Water
The supply of water has been organised on a commercial basis since the late eighteenth century. Setting a pattern they would follow down the centuries, the water companies started abusing their market dominance almost as soon as they received their licences to trade. One of their earliest customers was so irate that he published at his own expense an elegantly bound 1790 tract called A Bone to Pick . . . They weren’t afraid of long book titles in those days, and the full title, as found in the British Library catalogue (www.bl.uk), is worth quoting: A Bone to Pick; recommended to the several Water Companies of this Metropolis; or a check to avarice, tyranny and oppression . . . Being an . . . account of what steps the author hath taken to withstand the rapacity of a certain Water Company [viz. the Shadwell] . . . Also a friendly address to the public . . . stating the trifling expenses of the Water-Companies when compared with their excessive profits . . . Intended as an encouragement to a more public . . . inquiry into this matter, etc. At one point John Robins, the author, describes his visit to the office of the Shadwell Water Company to complain about a 50 per cent price rise dropped on him with no warning. He is shown in to meet the manager and is about to say his piece when there was suddenly a shout of turn him out, turn him out and Mr Robins found himself ejected onto the street.
I began my research with a preconceived idea that today’s leaky remnants of the Victorian water system are a legacy of high-minded reforms at a time of growing urban pollution and deadly epidemics. As the industry began to form, one of the main sources of water was the Thames, and the new practice of letting cesspits overflow into the river meant that the Thames stank in summer. By 1805 all the fish had died, London had a population of over a million, and the water supply was overstretched. Water is impregnated with the foulest and most unwholesome substances London’s Metropolitan Water Company told investors at its launch in 1833. It promised to change all that. But Christopher Hamlin, in his book A Science of Impurity, proves that the nineteenth-century water companies went on to behave in a way that is comparable with twentieth-century cigarette companies and twenty-first-century oil companies (though he does not put it in those terms), hiring scientists to present one-sided accounts that concealed evidence damaging to their position, and inflicting disease on the public through their refusal to apply the highest scientific standards. To take a few examples: a private water supplier in Newcastle-upon-Tyne caused a cholera epidemic in 1854 by taking water out of the Tyne; a cholera outbreak in east London in 1866 was traced back to the water company; and there was a waterborne typhoid epidemic in the Tees Valley in 1890.
Far from being motivated by public good, the reality was the familiar one of water companies maximising their profits at the expense of their customers. At the 1896 annual meeting of the East London Water Company, the self-righteous chairman told outraged shareholders that their management was being called grasping monopolists, and other hard names by its customers. Between 1860 and 1914, the private water companies had such low standards and such high prices that local councils were granted the power to take them over for the public good, and towards the end of the nineteenth century those local councils took it upon themselves to start appointing medical officers of health and public analysts who produced far more stringent and reliable analyses of water quality than the water companies. All this would have happened sooner but for the close financial links between the water companies and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of MPs, according to historian W. M. Stern. The problems the new municipal owners inherited led to huge new pumping stations being built, and eventually a new sewage system. Water began to be chlorinated and steel water mains were installed as well as double filtration.
Calls for a national water grid first surfaced in the 1920s, initially from entrepreneurs and engineers. It would banish for all time the possibility of drought in even the remotest village, an engineer wrote (inaccurately) to The Times in 1933. The idea was defeated on the grounds that there was no need for it if each area built its own reservoirs. A national water grid would simply put up water rates all over the country, Henry Brooke, the Tory minister for local government, told Parliament in 1959. But the movement of water from wetter parts of the country to drier parts continued to attract policymakers. By 1971 a massive underground tunnel had been built to carry winter water from Norfolk to Essex where a huge house-building programme was being held up because of a lack of water. In 1976 the Labour government was again talking of a national grid. That year torrential rain fell in Sussex at the same time as supplies to residents were cut off in a dozen towns in North Devon. Yorkshire County Council announced it was to put the beginnings of a regional grid in place.
Why did the British not take to capturing rainwater or digging boreholes? It was certainly an option, especially if a group of householders got together. And it still is an option. In fact, new houses in flood-prone areas may be forced to have rainwater harvesting systems to be granted planning permission. Private boreholes were first regulated under the Water Act 1945 with further restrictions applied by the 1961 Rivers Acts. Anyone can still drill a hole without permission if it’s for domestic use only. These days a domestic filter plus ultra-violet light would be more than adequate for anyone wishing to have a private supply of drinking water. In isolated areas where mains water still does not run, that is exactly what happens.
