River from the springs of Chadwell and Amwell, in Hertfordshire, to the site of the new laboratories in Clerkenwell. The New River company supplied the city through wooden pipes that are still often unearthed; in due course seven other water companies came into being, and London's water supply remained a private monopoly until it again became municipal with the creation of the Metropolitan Water Board in 1902. Since those days the board has achieved a triumph of engineering in the gradual merging of the eight .separate systems it inherited, the building of great reservoirs and of filtration and pumping stations. At present further works are in hand involving an outlay of about £6,500,000, which will increase the available storage by 11,600 million gallons. So the board has grown into a vast public utility service with an income of five and a half millions a year. And in their new quarters the scientists and chemists will wage endless war on microbes at the spot where three centuries ago Myddelton's victory was hailed amid the "triumphal sounds of drums and trumpets."