Vanessa’s water feature makes a splash
A Greenwich academic has published a research paper explaining the politics of water supply in late 19th-century Britain.
Dr Vanessa Taylor, now Research Fellow with Greenwich Maritime Institute, based at the university’s Greenwich Campus, worked with Professor Frank Trentmann at Birkbeck College, University of London on a paper titled ‘Liquid Politics: Water and the Politics of Everyday Life in the Modern City’.
Their work was featured in an academic journal, Past and Present, and from there it was featured in the prestigious BBC History Magazine (October 2011).
The piece, which explains that a “perfectly clean Victorian gentleman would only need to flush his toilet three times a day,” details consumers’ fight for fairer rates and better supplies.
Vanessa’s research tells us that people were becoming used to, and reliant on, the new technology of constant, tapped water supply in their homes, and they were paying for it. This period saw the emergence of groups of consumer activists insisting on their rights to constant supply and fair water charges. Their activism helped pave the way for public ownership of water in London in 1904.
Vanessa says: “There are echoes today of what our research found.
Water shortages are regular news stories - hosepipe bans concentrate people’s attention. I'm glad the BBC highlighted the unglamorous, overlooked act of toilet flushing! The toilet is still one of the biggest users of water in the home – almost a third of our daily demand.
“Also private companies again control London’s water supply and many people don’t like to see what they regard as their resource lining people’s pockets.
Waste is back on the agenda, and assumptions that were taking shape at that time – about the ever-expanding need for water as part of civilised urban life – are now being questioned. Today, water companies can hand out expandable ‘hippos’ to customers, which go in the cistern and shrink it to save water.”
Story by Public Relations