After decades of suggestions for regional water distribution, such as a trans-Pennine pipeline and a long-distance water pipe to Manchester, the system of multiple local water authorities ended in 1973 with the regionalisation of the water industry. In retrospect, the industry was being fattened up for privatisation in the 1980s. The bite-size local water companies were not tasty enough for the stock market.
At no point amid all this reorganisation and grandiose toys-for-the-boys engineering projects did any party to the debate seriously consider securing a reduction in water consumption, either by repairing leaks or limiting the amounts households used every year. Within a couple of years of regionalisation, the Great Drought of 1976 forced water shutdowns and standpipes in the street. The new regions were blamed, perhaps wrongly. Another was the Yorkshire drought of 1995 (so-called even though other parts of England received an even smaller proportion of their average rainfall that year), which marked a crisis of confidence in the privatised water industry. Yorkshire Water threatened shutdowns and standpipes in the street, yet its profits rose that year. It floated the idea of introducing water meters, raising suspicion that water companies were creating a false climate of scarcity in order to argue for compulsory metering.
Having read the papers and listened to ordinary consumers, the most persistent concerns today are that the privatised water companies are not spending enough on maintenance, especially the fixing of leaks, which account for the loss of an estimated 30 per cent of water from the system. Although some of this water runs into rivers and thus back into the system, some of it is just lost. So the first conclusion of my research is that far from our water system being shaped by altruism and public service, the present water industry is merely continuing a pattern of corporate greed, deceit and contempt for the customer set down from its inception.
With rainwater harvesting and community boreholes many of us could live without the water companies, as long as we acted responsibly about consuming and treating our own drinking water. We all take for granted the safety (if not the purity) of the water that gushes out of the kitchen tap. We would not be so carefree if we lived in India. Most industrialised countries insist that if you have your own water supply it has to be tested by the public analyst at least once a year. If society’s water was off-grid, we could not just assume that everyone would be a good citizen. But so what? Perhaps all this entails is travelling with a litre of Evian in a backpack many already do or carrying water purification tablets in a pocket. Dealing with our own sewage is another matter, but we could do it if we had to.
Gas
The first gas company, the London Gaslight and Coke Company, was founded in 1812. It was followed by start-ups in Preston and Liverpool. In the early days gas was mainly used for street lighting, which made towns and cities safer at night, but the Victorians soon took to gas for home lighting, then for cooking and heating. By the mid nineteenth century there were 2,000 miles of privately owned gas mains in London alone, and accidents were common. An 1843 explosion in a pub was visited by crowds of persons of all classes, reported The Times. The risks were tolerated, and for decades there were reports of explosions which made the pavements heave and caused great fissures in the streets.
The arrival of electricity in the late nineteenth century slashed demand for gas. To compensate, the gas companies aggressively marketed cooker hire at loss-making prices, then hiked the cost once they had the user base. Immediately after the First World War, the Board of Trade investigated gas companies for profiteering on gas appliance rental costs. There were nearly a thousand of them in the inter-war years, most of them quite small, but after the Second World War they were nationalised. By 1955 the beginning of the national gas grid had been firmly established. In 1965, the Ministry of Power decided to finance gas fields in the North Sea.
The 1967 Arab-Israeli war, followed by the shock OPEC oil price rises of the early 1970s, led the Labour government to switch the whole country to take advantage of North Sea gas. A huge natural gas conversion programme costing over a billion pounds at 1970s prices gave an extraordinary boost to the nations plumbers and heating engineers. By 1977, 2,600 more miles of new pipe had been laid underground to create a national grid of gas, and it was no longer stored in the huge cylinders whose remains still adorn many an urban landscape. Although millions of houses already owned gas cookers thanks to the earlier marketing efforts, these did not run on natural gas and had to be replaced or modified. Many households also switched to gas heating a decision they may come to regret. As the UK’s own reserves decline and world prices fluctuate, gas-connected households are facing sharp increases. At the very least consumers may be wise to make sure they have a wood-burning stove installed, in case prices rise to impossible levels, or the Russians simply cut off supplies to Europe for political reasons.
