Urban streams

The need for clean water in 19th-century Britain led to a new and magnificent genre of street furniture. Kathryn Ferry examines the drinking fountain

- Kathryn Ferry

WE live in the era of the locomotive, of the electric telegraph, and of the steam press…’ stated the Art Journal in April 1860, yet ‘even now we are not advanced far beyond such experimental efforts as may eventually lead us to provide supplies of pure water… to meet the requirements of our dense populations.’ Victorian workers were forced to spend money on beer and gin because, for all the benefits of industrialisation, water supplies remained erratic and heavily polluted. Temperance campaigners argued that reliance on alcohol was at the root of social problems, including poverty, crime, and destitution.

Free public drinking fountains were hailed as an important part of the solution. Indeed, the Art Journal reported how people crossing London and the suburbs, ‘can scarcely avoid noticing the numerous fountains which are everywhere rising, almost as it would seem, by magic, into existence’. These new articles of street furniture were erected by the goodwill of many individual donors, who sought to improve public morality through a fountain’s design, as well as its function. Many styles, decorative symbols, sculptural programmes and materials were marshalled towards this aim, leaving an astonishingly varied legacy.