The History of the London Water Industry, 1580–1820 by Leslie Tomory

Abstract

Reviewed by: The History of the London Water Industry, 1580–1820 by Leslie Tomory Tom Crook (bio) The History of the London Water Industry, 1580–1820. By Leslie Tomory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2017. Pp. 336. Hardcover $45. The networked city often is seen as an invention of the nineteenth century, and rightly so. It was then that urban dwellers began inhabiting spaces that were plugged into all sorts of large-scale technological infrastructures, variously supplying gas and electricity, taking away sewage, and providing trains, trams, and telegrams. The distance between 1800 and 1900 can [End Page 792] partly be measured in terms of the technological density of society, at least in towns and cities. But not all large-scale networks have their origins in the nineteenth century, as Leslie Tomory shows in his brilliant new study of the development of London's water industry between 1580 and 1820. Remarkably, by 1700 some 45 percent of houses in the metropolis had access to piped water, meaning they were able to dispense with the use of wells and the services of water-carriers. By 1800 this figure stood at 75 percent (p. 250). Even in the mid-nineteenth century, Paris could only manage 20 percent, according to the same measure. Historians of technology will be struck by this precocious trajectory: as Tomory himself notes, London's water network was ahead of its time, constituting a "model" that many other Western cities—and many other technologies—would emulate in the century that followed (pp. 237–42). Over the course of eight chapters, and drawing on an extensive collection of printed and manuscript sources, many of which have hitherto escaped proper scrutiny, Tomory details how this was achieved. The first three chapters focus on the birth of the metropolitan water industry, from the fledgling entrepreneurial efforts of the late sixteenth century through to the mid-eighteenth, when a sizeable profit-driven, pipe-based network had been put in place. The next three chapters delve into the technical and financial aspects of this transformation, in particular those of the New River Company and its smaller and less successful rival the London Bridge Waterworks, the two companies that lie at the heart of this account. The final two chapters dwell on the determination of water purity and the state of the industry at the start of the nineteenth century. It was at this point that established companies and a suite of new ones began to incorporate some of fruits of the industrial revolution, embracing iron-wrought pipes and steam-powered pumping. For the first time, constant (rather than intermittent) supplies were mooted as a universal possibility (pp. 234–35). Tomory cautions against labeling the emergence of these unprecedented networks "revolutionary" (p. 244), given the way they evolved in an incremental fashion. He also cautions against any kind reductive or teleological reading. As he summarizes in the conclusion, this was a fraught and contingent process of network building that combined legal and financial developments, demand-side variables and changing patterns of water consumption, and technological innovations such as the waterwheel—to which we should add, at crucial times, entrepreneurial ingenuity and ambition. One of the great strengths of the book lies just here: in the attention paid to all of these variables and the way their interrelations are carefully probed and analyzed. The most striking axis revealed by Tomory is that between the grubby work of assembling and maintaining large-scale systems and the investment and management of capital. As he argues, the joint-stock form of corporate personhood—still a relative novelty in the seventeenth century—was [End Page 793] especially crucial in terms of promoting commercial stability, and in part helps to explain the dominance of the New River Company, which was the first to adopt such status, doing so in 1619 (chap. 2). Tomory's book ends in the early nineteenth century, just as a new phase of London's infrastructural history was about to begin, as the city confronted the sanitary problems of an unprecedented demographic boom—among them polluted water supplies—and as gas and railway networks were first introduced. Clearly, as Tomory suggests, we need to revise of our sense...