Nearly two centuries after gas was first piped into the nations homes, what have we to show for it? Our vast gas reserves are running down. We have invested in a huge distribution system, a built-in dependence that will now act as a money-box for Russian despots. Although lights are no longer gas-powered, the legacy of those early gaslights is light pollution in every built-up area, and an almost pathological fear of complete darkness in our culture.
Electricity
The gas marketers invention of natural gas (as opposed to unnatural gas?) was mirrored by the electricity industry’s equally preposterous slogan Electricity for Life. In a 1980s TV ad for the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), a couple were shown snoring in their idyllic cottage. Every night while you’re asleep a miraculous power is at work in the land, the voiceover intones, a power which is used for everything from printing your morning paper to baking your daily bread . . . Images of domesticity and Englishness reinforce this miraculous tale. Long before you wake, your electricity board is working for you, the ad continues, drawing on its massive resources to serve you through the day. Hardly surprising, then, that on some subliminal level we are convinced that the power supply and the way it is brought to us via the national grid is integral to the fabric of our existence.
This confidence trick began at the dawn of the age of electricity: slick salesmanship built the national grid, further marketing activity persuaded people to use as much power as possible, then came the PR coup of foisting nuclear power stations on the country rather than simple energy-saving measures. In 1901, the scientist Lord Kelvin spoke at the opening of the new Neptune Bank power station in Newcastle. What I am seeing today is the dream of my life realised, he said. I do not know the limits of electricity, but it will go beyond anything we can conceive of today. The reality was less uplifting. Only 9 per cent of the country’s tramways were electrified in 1897 compared to 88 per cent in the US; and although half the key inventions needed for the commercialisation of electricity were made in the UK, the major manufacturers of our equipment Siemens, Westinghouse and General Electric were all overseas.
Bill Luckin, Professor of Urban History at the Bolton Institute, coined the term electrical triumphalism to characterise the dogmatic insistence by the pro-electricity lobby that electricity would solve all the countrys problems economic, physical and even spiritual. Electricity permeates all life and has been stored and harnessed by man for his joy and use, stated a 1936 pamphlet from the Electrical Association for Women (EAW), one of a network of industry-funded pressure groups. Each electricity company was required to donate 2.5 per cent of revenues to the industry PR campaign, Luckin revealed in his book Questions of Power, and in 1925 this was raised to 10 per cent. The EAWs role was to win over the housewife. Its charismatic leader Caroline Haslett toured the country giving inspirational speeches about the glories of the electric vacuum cleaner. You can put your clean apron on and keep it clean, and you don’t have to go down on all fours, like some monkey, she told the Women’s Institutes she visited.
Still, every local scheme from the New Forest in 1933 to the Lake District in 1949 met opposition. The grid builders tactic was to divide and conquer. Whoever held out against the march of the pylons was derided as some sort of eccentric, or worse, selfishly impeding progress and harming the community. The Verderers of the New Forest, whose ancient duty to protect the forest was created by royal charter, were apologetic when they refused the power company a right of way in 1933. They were one of a handful of groups or individuals able to make a stand. The Central Electricity Board (CEB), supposedly impartial, co-ordinated lobby groups like the Electricity Development Association and the Overhead Lines Association, whose slogan was electricity without spoliation. The technical press helped things along with attacks on reactionary anti-electrical elements in society who did not want to sacrifice local independence for the sake of this new energy source.
As happened in the gas industry, nearly a thousand electricity companies battled for a share of the market, which meant every area had at least one and usually several local firms. Legislation designed to centralise control of what was seen as a strategic industry forced many of them to amalgamate or go bust, with the result that what could have been a highly competitive industry made up of small companies serving local areas eventually became an uncompetitive monopoly in the national interest. Privatisation in the Thatcher years transformed it into a profitable, some would say profiteering, oligopoly.
The centralisation of the electricity industry and the decision to create a national grid was the work of a cabal of engineers, politicians and financiers organised by the messianic Charles Merz, designer of the aforementioned Neptune Bank power station in Newcastle. When the CEB was established in 1926, its first act was to adopt Merz’s idea of linking power stations through high-voltage lines carried on pylons. Seven self-contained areas around the country were gridded interconnected with a 132kV cable. To overcome opposition this was sold to the public as a means to transfer power between areas only in emergencies.
