London’s drinking fountains
With recent
press reports highlighting the environmental cost of our plastic bottle habit
in this country (every year we get through 7.7 billion single-use plastic water
bottles, that means 16 million bottles are binned every day in Britain), the
talk now is of reintroducing public drinking fountains in our towns and cities.
Of course, the idea is not a new one. The Victorians, as ever, thought of it
first…
As the population of London doubled in the first half of the 19th century, the old water supply from wells, streams and the filthy Thames soon became inadequate. In 1854 Dr John Snow famously identified contaminated drinking water (polluted by domestic sewage and commercial waste) as the cause of London’s cholera epidemics. In 1859 Samuel Gurney, a Quaker philanthropist and MP, founded the Metropolitan Free Drinking Fountain Association and inaugurated the first fountain in that same year.
It was installed on the boundary wall of
the churchyard of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate. Before long, as many as 7,000
people were using it daily. The fountain had to be moved temporarily when
Holborn Viaduct was built but is today back in its original location. Of more historical
significance than practical use these days, it still has cups on chains. |
| Buxton Memorial Fountain |
near the Houses of Parliament. It was erected to mark the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 and is dedicated to prominent abolitionists, including Wilberforce. It was restored in 2007 on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.
But the pièce de résistance of all London’s Victorian drinking fountains must surely be the Victoria or Burdett-Coutts Memorial Drinking Fountain in Hackney’s Victoria Park. Designed by H. A. Darbishire (of Peabody Trust fame) and dating from 1862, this pink marble, granite and stone fountain, with its distinctive cupola, ornamental slate roof, four clock-faces, Gothic arches, sculpted cherubs and inscriptions, was the gift of the wealthy philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts who visited Victoria Park in the East End. It is said to have cost £6,000 - a sizeable sum at this time. No doubt this Victorian extravaganza gave pleasure as well as clean drinking water to the poor folk enjoying the park, but it also offered edification, reminding them that "The earth is the Lord's and all that thereon is."
 |
| Burdett-Coutts Fountain |
Because of course, as with many Victorian
initiatives, there was a moral dimension to the drinking fountain project. The
facilities were not only aimed at slaking people’s physical thirst, their
“aesthetic” (charming images of women and children often feature) was meant to
be uplifting, to provide a point of beauty in the otherwise ugly world
inhabited by the poor. Religion, of course, also comes into the equation. Pious
inscriptions and Bible texts were frequently added to the monuments ("Jesus said whosoever
drinketh of this water shall thirst again but whosoever drinketh of the water I
shall give him shall never thirst").
The evangelical movement was encouraged to build fountains in churchyards to
encourage the poor to see churches as supporting them. Unsurprisingly,
the Temperance Movement also supported the initiative and it’s no coincidence
that many of the fountains were installed close to pubs. The original Holborn fountain, for example, was
sited next to the Viaduct Tavern.
But drinking
fountains are not just a historical phenomenon. The association started all those years
ago by Gurney survives today as the Drinking
Fountain Association. It received a lottery grant to build more
fountains in 2000, and it regularly restores existing ones.
References:
111 places
in London that you shouldn’t miss John Sykes (2016)The London Book ed. Ian Hessenberg (1980)
A History of London in 100 Places David Long (2014)
Website: http://www.secret-london.co.uk/Drink_Fountains_2.html
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