The Meaning of Water

The Meaning of Water

The Meaning of Water

Veronica Strang

Oxford • New York

First published in 2004 by Berg Editorial offices: 1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK 838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-4812, USA © Veronica Strang 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg.

Berg is an imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

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ISBN 1 85973 748 X (Cloth) ISBN 1 85973 753 6 (Paper)

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Contents Acknowledgements

vii

List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

1

Part I Cultural Landscapes 1

The Stour Valley

2

Losing Water

9 21

Part II Under Water 3

Senses and Sensibilities

49

4

Thinking Water

67

Part III Hydrolatry and Hydrology 5

Holy Water

83

6

Secular Hydrolatry

103

7

The Hydrodynamics of Order

113

Part IV Owning Water 8

Private Life

129

9

Governing Water

147

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Contents Part V Managing Water 10

Cultivating Water

167

11

Back to Nature

181

Part VI Contraflows 12

Watering the House and Garden

195

13

Water Pressure

221

Conclusion

245

Bibliography

253

Index

267

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Acknowledgements This research got underway with support from the University of Wales, Lampeter. The major part of the project was sponsored by Southern Water, Yorkshire Water, Thames Water, East of Scotland Water, West of Scotland Water and Essex and Suffolk Water. Other water companies, Vivendi and United Utilities, funded the latter stage of the project in 2001. I would like to thank all of them for supporting this independent ethnographic research and hope that they find the detailed picture of water use and management in the UK useful and illuminating. I would also like to thank the many members of the Office of Water Services’ national and regional committees, the Environment Agency and other water-orientated organisations who have shared information and given feedback on the research findings. In Dorset I received a great deal of help from the Arts and Environment Group, Common Ground, the local Environment Agency offices, various research centres and local businesses, conservation organisations and recreational groups. I was also assisted greatly by employees and managers of the two local water companies: Wessex Water and Bournemouth and West Hampshire. The research benefited greatly from the critiques and advice of fellow anthropologists, most particularly Dimitris Theodossopoulos, who read and commented on an early draft of this manuscript, and Howard and Frances Morphy, who as always provided staunch encouragement. My colleagues at Goldsmiths College in London and my ‘water collaborator’ Sandy Toussaint at the University of Western Australia have offered many helpful discussions, as have friends at Oxford University and at the University of Wales. I would also like to thank Sabina Lautensach, who kindly offered an Antipodean perspective on the final draft, and to acknowledge the support of other colleagues at the Auckland University of Technology. In addition, I am grateful for the work of the anonymous referees, whose thoughtful advice greatly assisted the development of this volume. Last but far from least, I would like to thank all the hospitable individuals in the Stour Valley who participated in the project. A number put up with me tagging along as they went about their work on the river: some guided me on tours of water treatment plants, mills and gardens; others invited me to join them in their recreation, so that enjoyable hours were spent paddling canoes, losing fish hooks, rambling along the banks and chatting to artists at work. Many were extraordinarily generous with their time and with their thoughts, and spent hours ‘talking water’, patiently filling in questionnaires, dredging up information for me and annotating and – vii –

Acknowledgements adding to transcripts of our discussions. I have tried to keep their voices in the ethnography,1 so that this picture of the Stour is at least partly a self-portrait. I hope they consider it a ‘good likeness’.

1. Although most of the people I worked with in Dorset indicated that they were happy for their names to appear with quotes, I have exercised discretion where I felt it might be appropriate, for example, if they have revealed personal issues or criticised their neighbours or employers. A few people, though happy to be interviewed and quoted, preferred to remain anonymous throughout. All of the quotes from informants are italicised, and either named or coded ‘INF’.

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Abbreviations BSE CJD CPRE CSC

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy Creutzfeld-Jakob disease Council for the Protection of Rural England OFWAT Regional Customer Service Committee (now WaterVoice [region]) DCV Dorset Countryside Volunteers. DWI Drinking Water Inspectorate DWT Dorset Wildlife Trust EA Environment Agency EU European Union GM genetically modified MAFF Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food NFU National Farmers’ Union NRA National Rivers Authority OFWAT Office of Water Services ONCC OFWAT National Consumer Council (now WaterVoice) RSPB Royal Society for the Protection of Birds SAP Species Action Plan SSSI Site of Special Scientific Interest

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Introduction

Introduction When the well is dry we know the worth of water. (Benjamin Franklin, 1846)

Only Connect All over the blue planet, even in the most rained-upon nations, people are engaged in conflicts over water. There are debates about who should own it, manage it, have access to it, profit from it, control it or regulate it. Nothing on earth, not even land, is more contested. Rising populations and intensifying agriculture are creating ever greater needs for water,1 and in many areas there is not enough infrastructure, or simply not enough water, to keep up with this demand. Even in ‘green and pleasant’ lands as disparate as the UK and New Zealand, hot summers are leading with increasing frequency to dry rivers, droughts and the prospect of insufficient water at the time of year when it is needed the most. In the next decade, more than half the cities in Europe will experience water shortages in the summer. Much of Africa is chronically short of potable water. Vast areas of land in the Americas and Antipodes are becoming barren, saline deserts because of farmers’ reliance upon groundwaters for irrigation. And as Rothenberg and Ulvaeus point out: ‘where there are enough humans and not enough water, hydrosquabbles spew forth’ (2001:40). In the UK more than half the years in the last decade have been ‘drought years’ with insufficient water levels in some areas to sustain fish populations and other aquatic plants and wildlife. A combination of reduced water levels and increased waste production has led to reproductive and health problems not just for fish, but also for humans.2 Some of these are related to ‘sex-change’ chemicals; others, it 1. Clarke notes that, internationally, irrigation is by far the biggest use of water. It increased ten times over in the twentieth century, and ‘elaborate plans are still being made to extend irrigation into more and more areas’ (1991:27). It has risen steadily in the UK too, but in such a densely populated country, domestic water use still accounts of 70% of the total demand. 2. An Environment Agency report notes anxieties about the effects of artificial chemicals and natural hormones in sewage: endochrine disruptors . . . so called ‘sex change chemicals’ substances like PCBs, dioxins, alkyl phenol ethoxylates, leachates from plastic packaging, steriods and pesticides, all of which have been suggested for disruptions in nature such as hermaphrodism in fish, male birth defects, falling sperm counts and rising levels of breast cancer. (Stedman 1998:7)

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Introduction has been suggested, are connected to the overuse of agricultural fertilisers and pesticides. Meanwhile: With an increasing population and more homes being built, the demand for water is increasing daily. Some predictions suggest that, without managing demand, by the year 2020 we will need almost a third as much again per person. (EA 1997b:1)