The arguments against the establishment of the grid were both ecological and local, i.e. based on a desire to keep power generation and distribution in local hands. In Keswick, in the heart of the Lake District, there was total opposition to the pylons on visual grounds, and a demand that the area be turned into a national park. The anti-pylon campaigners, Professor Luckin tells us, argued that Penrith and Keswick were non-industrial towns with populations of 8,000 and 4,000 respectively, both of which already have their own supplies of electricity and did not need it brought in from outside.
But in the end money talked. In 1929, a year of intense anti-grid activity, the CEB won their right of way through a backdoor agreement with the National Trust which owned the land the townspeople were fighting to defend, and by early 1930 construction was underway on a gigantic line of pylons east to Penrith, through over ten miles of what is now the Lake District National Park. The unsuccessful campaign damaged personal relationships in the community for a generation.
Perhaps the decisive moment in the rise of the grid had come a few years earlier, however, in 1927, when Battersea power station in London was given the go-ahead despite huge opposition, largely on environmental grounds. The King himself, plus a former Archbishop of Canterbury and all the local residents, warned of the effects of burning 2,000 tons of coal per day. Batterseas owner, the London Power Company, reassured the electricity commissioners, who in turn reassured residents of Chelsea, just across the Thames, we have evidence that there will be no emission here of gases which will be objectionable. Nobody believed them.
By 1934, Parliament had approved plans to compulsorily purchase the rights of way needed for a national system of pylons. Nearly 20,000 compulsory orders were needed. Wherever they found opposition too intense to handle, the power companies simply buried the cable. But it was cheaper to build the pylons. An aesthetically pleasing pylon design was commissioned, and a distance calculated at which the curve of the cable would be reminiscent of the shape of the Bristol suspension bridge. Houses throughout the countryside were soon being wired up at the rate of 300 a week, and The Times reported triumphantly, though incorrectly, there is hardly a village in this country today which has not got electricity supply.
Over a dozen power stations were under construction and there were more electric cookers in use in the UK than in the whole of the United States. However, those cookers were not all to the same standard. The infant days of mass electric power in Britain were a whirligig of madly divergent technologies, offering services at dozens of different voltages, some two-wire, some four-wire, some AC and some DC (alternating/direct current). In London alone, eighty-two power companies, subject to 243 different Acts of Parliament, offered seventeen different voltages, both DC and AC, with two-, three- and four-wire cables into the house.
The CEB was determined to stamp this out, and the decision was taken to standardise on AC. The advantage of AC that convinced Merz and others was its ability to carry electricity across long distances using much thinner and cheaper wires than DC. Also, once the AC standard was accepted, centralised power generation would be possible and relatively cheap, but if DC became the standard then power generation would have to take place much closer to the end user in fact no more than a mile at most, using the technology of the time. The adoption of DC would have created a very different world, much closer to a series of micro-grids.
Electricity use doubled every ten years to 1970, and this consumption was spurred on by cross-subsidised consumer durables such as cookers and fridges, later supplemented by TVs, deep freezers, washing machines, tumble dryers, vacuum cleaners, blenders and the like, sold out of electricity and gas showrooms. With the whole country being encouraged to use energy by what was now a nationalised industry, it is no surprise that the population took to these new toys, then became dependent on them. In 2006, land campaigner Simon Fairlie reminded us in an article called Ecoburbia, published in Building for a Future magazine, that he grew up perfectly well without a fridge in the 1950s, but all the infrastructure for living decently without one has now gone. Houses dont have cellars or larders; daily deliveries by local milkmen, butchers, greengrocers and bakers have been swallowed up by centralised supermarkets; local market gardeners have been ousted for development; even the ice cream van doesn’t call.
The development of electric power could have been different. There was no compelling reason why we had to have a national grid. It is likely that we would have a smaller economy if not for the national grid, but whether or not our economic success has made us any happier as a nation is at least questionable in this age of rising binge-drinking and violent crime. Suppose we had muddled along with much smaller, more widely distributed power plants. They would have been less reliable, for sure, perhaps more expensive, but we would have learned to use less power as a result, which would have been a good thing. Many households might have felt it was worth installing their own back-up power for those times when the local grid was down. There would have been more community power, from rivers and windmills. But today we live with the legacy of an era of centralisation in UK politics: a series of high-polluting trophy projects from Drax to Sellafield and a population lulled into thinking it can be no other way.
