From user to consumer: water politics in nineteenth-century London

On Monday 15 July 1895 one and a quarter million inhabitants in the East End of London awoke to a water shortage.Charles Lyel, a householder and member of the Hackney Vestry, complained that the East London Waterworks Company had stopped his constant delivery and switched back to intermittent supply.Water was turned on between 9 and 10 in the morning and fl owed for a mere two to three hours, with the result 'that I am deprived of my morning tub, [and] there is no bath for the children in the evening'.To be told by 'the company that the supply "is ample for all legitimate use" is adding insult to injury', Lyel told The Times. 1 East Enders without Lyel's benefi t of a cistern, or occupying the upper fl oors of tenements, were still less fortunate.People began to store water in jugs, buckets, basins or any container available.Others began to mobilize consumers against water companies.John B. Kyffi n, a draper of Hackney Road, had for some days put up with the 'scant supply of water' for his shop and twenty-six assistants.When the water necessary for domestic purposes 'practically ceased altogether' on 15 and 16 July, he had had enough.Looking at the rates (local taxes) water companies were collecting on his £200 property and at his toilets with 'no fl ushing remedy' and assistants taken ill while local authorities received a million gallons to water the roads, Kyffin took the company to court for failing to give the statutory 'proper supply of water for domestic purposes'.Kyffi n lost but proceeded to mobilize consumers across Hackney with support from the vestry and fellow ratepayers. 2 The battle between consumers and water companies during the 1895 East London 'water famine' marked a formative stage in the breakthrough of a new consumer identity and politics in the modern period.Water has been mainly understood in the context of public health, urbanization, housing, leisure and the material environment.3 While building on this research, this chapter seeks to reconnect the contestation of a basic good (water) to central problems of modern consumer society, in particular the formation of the consumer around questions of needs, rights and waste.Whatever their particular infl ection, from Veblen to recent post-modern accounts, most seminal texts have structured their narratives of consumer society or consumerism around the expansion of desire, affl uence and commercial objects and spaces and their role

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