Despite this reality and environmentalists’ pleas for conservation, populations given the chance to do so (via new technology or affluence) almost invariably increase rather than decrease their levels of water usage. In the UK domestic water use per capita has almost doubled in the last forty years,3 and similar increases can be seen in every industrialised nation. Environmentalists and water managers cling to the hope that with sufficient education and enough social and economic pressure they can persuade people to curb their levels of use. So far, though, their efforts have met with little or no success: water users appear to have become intractably unwilling to ‘save it’. Why are so many people apparently determined to use more and more water in the face of increasingly frantic messages, and despite their own professed concern for the environment? Policy makers and environmentalists tend to describe this ‘profligacy’ either in terms of individual self-interest – a ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ (Hardin 1968) or as simply ‘irrational’. However, the research described in this volume suggests that it is neither: that water usage is driven by deep rationality and, ironically, a yearning for social reconnection and reconciliation with nature. It shows that patterns of use are a manifestation of social, economic and political relations. There are close ties between power structures and the control of resources, between access to water and political enfranchisement. Concerns about social agency and inclusion are manifested in ‘profligate’ water usage, in resistance to demand-side management instruments, and in conflicts about water ownership, control and management. To understand why people, particularly in Western societies, are so passionate in their desire for water, it is necessary to go under the surface and explore the complexities of their relationships with this most vital resource and with each other. The in-depth analysis described in this book is based on ethnographic research carried out along the River Stour in Dorset. Winding across an affluent southern English countryside, through farms and pretty villages towards the towns along the south coast, the Stour Valley has no extraordinary problems with water. 3. Though industrial use has dropped with the shift from manufacturing to service industries, and per capita use is still fairly low compared to other developed countries, this is mostly domestic usage. The Water Services Association (1997:27) calculates that domestic consumption has almost doubled since 1961 (from 85 litres per capita per day, to 160 litres per day), and the Environment Agency agrees that the range is now 140–90 litres a day.

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Introduction Yet the local ecology is under strain, and people speak with considerable feeling about water issues. They are concerned about water quality, anxious about pollution and foul flooding in the winter, aware of water shortages in the summer, and angry about ownership. More than a decade after the water utilities were privatised they still describe it as ‘the worst thing they ever did’ (INF21). In this relatively calm and ordinary place, all of the undercurrents which add pressure to much more intense conflicts about water are present and can be explored. In embarking upon this exploration, the volume relies most heavily upon classical anthropological research methods: long-term fieldwork, in-depth interviews with a cross-section of the population, close observation and the ‘mapping’ of social, spatial and environmental relations. The contemporary data are placed in a historical context through the use of archaeological evidence, environmental records, local archives and maps. The text also draws upon related disciplines, such as theology and psychology, in which water imagery plays an important part. Most particularly, it locates the case study in the wider political and socio-economic context pertaining to water resources, noting that the patterns evident in Dorset reflect the dynamics discernible in many comparable cultural contexts. What emerges from this systematic investigation is a picture of a highly complex relationship with water, in which physical, sensory and cognitive experiences articulate with cultural meanings and values. The ethnographic data suggest that the meanings poured into water have proved highly consistent over time; that they exert a powerful influence over every decision involved in water use; that they form a deep rationale for increasing levels of usage; and that they are difficult to alter. A clearer view of the undercurrents also suggests that the contemporary arrangement of water ownership and management in the UK (a model that is being enthusiastically exported and replicated elsewhere) is fundamentally at odds with these powerful meanings. Such dissonance is extremely problematic, actively encouraging high levels of usage and an unwillingness to act cooperatively and conserve resources. In the longer term, it seems that this organisational structure can only lead to greater social and political tensions over water and further environmental degradation. The findings therefore present a challenge to policy makers, the water industry and other groups who hope to engender more careful water use, suggesting a need to develop policies and practices which cohere – rather than conflict – with ‘the meaning of water’.

An Analytic Framework The importance of water is demonstrated by the fact that every academic discipline deals with it in one way or another. Historians have written extensively about drinking water (Astrup 1993, Goubert 1986), about rivers (Haslam 1991, 1997),

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Introduction and changes in land and water resource use (Harvey 1997, Taylor 1975). In Dorset itself, local changes are described in early accounts of farming and industry (Bettey 1977, 1986, Pugh 1968) and in historical documents (Hutchins 1973 [1861]). The County Record Office archives contain tithe maps, probate inventories and legal documents going back for hundreds of years. Historians and theologians have produced a rich body of literature on the sacred meanings and ritual uses of water (Pocknee 1967, Schama 1996, Schmemann 1976), and there is also considerable interest in holy wells (Bord and Bord 1985, Rattue 1995, Wild 1981), of which there are many in Dorset (see Irvine 1989, Knight 1998, Whitaker and Edwards 1926). The symbolic aspects of water and water imagery play an important part in writing on psychology (Freud 1961 [1900], Jung 1964, Wittels 1982). Disciplines dealing with environmental issues have focused mainly on the biology and hydrology of water (Sowry 1977, Speidel et al. 1988), and on the growing problems in water resource management (Clarke 1991, Reisner 2001 [1986], United Nations 2003). Some have attempted to consider relationships between social and environmental factors (Pearce 1982, Wolman 1971). Others have tackled the subject from an economic and social perspective (Field et al. 1974), or from a developmental point of view (Goldman et al. 1973). There are some relevant analyses of the relationship between water and political agency (Bennett 1995, Donahue and Johnston 1998, Kinnersley 1994, Lowi 1993, Ohlsson 1995, Strang 2001, Ward 1997, Worster 1985). There is also an extensive literature on water policy and legislation (Boon and Howell 1997, Kay 1991, Newson 1992, Young et al. 1994). Although this study draws on these areas, its major theoretical frameworks are located in anthropology and archaeology, and in analytic models that consider the human–environmental relationship as a whole. Critiquing the conventional Western model that considers nature and culture in dualistic terms, anthropological theories present this as a dynamic, interpenetrative interaction. Rather than merely ‘adapting to’ environmental pressures, human beings have considerable agency (Descola and Palsson 1996): they ‘appropriate’ nature and act upon it (Ingold 1986, 1995). They create a particular cultural space or ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1977) and construct it in ideological and moral terms (Ingold 2000, Strathern 1980). They engage with it imaginatively (Bateson 1973, Gibson 1979, Ingold 2000); they impose meaning upon it (Geertz 1993 [1973]) and invest identity and emotion in it (Milton 2002, Strang 1997). As Douglas (1973) has made clear, aspects of ‘nature’ have particularly powerful symbolic force, and as Herzfeld comments: ‘unobtrusive symbols are often the most potent of all. Their connections with received ideas . . . give them unusual potential for manipulation. They seem natural and obvious’ (1992:11). Human–environmental relations are also subject to ecological constraints and physiological and biological needs. As the substance that is literally essential to all living organisms, water is experienced and embodied both physically and culturally. –4–