Planning and roads
In the eighteenth century the British countryside was teeming with labourers who squatted tiny patches of land and made their living from that land. But the second great wave of enclosures in the early 1800s seized some fourteen million acres of land for the rich, causing a huge migration to the towns and the gradual emptying of the countryside.
In 1915, travelling showman Charles Neville spotted some derelict land near Brighton and bought it to launch a remarkable scheme. Planning permission as we know it today did not exist then; if you owned land, you had the right to do pretty much what you wanted with it. Through ads in national newspapers, Neville asked the public for a name for the new town he intended to build there. The top prize was a plot of land allegedly worth 100, and there were fifty prizes of plots worth 50. A fee of 3 would cover administration costs. The competition was wildly popular: there were over 80,000 entries. Neville’s South Coast Land & Resort Company increased the number of runner-up prizes to over 2,400.
The winning name was New Anzac-on-Sea. It lasted less than a year. Neville changed it to Peacehaven in 1917, a name that remains to this day. The Daily Express saw the scheme as a fraud and took Neville to court. He lost, but by then Peacehaven was famous, and 3,000 homes were built on what had been an empty, barren patch of land. The 2,400 runners-up paid for the land transfer, and the South Coast Land & Resort Company supplied the new owners with either a house or the materials to build one.
Peacehaven showed that there was a huge pent-up demand for somewhere affordable to live in the country, even if it had no services. The town planning community, to the extent that there was one, and government policymakers were appalled by the project. They saw Peacehaven as an anarchic mess, but there was nothing they could do other than prevent a repetition, so they began the process of framing laws that would not allow such a massively popular success story to reoccur.
But it would be a few decades before such a law was enacted, and in the meantime the idea of dividing rural land into plots took hold, and tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dwellings were built on what became known as Plotlands. In Arcadia for All, Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward chart the rise and fall of Plotlands, with their strange dwellings made of redundant railway carriages and garden sheds a motley collection of makeshift structures [which] carried dispersal (from town to suburb and country) to its limits. Historian S. B. Mais in Britain and the Beast bemoaned one development on the North Downs, honeycombed with hidden shacks thrown haphazard like splodges of mud against a hillside once covered with trees. The hut-dwellers both get the view and spoil it. Few of the Plotlands caused as much furore as Peacehaven, however, with the exception of a series of developments in the Thames Valley which attracted the full weight of establishment criticism. Residents of Eton, Windsor and Henley suddenly found greengrocers from Acton and printers from Fulham making free with their squalid little huts, wrote Ward and Hardy. The time has come, Lady Cynthia Moseley informed the House of Commons in 1930, when we must choose between the end of laissez faire and the end of rural England. Eventually other forces combined to destroy many of the Plotland houses. As soon as the Second World War started, the Ministry of Defence swept away thousands along the south coast, and the freak storm surge of 1953 reduced the shanty buildings along the east coast to rubble. Many more were simply forgotten and abandoned.
Then, in 1947, the Town and Country Planning Act removed the sole right of landowners to decide what could be built on their property. Planning permission was now required for land development; ownership alone no longer conferred the right. The Times called it the effective nationalisation of the right to develop land . . . rights were appropriated by the state, to be released only at the political judgment of local authorities.
The planning permission process was creaky from the start, and there was suddenly a scarcity of building land. Land prices for housing, which had hardly increased at all in the previous fifty years, rose tenfold over the next half century. As a result, houses were built ever closer together and to lower standards because so much had to be spent on the site. Selected villages became high-density, middle-class dormitories. As farming land became more valuable, it made less and less economic sense to farm it when it could be used for building houses or factories, or simply sold as an investment. This led to a further decline in the rural population. It became almost impossible to create employment outside urban or industrial areas. In 1946 there were 976,000 agricultural workers in England and Wales; by 1989 there were 250,000.
And just as this change to Britain’s basic property laws was making it more difficult for individuals to live close to the land, the last barriers to the construction of a national motorway network were falling.
