Parched City by Jones Emma M

Author:Jones, Emma M. [Jones, Emma M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78099-159-7
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2013-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

Aqua Cool water cooler advertisement, 1990. Ionics Incorporated: GE

Power and Water purchased Ionics in 2005. Copyright General Electric

Company; used with permission.

Aqua Cool’s claims of ‘outstanding purity’, as well as being chlorine, lead and nitrate free seemed to be custom-designed for the U.K. market. Despite these assurances, the advertisement does not explain the source of the water as spring or mineral. It is simply labelled ‘pure bottled water’. The advertisement’s small print revealed that in addition to London, Aqua Cool operated in Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington.

In 1989, the renowned office architect Francis Duffy wrote this snapshot of the city: ‘London, as an office centre, is changing rapidly in response to international pressures. Being such an open city — the Hong Kong of the European Community — it is easy to see in every street and skyline the architectural consequences of the globalisation of financial services and all related trades and professions.’106 At the time, projects such as the construction of Canary Wharf were well underway. The water cooler was a minor response to the market produced by developments in London’s global working culture. This was a product that appeared to offer superior quality water to the tap, wherever one was working in the world. The utilitarian tap did not fit the aesthetics of highly designed, materially luxurious office environments. Instead, they could be embellished with a Holywell Springwater Cooler; perfect ‘for companies that care about their personnel’ or a Buxton Spring Watercooler, with water drawn from a source reassuringly distant from urban pollution.107 Some twenty different brands appeared in the 1993 edition of the Yellow Pages. 108

The water cooler was also symbolic. It was as much a child of the neo-liberal vision of the free market’s entrepreneurial spirit as the drive to privatise the water industry as another ‘utility’. Both fitted into the new frame of water as an economic resource.

Pricing Britain’s Water

In 1988, a book written by the eminent water industry expert and water economist David Kinnersley unpacked the complex issues surrounding debates over freshwater’s value, and therefore the future management and ownership of the water and sewerage industry as it ‘stumbled’, in his words, towards privatisation.109 Kinnersley points out in Troubled Water how measuring water’s value in Britain’s economy shifted noticeably with the 1963 Water Resources Act, when protecting river and groundwater quality became bound up with recognising water’s value as a raw material for industry.110 From then, abstraction for commercial use was highly regulated through licences. For Kinnersley, the equation of abstraction from rivers had failed to be balanced with the price of toxic discharges going into rivers. He notes the lag of British Water Authorities in adopting the ‘Polluter Pays’ principle of other European nations: ’…the authorities hung back from serious attention to improving charges for trade effluent disposal to sewers, or promoting in Britain the concept of charges for discharges direct to rivers.’111 The economist was well placed to be critical of the shortcomings of the water authorities created as a result of the 1973 Water Act.

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