Parched City (26 page)

Whilst the finishing touches were being put to the Hyde Park fountain, Sustain began a project to translate its tap versus bottled water polemic into activism. Coincidentally, the initiative was focused on parks and fountains. Off a side street, near the bustle of Angel Tube in central London, the two women behind the Children’s Food Campaign (CFC), at the charity Sustain, operate from an office densely packed with environmentalists. Their core campaign is to counteract the damaging effects of junk food mass-marketing targeted at young people and to secure better ‘real food education in every school’. Jackie Schneider’s and Christine Haigh’s part-time posts are funded by the British Heart Foundation (at the time of the interview, in 2010). Their time is tight and the task is mammoth. Sustain’s research on bottled water and the public space connection resonated with Schneider, also a primary school teacher. Fountains are a familiar topic amongst her pupils: ‘Most schools aren’t equipped for the whole class to have drinking water at once. Children get quite stroppy about that if they’ve forgotten their water bottle or drunk it all at playtime and they can’t refill it. They are actually quite keen to drink water when they’re thirsty.’ All schools have fountains (often donated), however Schneider explains that the problem is the quantity. A lack of sufficient fountains is a common complaint voiced by student councils nationally. From a health perspective, the case for promoting drinking water as an alternative to sugary drinks was an obvious link for the CFC but Jackie Schneider underlines how it is also a crucial issue in the
battle against childhood obesity: ‘Young people can be confused that their body is telling them they are thirsty and they mistake it for hunger.’ Water UK agree that obesity, diabetes, and some cancers, such as urinary tract, could be avoided later in life by children having better access to hydration and education about why it is important.
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When the bottled water issue became a prominent focus for Sustain, the CFC managers saw an opportunity to connect the public-space-water-access-deficit with children’s play spaces (outside the context of schools). In summer 2009, they mounted a national census of park fountains. As predicted by the activists, the results were poor. One hundred and fifty responses were tallied, but only fifteen parks with drinking fountains were recorded and some of those had more than one fountain.
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Desiccated civic fountains are a common trope of British parks, usually designed in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Out of the fifteen parks in the survey results, thirteen working drinking fountains were recorded. Though the research was conducted across the U.K. (fountains stretching from Ashford to Wolverhampton were tallied), ten of the fifteen parks with fountains identified were in London. A mere nine were reported to be functional.
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Sustain’s
Thirsty Play
report acknowledged that the results represented approximately a three per cent sample of the nation. An on-line message board associated with the campaign was overwhelmingly supportive, however concerns about vandalism and ‘dog poo’ contamination did surface. With limited personnel and time, they hoped the project would add to the momentum of other environmental groups tackling the bottled water problem and
London on Tap
. Christine Haigh further explained their philosophy: ‘We could go down to the level of a national campaign and try to get a law that says every park must have a fountain but frankly we don’t think that’s the road to go down.’ These campaigners prefer a democratic, bottom-up approach to the issue.

Find-A-Fountain

Parallel to Sustain’s foray into park landscapes, a fresh-faced drinking fountain enthusiast was on his bike mapping London’s drinking fountains. Like the CFC’s results, he found that most of them were in a state of dereliction. Guy Jeremiah was a successful environmental consultant; that is until he became an anti-bottled-water zealot (easily done). As he recalls in summer 2011, a couple of years previously he was about to board a train in London to his hometown of Sheffield, when he realised that the only drinking water he could access was from a shop — in an expensive, environmentally unfriendly package. Mentioning this experience to his mother, she retorted ‘“Why don’t you do what your dad does!”’ It turned out that Dad simply refilled a used bottle from the home tap on his excursions. Jeremiah was not satisfied with this solution. One hung-over day in May 2008 he was lolling with friends on London’s Primrose Hill and the thought of the tap water refilling came back to him (dehydration can induce such drinking water fantasies). After sketching the ‘squashy thing’ he was imagining, one friend was immediately impressed with his mock up. That friend is still a shareholder in what became a new product and a company: Aquatina (now rebranded ‘ohyo’). Jeremiah’s inner designer was on the loose.
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Aquatina is a collapsible plastic bottle, intended to be as portable as keys or a mobile phone. The accordion-like bottles come in an array of bold pink, blue and green shades but the product took a long time to translate from his foggy-headed sketch to a mass-produced object that can be purchased in a couple of clicks online. Jeremiah brought his sketch to a product design firm in Sheffield, where it was translated into a 3D version that fulfils his collapsible vision whilst materially withstanding any possibility of chemical leaching. Moulded from ‘category four’ plastic, the Aquatina can claim to be free of any trace of the chemical Bisphenol A (BPA) potentially associated with negative health effects from long-term plastic
degradation. This environmental professional was not content with ‘marketing Tupperware’, as he puts it. He also wanted to tackle the public space facet of where such a vessel could be refilled with water, for free.