Introduction The meanings encoded in it are not imposed from a distance, but emerge from an intimate interaction involving ingestion and expulsion, contact and immersion. Engagement with water is the perfect example of a recursive relationship in which nature and culture literally flow into each other. As Harrison and Morphy point out: ‘Human biology and physiology are likely to be as important as cognitive factors in understanding many areas of human behaviour and culture’ (1998 [1993]: vi–vii). A key area of literature in considering water is therefore concerned with sensory experience: the ‘acculturation’ of the senses (Feld 1982, Gibson 1979, Howes 1991, Ingold 2000), and the relationship between sensory experience, cognitive interpretation and the creation of meaning. As Schiffman points out, sensory perception ‘involves organizing, interpreting, and giving meaning to what the sense organs initially process’ (1996:2–3). Thus engagement with the environment provides synaesthetic experiences that are integral to the generation of meaning; and instrumental in the development of cultural values and practices. The Dorset research suggests that water plays a vital part in the construction of identity at an individual, local and national level, and in conceptualising universalist ideas of common humanity. There are useful comparisons to be made with analyses of food and identity (Caplan 1997, Lupton 1996, Macbeth 1997), pollution (Douglas 1966), and other issues relating to embodiment (Lacan 1977, Lambek and Strathern 1998). The essentiality of water also means that there is much common ground in human interactions with it, which opens the door to a useful cross-cultural comparison of the various themes of meaning that emerge (Blatter and Ingram 2001, Giblett 1996, Lansing 1991, Sprawson 1992, Tuan 1968). In this regard, analyses of water and meaning sit alongside research on other natural resources (Ellen and Fukui 1996) and debates about universality, for example those concerned with the commonality of meanings encoded in different environmental and cultural contexts (Gibson 1979, Ingold 1995, Rival 1998). Interactions with water take place within a cultural landscape which is the product of specific social, spatial, economic and political arrangements, cosmological and religious beliefs, knowledges and material culture, as well as ecological constraints and opportunities (see Bender 1993, 1998, Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995, Strang 1997, Tilley 1994). Cultural landscapes contain deep historical roots: Dorset’s landholdings and farming patterns retain echoes of Celtic and Roman economic activities, Saxon yeoman farming and other waves of invasion and enclosure. Ancient water meadows, drainage systems, weirs and mills merge with modern systems of water treatment and delivery, industrial farming and urban development. This cultural landscape is therefore both producer and product of the material culture through which human agency is enacted (see Appadurai 1986, Csikszentmihályi and Rochberg-Halton 1981, Hodder 1991, Miller 1987). Much can be –5–

Introduction gleaned about how people think and feel about water by considering the artefacts and technology through which it is contained, controlled, moved around, treated, made decorative or made sacred. As Gell has pointed out (1992, 1998), artefacts are devices through which people express particular world views, acting as ‘prosthetic’ extensions of their agency, or, as Garner puts it, ‘semi-actants’ (2002). In this way, water itself becomes an artefact, acculturated through human action, endowed with personal qualities and identity and used to invoke meaning (Carrier 1995, Miller 1998, Moore 1994). Having been appropriated in this way, it is employed representationally, providing imagery and metaphor for many aspects of human experience, including the power relations expressed in its control and management (see Blatter and Ingram 2001, Douglas 1987, Foucault 1978, Reisner 2001 [1986], Worster 1985). In attempting to contextualise and so elucidate the meaning of water, this volume considers each of these areas systematically. Part I, ‘Cultural Landscapes’, provides a historical and ethnographic background, describing changing social and spatial arrangements in Dorset, and important shifts in water ownership, management and use over time. It offers a brief overview of the ecological consequences of these changes. Part II, ‘Under Water’, examines the material qualities of water and considers the relationship between sensory experience of these and the generation of meaning. It explores the metaphorical use of water imagery in the construction of ideas about the self, and in models of the relationship between individuals and their social and material environments. Part III, ‘Hydrolatry and Hydrology’, looks at religious and secular cosmological models in which water imagery plays a central part, and considers how imagery and metaphor flow from one conceptual model to another, creating coherent undercurrents of meaning. Part IV, ‘Owning Water’, examines how the meaning of water influenced public responses to the privatisation of water in the UK. It describes the water industry’s own engagements with resources, and the standpoints of the various agencies attempting to regulate and impose governance on water resource management. Part V, ‘Managing Water’, considers Dorset’s local water owning and managing groups, exploring industry and farming perspectives and the relationship between commercial and domestic water users. It looks at the local groups directly involved in river management and water conservation, and considers how their role enables them to regain some degree of common ownership. Part VI, ‘Contraflows’, focuses on the domestic sphere and the way in which contemporary socio-spatial arrangements articulate with engagements with water. It traces the influence of the most powerful meanings of water upon patterns of domestic water use, and considers how these affect evaluations of water quality and responses to government and water industry policy instruments. The Conclusion summarises the findings, considers their longterm social and environmental implications, and suggests a new perspective on analyses of water ownership and management. –6–

The Stour Valley

Part I Cultural Landscapes

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–1– The Stour Valley The Stour Valley is both typical and unique: it has its own demographic profile, economic practices and social activities, a particular place in history, and local ecological characteristics. In other words, it has its own cultural landscape. However, its population is simultaneously part of much wider social, economic, political and cultural processes, and its ecological issues are replicated – with varying degrees of severity – in many places. In this sense the locale of the Valley reflects many water-related issues that have become evident in many other areas. The ideas, beliefs, values and concerns expressed by its inhabitants echo those of water users and managers around the country and resonate with issues raised in conflicts about water all over the world. The River Stour is approximately 96 kilometres in length: it emerges from greensand at Stour Head on the Wiltshire border, various tributaries join it around Gillingham and Marnhull, and it flows southwards into the sea at Christchurch. Its catchment covers an area of about 1,300 square kilometres, the upper reaches draining clay valleys between parallel belts of limestone hills and the lower part of the river bordered by dramatic chalk downs (EA 1998:5) Travelling from the rich uplands of the Blackmore Vale into the floodplains of its lower reaches, the Stour runs from a rural heartland into the industrial conurbations of Bournemouth and Poole. Approximately 394,000 people live within the river catchment (EA 1999a:2), and Dorset itself contains approximately 650,000 (Dorset County Council 1998). Ethnic minority groups are poorly represented, with over 99% of the county’s inhabitants falling into the ‘white/caucasian’ category. The population is heavily concentrated along the coast, although there has been an influx of retirees from London to the northern parts of the county in the last twenty years. This is particularly evident in the upper reaches of the Stour, where the population is older, wealthier and more conservative than average. Historically, Dorset has long been a rich farming region, dominated for several centuries by major landowners. Agriculture remains important, although it now employs only about 2% of the working population (reflecting the UK norms). About a quarter of employment is in manufacturing or construction, and a similar proportion in tourist-related industries. Over 30% of jobs are in public administration or education, and over 10% in banking or financial services. Unemployment is only about two-thirds of the national average. –9–