Before the Second World War, Britain was among the most reluctant of European countries to build motorways, despite having the highest per capita car ownership. British policymakers believed that a national system of highways through the countryside was totally unnecessary, and private ventures in the 1920s to build motorways failed to win government approval, which contrasted strongly with the likes of Italy and Germany, where autostrada/autobahn construction was embraced with enthusiasm. After the war, UK policy was reversed; in fact, an officially endorsed outline of a national network had been developed for planning purposes by 1944. It was decided that there were, after all, immense benefits to be derived from building motorways, such as time-saving.
Some, like media guru Marshall McLuhan, saw roads as a medium of communication, just like TV or newspapers, and believed that wide straight roads were a sign of a strong centralised government, whereas random, disjointed roads implied the absence of control. More and more motorways were built over the succeeding three decades, but as we know, instead of speeding up traffic and alleviating jams, they simply created a greater demand for road travel and encouraged people to use their cars more. One consequence of the rise of roads is a smooth distribution network allowing chain-store groceries to send food almost any distance economically, with little consideration for locality or freshness. This has had the effect of destroying community deliveries by milkmen, butchers, bakers and the like. We are now moving swiftly towards a state of permanent gridlock.
Imagine if motorways had not been built, and at the same time a looser version of the 1947 Planning Act had been passed leading to lower land prices and more building in the countryside. There would be less open countryside, but fewer cars, and better public transport. Cars and lorries would have fewer, slower routes around the country, but the train network, which was decimated in the 1960s, would have grown instead. Meanwhile, if people wanted to live in the country they could have done so much more easily. Land and property prices would not have rocketed, so the gap between rich and poor (i.e. property haves and have-nots) would be narrower. The nation would have less overall wealth, but would the quality of life be any worse? Based on the numbers of people who appear to want to leave the city and live in the country, I think the level of overall happiness would be much higher.
But property prices exercise people’s minds more than roads. Currently, less than 10 per cent of the UK is built on, and 89 per cent of the population live in densely packed towns and cities. Many on the left and right are calling for the scrapping of planning laws, the states 60-year stranglehold on urban development as the Sunday Times labelled them in an October 2006 article entitled Welcome to Superbia, which would bring with it a slump in property prices. But too many voters have too much invested for that to be a believable political option. The entire system is designed to protect the kind of urban neighbourhoods in which [the advocates of the current planning system] live, and the country houses where they vacation, while the problems fall most heavily on other parts of the population, says Robert Bruegmann, an American professor of urban planning and author of Sprawl: A Compact History. In 1966 Britain built 400,000 homes; in 2006 we built less than half that. Yet 500,000 people live in overcrowded homes and 95,000 households are in temporary accommodation. And the population is rising. According to one forecast another six and a half million people will be living in Britain by 2030. The Treasury economist Kate Barker condemns the planning system for inhibiting growth and wants it relaxed so that huge new suburbs can be built. Nick Hubble, head of Kingston Universities Centre for Suburban Studies, comments that a combination of immigration and families wanting to move into more spacious surroundings will create such pressure that greenfield sites [will] have to be developed. It would be better to plan that now.
I am no expert in these matters, but I do not want jerry-built homes in the middle of the countryside. If we are to keep what is attractive about the countryside then overdeveloping it is not the solution. I want to see the system altered to allow non-commercial, low-density, low-impact development of the countryside. It would not solve the housing shortage, but it would help. Following Simon Fairlie, I want to see the Department for Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the ministry responsible for the environment, fund half a dozen experimental off-grid developments. Each would have a few hundred inhabitants and each would be allowed to generate, say, 10 per cent of the energy used per capita in the rest of society. The governments 2006 energy review forecast that 18 per cent of homes will have some form of microgeneration by 2030 and announced we will be removing barriers, where viable, in planning, in selling electricity and in accessing the benefits of renewables obligations. I’d like to see them go a bit further than just removing barriers, proactively creating conditions for successfully living with renewable energy. There would be no shortage of volunteers willing to live in these experimental communities. It would at the very least allow the concept of off-grid living to be tested.
Why should the government want to test it? Because it would be good for society, and it would help to solve some of the key problems confronting us in the twenty-first century. And because the trend towards off-grid living is not just a result of the ravings of a few back-to-the-landers. During research for this book I met many people who thought the idea of living off-grid was alien and unintelligible, but an equal number of all ages and backgrounds responded enthusiastically. This awakening of interest is happening for a reason. Or to be precise, several reasons.