Jeremiah explains how he set about the fountain search with his colleague: ‘Paul in a crazy fashion did a Freedom of Information request to every council in the country, pestered them all and some came back really enthusiastically and gave us all these rough locations of fountains. Most bizarrely did, so we mapped them all.’ This spatial plotting, on the ground in London, was done with the aid of Google Maps and the same software was used to put together a crude website. Find-A-Fountain was born. Jeremiah is aware that his fountain promotion might seem too green to be true: ‘Cynically people can look at this and think Find-A-Fountain is just a PR campaign. I hope it does raise PR but at the same time with the amount of effort we put into Find-A-Fountain. If I was a hard-nosed businessman it would be, forget that: put all the money into marketing Tupperware.’ At sales of over 60,000 Aquatina bottles (as of September 2011) and purchases from major retailers, such as Robert Dyas, the marketing end of things is going well though Jeremiah is adamant that many more need to be sold for the operation to stay afloat. The refill market is getting crowded. One competitor particularly irks Jeremiah. The Water Bobble pipped the Aquatina to the post for supplying London’s Science Museum shop. Apart from a loss of sales, and the product’s American origin, Jeremiah disapproves of its unique-selling-point: a built-in filter: ‘What are they filtering?’ In his mind, those in the business of advocating tap water refilling should not be raising doubts about quality, because ‘they’re giving the impression to those who go into the Science Museum that for London’s water to be safe, you have to filter it’. Jeremiah might be comforted to learn that the only bottle presently on sale in the Museum’s shop is not the Water Bobble but a designer glass refill model that is
starkly devoid of any brand name or filtering apparatus.
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Jeremiah does not mention the embodied energy in the production of his plastic product but Aquatina’s website does state: ‘Refill your Aquatina just three times and it’s carbon neutral compared to buying bottles.’ For those consumers in the habit of buying disposable bottles and not reusing them for fear of leaching, the product is a better option. Jeremiah is evidently passionate about improving access to free tap water in London and beyond. Aquatina’s presence at the Prince of Wales ‘Start’ sustainable living garden party attracted the interest of the Garfield Foundation and Charles himself is said to have declared the design to be ‘“genius”’.

Find-A-Fountain now has a sophisticated website on which an interactive map of all the working, and dry, fountains Jeremiah and his colleagues located appear. Anyone can send in details of a fountain they find; whether outdoor, indoor or defunct. No map of London’s drinking fountains has been published since the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association issued maps attached to its annual reports in the 1870s, but they were soon suspended as an extravagance when funds were running low. It is apt, therefore, that the same organisation in its contemporary guise — The Drinking Fountain Association — is working in partnership with Aquatina’s founder on this contemporary mapping project that takes full advantage of the digital age and locative media.