Cultural Landscapes Like the rest of the UK, Dorset’s environment is under considerable pressure. The county contains large ‘areas of outstanding natural beauty’ and ‘heritage coast’, as well as numerous Sites of Special Interest (SSSIs) and ‘environmentally sensitive areas’. Meanwhile the population is growing, and – with smaller households – new housing is increasing even more quickly. Dorset is relatively ‘well off’ for water, with underground aquifers providing nearly half of its supplies, and higher than average rainfall. River water quality is also better than in some parts of the country. Nevertheless, like most other rivers in the UK, the Stour experiences a range of problems with industrial, farming and domestic wastes, as does the coast (although bathing water quality has improved in response to EC legislative pressure). In the summer there are regular problems with levels of abstraction which lead to low flows, and a Stour tributary, the River Allen, is listed as one of the top ‘low-flow sites’ in England. Meanwhile, domestic water usage levels continue to rise.

Times and Tides Socio-economic and environmental changes in the Stour Valley follow a familiar historical pattern: an accelerating intensification of land use and population growth, accompanied by the privatisation of land and resources and a steady shift from rural to urban areas. In the process, individual interaction with – and control of – resources has become increasingly indirect, with significant effects on water ownership, use and management. Notably, although interactions with the environment have changed radically, people still draw upon images of past communities and systems of management to formulate ideas about the present and construct ‘ideal’ models. Models of truly collective ownership of the land and resources are almost lost in the mists of time, but may be found in Dorset’s pre-Christian past, when Celtic tribes called Durotriges1 lived mainly by hunting, gathering and fishing in what was then a heavily wooded landscape. Evidence of agricultural development remains in Iron Age hill forts such as Maiden Castle, near Dorchester. According to Hutchins (1973 [1861]), the early Celtic groups were superseded by a Belgic people, from Gaul, whose cattle breeding and trade required more permanent settlements. Self-sufficient village economies emerged, reliant on mixed farming – mainly livestock and a few crops such as wheat and beans.

1. According to Ptolemy, these ancient Britons were called the Durotriges. Hutchins suggests this name was ‘derived probably from Dour or Dwr, in British, water, and Trig, an inhabitant . . . dwellers by the water or sea-side’ (1973 [1861]:i). The link with water remains in the name of Dorset itself: Hutchins also notes that according to Asser Menevensis (in the year 890), the ancient Britons called the area Durnguies, and the Saxons translated this into Thornsaeta or Dornsaeta (1973:i).

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The Stour Valley The Roman invasion of Britain, beginning in about 55 BC, took less than a hundred years to achieve dominance. Bringing their ships up the rivers, the invaders established military and then civic settlements in Dorset, making Dorchester (Dunium or Durnonovaria) their major provincial capital. They built numerous fortifications, traces of which remain on the Downs overlooking the Stour, and they imported sophisticated agricultural methods and water management technology, including the first water wheels and aqueducts.2 In the fifth and sixth centuries AD, Saxon invaders created a central parliament and managed the county via sheriffs (shire-reeves). Throughout the Middle Ages, their farmers enclosed and cleared land in Dorset, removing much of its woodland. In 787 the Danes, despite King Alfred’s efforts,3 destroyed Dorchester, Sherborne and other Dorset towns, placing their King Cnut on the English throne. Though the Saxons managed to restore their rule briefly in 1042, the Norman conquest in 1066 replaced the English landowners with a foreign, military aristocracy and led to large areas of Dorset being designated as Royal Forest or ‘chase’, a land use which continued for centuries along the Stour Valley (for example in the famous Cranbourne Chase to the east, and in the Blackmore Vale itself).4 Dorset’s first millennium was thus characterised by one flood of invaders after another, each introducing new technology that enabled more intensive forms of land use and population growth. With military occupation, small-scale, fairly self-sufficient communities were subsumed into larger landholdings and more economically complex villages, owned by an emerging aristocracy and powerful monastic orders. Thus, although much administration remained local, some control over land and resources passed from communities to more centralised bodies.

Dorset Shires Dorset appears in the Domesday Book (1086) as a county composed of fifty-eight manorial estates, some belonging directly to King William, but most held either by 2. When they first arrived in Dorset, the Romans enslaved the Durotriges, forcing them to work on a huge corn mill near Poole, which was so large that slaves could only work for ten minutes or so at a time. When slavery was officially abolished in the fourth century AD, donkeys and asses replaced this labour, but the most important change came when the Romans introduced the water wheel, first at Hadrian’s wall. As there was a contingent of the Durotrigan Tribal Levy Corps there, this technology was soon brought to Dorset (Dewar 1960). 3. King Alfred’s Tower, at the Stour Head estate supposedly marks the site of one of his victories against the invading Danes (Roscoe et al. 1952:38–39). 4. There were large areas of Royal Forest around Gillingham and in the Blackmore Vale down to Sturminster Newton, and this brought quite repressive levels of control. Landowners could do nothing without permission – no tree felling or building, and not even any hunting without a licence. This created considerable resentment that was only alleviated by the Charter of the Forest made by Henry III (Roscoe et a/. 1952).

