In recent years, histories of urban water supply have been written for cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York, rightly focusing on the importance of nineteenth-century developments in their specific water networks. One of the great successes of Leslie Tomory's richly detailed History of the London Water Industry, 1580–1820 is tracing the origins of urban water networks back to early modern London.
Focusing on the rival companies that supplied piped water to private addresses in London, Tomory opens with three chapters that address technology, company structures, and public institutional support for the water industry from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. Chapters 4 to 7 constitute the heart of the book, Tomory offering in each a substantial exploration of the development of the water industry across the eighteenth century. The major focus is on two companies, the New River Company and the London Bridge Water Works, whose divergent fortunes Tomory traces through company minute books and accounts now deposited in the London Metropolitan Archives. In two concluding chapters he assesses changes in the industry in the years around 1800, as iron came to replace wood as the material of choice for pipes, the Napoleonic Wars drove up commodity prices, and a series of new companies dented the once dominant position of the New River. Tomory also finds room to offer instructive European and transatlantic comparisons, where we learn that while London once looked to German pumping technology in the later-sixteenth century, by the eighteenth century London was serving as a model network for the likes of Hamburg, Paris, and Philadelphia.
Tomory has marshaled a significant amount of new material into a convincing argument that leaves us without doubt about the centrality of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the history of urban water supply. Indeed, so important is this longer history of London's water supply network that it emerges from this study as a kind of ur-network. London's water network is presented as a precursor to its subsequent networks of sewers, gaslights, and electricity, and we are invited to think of the transition from public pump to private pipes as a “broad trend toward the networked city” on the first page. Yet Tomory hedges against charges of teleology with reminders of the lasting importance of water carriers, wells, and the differential penetration of piped provision across neighborhoods (chapter 6). This reviewer would have liked to have seen more on the fading methods of water provision as part of a holistic approach to the water industry, as well as the extent to which Londoners could access other sources of open water. But given the source material available, this may not be possible, and the focus on commercial, piped supply does not diminish the history of water networks assembled here. Its development is presented as a long-term, organic, evolutionary process without overall design that Tomory has managed to carefully piece together from a mass of administrative and technical records.
Much of the book is centered on practical matters: Tomory goes into detail about the river channels, pipe arrangements, and share prices of London's water companies. This is, after all, a history of technology and of business. However, people have a place, too. Tomory tracks the influence of various surveyors and engineers on the work of the New River Company, along with the application of new mathematical and natural philosophical ideas through figures like Christopher Wren and Charles Bossut. And yet, refreshingly, among named engineers and mathematicians Tomory also finds space for the many unnamed turncocks, walksmen, and millwrights on whose tacit knowledge the emergent water network depended. It was these men whose daily labors kept up water pressure and maintained connections, and who influenced the development of London's water supply more immediately than ideas from mathematics and natural philosophy.
The people who opened the valves and flushed the pipes are given more attention than those who turned on their taps. Tomory is focused more on supply than demand. When demand is addressed, it is mentioned primarily as a function of rising population. It is reasonable to assume that demand for water increased as population increased, but to tie that assumption to a particular model of water supply requires careful unpicking. Tomory proposes that the rising number of connected houses and the increasing social depth of new connections over time is evidence that water should place among the commodities typically identified as part of the consumer revolution experienced in England in the later seventeenth century. The English appetite for bathing is mentioned as one source of demand for water, along with rising commercial use in industries like brewing and services like firefighting. Yet much more could have been said about what water was used for once supplied to newly demanding consumers. We read little about water once it crosses the domestic threshold. For example, given the often highly gendered domestic division of labor in fetching and using water, some analysis of the differential social impact of household water supply would have been welcome, particularly in the later period, when Tomory estimates that the poorest 30 percent of houses remained unconnected. Social and cultural urban historians will want to explore the consequences of Tomory's argument about the (unequal) proliferation of piped water in the eighteenth century, given the implications it has for histories of domestic labor, ideas of cleanliness, and sociability in and around the early modern urban household.
In 2017, the UK government introduced a market for water supplied to nonresidential customers in England in the latest of its generational shake-ups of the water industry. These reforms break up wholesalers' regional monopolies, allowing Northumbrian Water to supply brewers in Bristol, and Bristol Water to supply in nurseries in Newcastle. Tomory's timely and stimulating new history of the London water industry provides an in-depth examination of one of the first markets for piped water. It will be of interest to historians of business, technology and the early modern city, as well as anyone seeking historical background on the Brave Old World into which we are now moving.