“Refill on Tap”
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A new fountain, which appeared on Find-A-Fountain’s radar in 2010, became the darling of the tap water refill market. This would be no bombastic Victorian-style restoration but a suitably twenty-first century civic amenity. Victor Callister, the Street Scene Manager for The City of London Corporation, was keen for sustainability policies to be transposed from the comfort of digital files to the messier realities on the ground. The edges of
Callister’s Mancunian accent may have been softened during twenty years down south, but he is hard on the waste issue: ‘We don’t have many litterbins in the City [an anti-terrorism measure]. There’s a lot of street waste…so in the general cleansing there are high volumes of bottle waste. It seems unnecessary that people are buying bottled water and not refilling their bottles.’
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He issues this statement within an elegant glass-fronted boardroom, which forms a contemporary façade to the medieval Guildhall complex. Nestled in one of the world’s most historically resonant spaces of global finance, his anti-bottled water stance comes as a surprise. Despite his distaste for plastic litter, Callister explains that the new fountain design will embrace the use of bottles, as long as they are re-usable: ‘We think it’s more about topping up bottles rather than drinking from the jet fountain.’ Despite the project’s small material scale, the human resources being poured into its production are evident from the account of its production that Callister shares.

With highly qualified urban designers and architects in situ, the Corporation’s planners are usually in a luxurious position (the economic climate have already changed that). Part of the planner’s job is to observe and respond to changes in the use of urban space. Victor Callister explains the significance of the chosen site for the pilot fountain: ‘When I started to work in the City, it was a business city. It closed down in the evening, it closed down at the weekend and it was really only people coming in to do maintenance work on buildings. There was no retail because there was no business then. That’s fundamentally shifted. You come around St Paul’s at the weekend and it’s one of the busiest places in central London.’ These new residential and transient tourist populations form new publics. They consume and they make waste. One location where the City’s diverse groups of workers, residents and visitors intersect is in the outdoor space of Carter Lane Gardens.

From a bird’s eye view of St Paul’s Cathedral, Carter Lane
Gardens is a slice of pedestrianised breathing space sandwiched between the road running along the south of the church and the Thames. The semi-circular little plaza-cum-garden has planted beds and benches dotted around it. Tourists, office workers, construction labourers and local school children alike all take breathers from their exertions there. Standing in the garden’s centre and tilting one’s head up to the right, the full height of the Cathedral looms, whilst to the left the Millennium Bridge’s dramatic walkway shoots across the Thames to the feet of the Tate Modern. Pedestrians moving from the mammoth contemporary art gallery to one of London’s première heritage tourism draws can pause in the tranquil space of the landscaped garden before entering the City proper. Here, the minor architectural wonder of the new drinking fountain lies.

Just before eleven on the scorching morning of 21
^st
May 2010, a modest group of circa thirty people gather to launch Refill on Tap. Standing at just over a metre high, the polished cast iron rectangular slab of the fountain forms a sleek, elegant casing for the single water pipe out of which a sturdy, gleaming brass spout protrudes. Its Spanish designers, Santa and Cole, state that their concept for
Atlántida
–an off-the-shelf landscape architecture accessory –was to break ‘with the classic design of an ornamental fountain’.
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The only other feature is a grate in the ground for an essential function, which is drainage. Drinking directly from the fountain’s brass spout would require a feat of acrobatics. It points firmly, almost stubbornly, downwards.

For the launch, a temporary street sign is in place to the side of the fountain, announcing: ‘This is London’s first fully approved drinking fountain in thirty years.’
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Given that the Hyde Park fountain was the only other high-profile public fountain project in London at this point, it is hard not to interpret the statement as a slight to that project’s integrity (green kudos a much-sought after accolade). The acronym WRAS, standing for Water Regulations Advisory Scheme, is emblazoned on the sign.
This stamp of approval certifies that the plumbing fittings encased in the cast iron slab, and the spout’s design, protect both the health of its users and the wider water supply from contamination. Approval also encompasses the design’s prevention of water waste. Santa and Cole’s
Atlántida
had to be adapted for The City of London Corporation to meet these precise regulations. Callister is very clear that the fountain being shut down as a public health hazard would not look good and the fountain project officer, Henry Smith, looks harassed by remembering the lengthy process of securing the WRAS stamp of approval.