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Cultural Landscapes the ecclesiastical orders who built the famous monastic houses (such as the Abbey in Shaftesbury), or by feudal lords whose peasantry was bound to service (Pugh 1968). Divided into circuits, shires and hundreds, the land was taxed according to its smaller subdivisions or ‘hides’ – areas of land considered sufficient to sustain a household. This system persisted until the great plague of the mid-1300s, in which 50 million people died in Europe. People reportedly rushed to bathe in the Stour because its waters were supposed to be preventative and curative, but a third of the population perished nonetheless. Agriculture remained the major industry, and in the fertile valleys the tenants of the aristocracy did well, creating a class of wealthy yeoman farmers who, according to Thomas Gerard, a Dorset surveyor in the 1600s, ‘now beginne to encroach upon the Gentrie’ (Dorset Records, Probate Inventories). However, local economies were disrupted by the Civil War5 and the dissolution of the monasteries, and everyday existence remained materially spartan for many. According to Roscoe et al, the less fortunate lived in ‘hovels with rotting thatch, rush lights, vermin, seas of mud in winter, disease and epidemics’ (1952:41). The wealth of the Stour Valley improved greatly with the introduction of water meadows in the 1630s. This carefully managed system of artificial channels and hatches created meadows in which temporary flooding, by insulating the grass and providing it with regular deposits of silt, produced an earlier growth of fodder, freeing farmers from the limitation of having to store food for stock over the winter.6 From the seventeenth century on, there was a shift away from sheep farming to arable crops: wheat, barley, oats and rye, and potatoes, the latter being of particular importance during the Napoleonic wars. These changes encouraged a rash of further enclosures and more intensive farming, leaving many bereft of common land. Nevertheless, rural populations remained relatively stable, with one generation after another taking over farm tenancies and the range of small domestic businesses that were essential to the local economy.7 By the late seventeenth century the local economy was heavily dependent on the technological management of water. Meadows and irrigation underpinned intensive farming practices, and water-powered mills had become crucial drivers of local industry and employment. At the same time, ‘scientific’ agriculture 5. The Battle of Dorset in 1645 took place on the banks of the Stour, and resulted in much raiding of the villages in the river valley. 6. This became a standard agricultural method, and by 1800 over 6000 acres of water meadows had been established (Bettey 1977). 7. In 1821, for example, a census in Marnhull records a population in which the majority of men were either yeomen or labourers, but which contained a whole spectrum of tradesmen such as stonemasons, thatchers, blacksmiths, carpenters, wheelers, woolcombers, millers, sawyers, linen drapers, tailors, dairymen, chandlers, coopers and brewers. It seemed that women, apart from the occasional schoolmistress or mantua maker, were either in domestic work, not listed as having a

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The Stour Valley brought methods of drilling, sowing and rotating crops, land drainage, animal husbandry and of course irrigation. The capital investment this necessitated (and the potential profits) encouraged another burst of land enclosures, mechanisation and redundancies. ‘Lifehold’ tenants were evicted and small farms became less viable: the percentage of people involved in agriculture plummeted, fuelling the growth of the cities. In Dorset a relatively stable population was therefore increasingly disrupted and dispossessed. There were violent protests: at Sixpenny Handley and Stalbridge people rioted and destroyed agricultural machinery when the commons were enclosed in 1830, and numerous fires were set at Bradford Abbas. The military was brought in to ‘restore order’ and in 1834 the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ were deported.8 The enclosures continued, and farming became, inexorably, a more commercial enterprise, intensifying steadily to feed the cities to which the poor migrated in the hope of finding employment. In Marnhull, the Inclosure Commissioners approved the ‘the inclosure of Marnhull Common’ in 1862, parcelling up the land for freehold sale or leasehold. A village census in Marnhull in 1891 reveals a population composed of more glovers, builders, masons and suchlike than agricultural labourers, and increasing numbers of domestic servants and gardeners working for the ‘gentry’.

Twentieth-Century Dorset Like other areas in the UK, Dorset experienced a demographic transformation in the twentieth century. Firstly the population expanded exponentially,9 though mostly in the urban areas: for example, rural Marnhull in the mid-century contained fewer people than it had a hundred years previously.10 However, people were living in much smaller family units than before, requiring vast numbers of new houses. Thus there were 383 houses in Marnhull in 1951, although the 240 homes particular profession, or appeared as ‘gentlewomen’. There were 285 families in Marnhull at the time, 135 engaged in agricultural work, and 120 in local trade, manufacturing or handicrafts. Two hundred and forty inhabited houses contained a population of 1273, averaging five people per house (County Records 1821). Nearly 43% of the population was less than 15 years of age, and only 14% of it over 50. This demographic pattern was repeated in villages all over Dorset, with the total population in the county in 1821 being only 144,930 – less than a quarter of its current level (Census 1951). 8. A Martyrs’ Tree in Tolpuddle still commemorates the political activities of the workers transported to the penal colonies for their protests against local land enclosures in 1834. 9. In 1881 the county contained only 191,028 people; in 1951 this had grown by over a third to 291,323. By 1991 the number of residents had more than doubled again, reaching 645,166 (HMSO 1991:11). 10. Changing parish boundaries and census methods make comparisons over time uncertain, but in 1951, the census for Marnhull lists 1152 people – 121 fewer than in 1821.

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Cultural Landscapes there in 1821 had contained more people. By 1991, with smaller families, lower infant mortality and lengthening life spans, the demographic profile had altered considerably: the percentage of people under the age of 15 had halved, falling to less than 20%, while the proportion of people over 50 had leapt (from 14% in 1821) to nearly 40%, becoming particularly high as Dorset became a favoured retirement area. By the end of the twentieth century the economic focus of the county had passed from agriculture, through a manufacturing phase and into a dependence on urban service industries. The rural economy, though healthier than in many parts of the UK, became increasingly unstable. Large farms were able to absorb economic ups and downs, but the loss of small farms continued, with many increasingly dependent on subsidies, to the extent that, in 1999, some farmers reckoned that these composed ‘40–50%’ of average farm income. It’s that serious – because the returns on your sale of grain and livestock have halved in the last two years . . . they’ve literally halved. The price of grain has halved, the price of lambs has almost halved, and dairying is on its way down. (INF57)

A growing tourist industry alleviated these problems to some degree, as urban populations acquired sufficient time and resources for seaside holidays and weekend breaks, but many rural properties passed into the hands of well-heeled retirees. These ‘incomers’ and tourists proved much more interested in using the land for recreational rather than agricultural purposes. The most visible changes in the Stour Valley are in the south. The towns of Poole and Christchurch are now linked by fast motorways to Bournemouth, Dorchester and Weymouth, and the entire coast is densely populated and crowded with supermarkets, cinemas, hotels, restaurants, marinas, golf courses, caravan sites and light industry. Further up the Stour Valley many of the pretty thatched villages, though undoubtedly more pristine, look much as they did when occupied by 19th century glove makers and yeomen. Some contain a few families who have been there for generations, and there are still some extremely wealthy landowners who own great stretches of the river and live in manorial splendour. They [a local family] virtually own that village and other areas around. You still get a lot of that in this area, a lot of local landowners. My daughter . . . is a nanny and the people she nannies for own their village, and the people rent the farms and cottages from them. People still can maintain a lifestyle that’s very nice because they’ve got the income from all the estate. (INF14)

Of all the groups along the Stour, the farming community remains the most stable and cohesive. The mere fact that it involves direct investment in and production from the land maintains some of its continuities, in accord with Gellner’s – 14 –

The Stour Valley ‘potato principle’ (1992) that territorial identity and ‘rootedness’ stabilise rural societies. As one farmer wrote in a local newspaper: My husband and his family have farmed at Huntingford for at least six generations. . . . Despite the fact that the village was more populated before mechanisation of the farming way of life, and our population has dwindled, we remain largely untouched by the modern world. (Fricker 1998:27)

In these ‘pockets’ of stability a few older farmers can still speak a Dorset dialect, though their numbers are dwindling: It’s a job to find youngsters that read dialect, the original Barnes dialect . . . there’s very few people that speak it now, very few. (Tom Fox)

Younger people, unable to afford spiralling property prices and needing access to non-agricultural jobs, have moved to the towns. The village shops have closed, people have got cars, they go to the towns to do their shopping to the big supermarkets . . . The local people are not able to stay in their own village, (a) because the work is not there on the farms any more, and. (b) because they are priced out – with the housing market. (Pat Herbert)

The age distribution in the Valley has therefore changed, with the villages becoming ‘older’ and the towns ‘younger’ – a factor that no doubt exacerbates the ‘rural– urban divide’ so prominent in political life. We’ve had a Conservative MP for yonks here, all four sections of Dorset have Conservatives and always have . . . The countryside on the whole is inclined to be Tory. (INF59)

New material wealth has also changed housing tenure dramatically. More than three-quarters of dwellings in Dorset are now owner-occupied, and almost half of these are owned outright. (Census 1991:462). New housing has followed the postwar trend towards larger house sizes with fewer occupants. The development has not been confined to the coast: small towns along the Stour, such as Gillingham and Blandford, have enlarged too.11 The villages along the river have also expanded somewhat, but there has been fierce resistance to this, in particular when local planners have dared to propose low-cost Housing Association developments. In Stalbridge, for example, in 1998, residents fought in meetings and through the media to keep the village within its ‘accepted settlement boundary’: 11. For example, at the beginning of the 1980s, Gillingham had approximately four thousand inhabitants; by the beginning of the new millennium there were about ten thousand and plans for housing a further six thousand

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Cultural Landscapes Stalbridge community turned out in force . . . to oppose an application for 16 Housing Association Houses in the village, fearing that the flats would be filled with ‘alcoholics, drug addicts or those suffering from mental illness’. (Weaver 1998:1–3)

Thus, flowing southwards, the Stour passes – very broadly – through a series of recent socio-economic changes, in a sense heading into the future, with the aristocracy and an older, wealthier and conservative population ensconced along its upper reaches, and the younger, more mobile, liberal and diverse groups clustered around its estuaries. As in the rest of the UK, though, the population as a whole has become a great deal more fluid, shifting in concert with changing work patterns. The effect on the communities along the river has been radical. The days when villages were mainly composed of families tightly interwoven through marriage and long-term economic interdependencies have largely vanished, and villages vary in the extent to which they maintain a collective sense of identity. Although a few still contain extended kin networks, most families are now scattered much more widely, reflecting a nationwide retreat from collective involvement and interdependency into smaller, more mobile familial units. There has been a process of dissolution, as younger generations have moved into town, and housing has been taken up by wealthier incomers whose work and social life may be focused elsewhere. The trouble is, there’s a lot of outsiders who buy property in the villages, they’re hardly in the villages . . . I think you have strong communities and not so strong communities . . . I am very interested in community affairs, but . . . people don’t have the time these days. I think if you’ve got people who are in employed work elsewhere, basically they don’t have the time to give to the community. (INF57)

Reflecting patterns visible all over the UK, most villages have also expanded: as the Council for the Protection of Rural England notes, ‘we have built over an area of rural land the size of Greater London every decade since 1945’ (CPRE 1998). The major loss of common land in Dorset today is for housing development, and, as Legg notes (1995), it is an ongoing battle to prevent common land being deregistered for other purposes. The population growth represented in this vast building programme has also made a major impact upon land use. Although the historical account shows continual technological development and intensification of resource use since the Celtic tribes began to sow seeds and keep livestock,12 the most radical changes in land use in the UK have occurred within the last century. English Nature records that 95% of neutral grassland and hay meadows have gone into agriculture

12. The Domesday Book describes vast areas of woodland, and at least half of Dorset was ‘wild’ or ‘wasteland’. By the 1950s woods covered only 5% of the whole area of the county.

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The Stour Valley since the 1930s; 48% of grazing marsh since the 1950s; and 50% of fens and mires since the 1950s.13 There are some aspects of village life that still seem to generate a sense of ‘community’: historically based continuities such as local employment are still relevant, particularly in the most rural areas. The Church provides some continuity, mainly for the older generations. Village pubs and clubs offer a secular social space, and some professional middle-class incomers become active in village events, initiating local history groups, conservation activities and recreational and artistic projects. Social dynamics are subject to subtle differences such as the extent to which historic patterns of land ownership have been maintained and each village’s location in relation to amenities, schools and employment. Much depends on minor variations, such as the local leaders in the community, or fluctuations in the economy – factors that can change quite rapidly.

Social Pressure Intensifying land use has brought some major social pressures, and these are revealed in the matter of access to the river and its environs. In Dorset’s rural communities and even many urban neighbourhoods, even fifty years ago, the inhabitants knew most of the people likely to be wandering about in the vicinity. The shift from relatively stable social organisation to increasingly transient settlements has brought a constant influx of strangers. People not only move home more frequently now (on average every four years), they also move between urban and rural areas much more freely. Many ‘townies’, newly equipped with leisure time and transport, want to escape to the country for some respite, and this desire has generated sufficient political pressure to create the new ‘right to roam’ legislation that emerged in 2000. In the Stour Valley this has increased the demand for more access to the river. There is a ‘Stour Valley Path’ guide (Griffiths 1998 [1994]), described as ‘the complete route from Christchurch to Stourhead . . . a six day journey to the source of a fine English river’. In fact, for much of its route, the path is a considerable distance from the river, being heavily reliant on ancient rights-of-way directly between villages. Access to riparian land is problematic: both symbolically and economically it is the most sought-after land, long held by the most wealthy and powerful members of the local community. Landowners’ responses to pressure for increased access range from lukewarm to actively hostile, and this is keenly felt by people attempting to negotiate access or mediate in the debate:

13. English Nature also notes that in areas such as East Anglia, 95.5% of fens etc. have vanished since the 1820s.

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Cultural Landscapes Access is an extremely delicate issue amongst landowners, perhaps in Britain more so than many other countries. It is very much ‘my land is my land . . .’ It is sad, because it’s a beautiful river . . . It is steeped in history. Most of the land ownership in this part of Dorset is held by very large estates that have maybe still quite feudal views. (INF47)

One informant, who wanted to canoe the length of the Stour in order to raise money for charity, had to write over sixty letters to landowners to gain permission simply to pass through their land on the river. ‘It took ages and ages’ (INF50). Even the most liberal landowners are anxious to maintain control over access. Public intrusion into their little empires is never welcomed. There will be those amongst them who will try . . . Perhaps create prescriptive paths, or those sorts of things . . . Those paths are the reaction to ‘right to roam’ . . . trying to establish voluntary access agreements and so on. (INF34)

The growing tensions about access also reflect the fragmentation of previously stable social relations. For example, the Stour Valley is one of the heartlands of the Countryside Alliance: many local farmers drive cars with stickers indicating that they joined the 1998 London march in support of ‘the countryside’. In the same year, at the annual Gillingham and Shaftesbury Agricultural Show, a generous platform was given to the hunting lobby to promulgate its views and bring its hounds and horses into the arena with the loudspeakers blaring the song ‘We are the Guardians of the Countryside’. However, even at this ‘traditional’ event, with its parades of gleaming cattle and carefully combed sheep, this elicited a mixed response. Modern Dorset has many new landowners who see little reason why the hunt should have any more access to their land than anyone else: Years ago, when there were a lot of little tenant farmers, you had to put up with them . . . because they owned the land that you farmed, and if you didn’t let them ride over it with their hounds and their horses they kicked you off the farm . . . My father didn’t like the hunt . . . The master of the fox hunt came and almost demanded that he stop shooting foxes and the old man bluntly told him where to go . . . You don’t have to put up with [those people]. (INF33)

In most cases, though, the concerns are about access to ‘the public’ and the problems this creates: vandalism, dog fouling, harassment of stock, damage to crops and fences, gates being left open, litter and the disturbance of wildlife. The owner of nine miles of land along the Stour, including several old mill sites, described his experiences: They break their way into the mill. We have a great deal of vandalism: ten break-ins in two years . . . That wood over there is an SSSI . . . it is a beautifully quiet place, and we

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The Stour Valley are trying to use it as one of the places where otters can go . . . It’s best that there isn’t public access . . . I am not very keen on boating because it upsets the fishermen . . . the fishing people are my tenants. I like to know: I want to have a trace of anybody who’s there, particularly for casual visitors, in case there’s trouble. (INF25)

A farmer was similarly keen to maintain some control: I see the need, but then I can also see the farmers’ need, with this worrying, with dogs out of control . . . I’ve had to put a horrible notice on the gate, ‘please do not let your dogs foul this ground’ . . . I know we cover the ground in manure of various sorts, but it is known that dog manure can carry some horrendous diseases . . . Future farmers will come to terms with people having more access . . . but it’s got to be defined and controlled. (INF32)

Concerns about litter, pollution and disturbance to wildlife are shared to some degree by local environmental groups. While more enthusiastic about the idea of public access than landowners, they also want to see it carefully controlled with waymarked paths and exclusion zones. Yet much of this resistance to access is very recent: older informants in the Stour Valley recall swimming or fishing in the river and wandering about the countryside fairly freely in their youth. These new anxieties are partly a response to a pressure of numbers, but they also seem greatly exacerbated by the fact that this is an invasion of strangers, people with no connection to the local community, and no investment in the land or resources. Without the social connections and economic obligations that maintained interdependent communities and collective identities, ‘the other’ is more readily perceived as out of control, and thus represents a very real threat. In the new millennium, one third of households in the UK do not know their neighbours. In evolutionary terms this is surely a first, and it is unsurprising to observe that it creates considerable anxiety about invasion or ‘pollution’ at many levels. It appears that even in the most stable rural areas, people feel a loss of collectivity: they are surrounded not by ‘themselves’ but by ‘others’ whose beliefs and values may be widely different from their own, and their landscape – already fragmented and contested – is under siege by complete strangers who appear to want access without responsibility. The farms that used to provide the basis for local economic and social stability have changed hands and style, in the process becoming large commercial enterprises that conduct their activities in relative isolation. The remainder of the landscape is controlled by private industries and government agencies whose local involvement has decreased as the scale of management has enlarged and centralised. Some collective management of the physical environment is critical to the creation and maintenance of a sense of community. As Strathern has pointed out – 19 –

Cultural Landscapes (1988), there are close ties between work, performance and identity:14 if people cannot enact a sense of collectivity, there is little to concretise and thus uphold a common identity. In the historic patterns of enclosures in Dorset there is clearly a relationship between control over resources, social identity and the empowerment – or disempowerment – of particular groups. At every stage, increasing control over land and water has supported particular elites, while those excluded from such ownership have developed numerous strategies to try to fulfil their social and economic needs, to maintain a connection with the environment and each other. However, it seems that their enforced departure from the land has massively undermined the potential for the construction of localised communities and encouraged a shift to much more individuated forms of identity. It has also led to an increasingly deep divide between those who control land and water resources and those who do not. It is in this context that people think about and respond to water resource issues.

14. See also Gell 1998, Schechner and Appel 1990, Turner 1982.

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Losing Water

–2– Losing Water Changing Channels Just as the broad social and economic changes in Dorset have created a particular cultural landscape, patterns of water use and management have shifted to conform to this topography. Water has been brought steadily ‘under control’, with its enclosure concretised by new technology at every stage. As with other resources, social fragmentation has meant a crucial shift away from collective ownership and management, placing water resources in the hands of small groups of people who either own the infrastructure and rights to abstract and supply water, or are empowered by specialised knowledge and expertise. Meanwhile the wider population has become a passive recipient in water management, largely disenfranchised from participation, although a minority maintains some involvement via membership in environmental and conservation groups. A historical perspective on water use and management in Dorset elucidates some of these changes, and their bearing upon the way in which people think about and evaluate water today. Ward argues that ‘control of water is inevitably control of life and livelihood’ (1997:32), citing Wittfogel’s argument (1957) that ancient empires like those of China and Egypt were built upon central control of the waters of great rivers, and that any form of planned water control provides the opportunity for more ‘despotic’ patterns of government and society. Even in a modern democracy it is evident that to control the most vital resource is a powerful political position, and likely to be contentious. Water is always a metaphor of social, economic and political relationships – a barometer of the extent to which identity, power and resources are shared. Following Wittfogel, various writers (Bennett 1995, Reisner 2001 [1986], Worster 1985) have shown how the control of water has empowered the Church, the State, or other elite institutions. Like the first land enclosures, the shift away from collective control of water in Dorset began with the Roman invasion, and has rarely been reversed. The archaeological record suggests that the Celt’s low-key use of resources involved little technological interference: a few stones placed to improve access to spring waters perhaps, and the planting of sacred trees around holy wells. Their most durable achievements, the great stone circles, appear to have been directed towards the

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Cultural Landscapes worship of natural resources rather than their manipulation for economic purposes (see Richards 1996). Along with appropriating the Celtic holy wells for their own religious purposes, the Romans had great enthusiasm for the physical management of water, building magnificent aqueducts to supply their towns and garrisons. The first ‘urban’ water supplies in the UK were thus created by military occupiers, who also enslaved the population itself. Roads and water conduits effectively asserted Roman agency, directing all production towards their own aims. The destruction of much of their work by the ‘Barbarians’ in the ‘Dark Ages’, like the activities of the later Luddites, could be interpreted as a revolutionary act, demonstrating an awareness that this apparently benign technology was, in itself, a powerful colonising force. The Romans introduced water wheels and mills,1 establishing an important idea of water as a creator of physical energy – a generative force for economic growth. For many of the subsequent centuries economic activities in the UK were heavily reliant upon water power. Dorset rivers like the Stour were central to local economies: they provided energy for numerous small mills, and the flat, fertile river valleys offered the best agricultural land and vital routes for the transportation of goods. The medieval period saw a steady increase in the physical management of water, with the creation of communal supplies in settlements and the construction of small dams, weirs and mills to reuse water energy over and over again. The Domesday Book lists 166 water mills in Dorset, a great number of which were along the Stour and its tributaries (Bettey 1986).2 The rivers were economically vital in other ways too: rush cutters3 supplied local thatchers, and people still fished for food. For example, at Sturminster Newton: There are fish which were eaten of course – pike were eaten, and eels . . . We know that in the early days of this mill from the Domesday Book records, when it was the property of the Abbot of Glastonbury, some of the rent for this mill was paid in sticks of eels. (Peter Loosmore) 1. Water power had also been utilised in ancient Egypt. Astrup notes that ‘the hanging gardens of Babylonia probably received water from a piston pump of wood run by a water wheel and was capable of raising the waters of the Euphrates to a height of 92 m.’ (1993:79). 2. These were mainly flour, flax or grist mills, or powered looms for cloth, but over the centuries they were also used for making woad, oil, paper, silk and even snuff . Most of the buildings still standing date from the eighteenth century (for example, the mill in Gillingham, made famous by Constable’s painting of it, was built in 1769) but the sites themselves are much older and the mill house at Fiddleford still bears a sixteenth century inscription (Addision and Wailes 1963). 3. Rush cutting remained a common local industry until relatively recently: Guttridge (1991) provides photographs of a rush cutter working near Marnhull in 1955, making baskets and mats. Today the major use of rushes in Marnhull is to provide organic sewage purification in Wessex Water’s experimental reed bed sewage plant.

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Losing Water Local economies therefore focused on the river, and each village along the Stour had a well, a pond or a ford at its heart. As Bailey points out, village pumps ‘stand like symbols of village continuity . . . the community’s source of life’ (1985:22– 23). Many ancient pumps and other traces of public water access remain, some – revealingly – maintained by organisations dedicated towards maintaining communities: Round Gillingham, by the Red Lion, that’s ‘Spring Corner’ . . . The Rotary [club] have put a little bay in the wall, where there’s a thing to say that this was one of the first public places for fetching water. There’s another further up the Wyke road, and on the wall it says ‘By Leave’, so presumably that was another sort of public water place. And of course the cottages on the river, like mine, they’ve got dipping places . . . stone and . . . brick steps down to the river. (Elizabeth Kendall)

For many centuries, water for domestic use was physically carried from the well, and this served as a constant – if arduous – reminder of its value. As a contemporary inhabitant of the Stour Valley put it, ‘if you carry water, it’s part of you, . . . – you kind of embody it really, then you are really in touch with it’ (Karen Wimhurst). Gell (1992) noted this ‘creation of value’, suggesting that value is encoded in an object by the investment of human agency in it.4 Thus the physical collection and transportation of water – the investment of labour and its difficulty – ensure that the water itself, and the water carriers (human and material), are imbued with meaning and value.

En-gendering Water Consideration of the importance of ‘water carriers’ highlights some of the gender issues that have accompanied changes in water management. Archaeological evidence throughout Europe suggests that for many centuries women were primarily responsible for the collection of water for domestic purposes – the archetypal ‘water carriers’. This iconic image connects with their reproductive role as literal and metaphorical ‘bearers of life’. The village well as a female space and as the

4. Though he was writing specifically about the awe induced by perception of skill in the production of art, Gell noted ‘the halo-effect of technical difficulty’, arguing that: The attitude of the spectator towards a work of art is fundamentally conditioned by his notion of the technical processes which gave rise to it, and the fact that it was created by the agency of another person, the artist. The moral significance of the work of art arises from the mismatch between the spectator’s internal awareness of his own powers as an agent and the conception he forms of the powers possessed by the artist. (1992:51–52)

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Cultural Landscapes centre of social reproduction is a familiar trope: ‘the daily work of collecting water has always been one of the agencies for cementing social bonds’ (Ward 1997:84). What this also implies, of course, is that in the early stages of settlement along the Stour, women had the major responsibility for the management of water resources. The worship of many female deities at that time suggests that they also enjoyed considerable religious and political equality and, with more collective forms of resource ownership, greater economic parity as well. In a shift that – in symbolic and political terms – remains central to water management issues, women were one of the first groups to be ‘disenfranchised’ from the control of water. The invention of technology to pump water, although it doubtless spared water carriers much hard work, seems to have been largely initiated and constructed by men. As Kinnersley points out (1994), it began the process of transferring water management into the hands of male engineers: a process that led to the piping of water into more individuated domestic spaces. The excision of women’s agency and investment of labour perhaps represents the first real steps towards a situation in which the majority of people increasingly became the recipients – or consumers – of (male) technology, and marks an important stage in ‘progress’ towards more commercial interaction with environmental processes and resources. In effect, it materialises a Western ideal in which enclosure enables the primacy of patriarchal control or ‘Culture’ over (female) ‘Nature’ (see Schaffer 1989). Changes in material culture generate and reflect changes in meaning: there is a fundamental difference between carrying (female) vessels of water from the (female) well, and pumping an ejaculative stream of it out of the earth through a (male) spout. The invention of homologously male objects5 for water management is a telling analogue of the technological development that is generally acknowledged to have enabled male social and political dominance. In Dorset, as elsewhere, alterations in the physical management of resources were matched by socioeconomic changes: a narrowing of female roles, women’s exclusion from many new economic activities, and their greater confinement to the domestic sphere. Wittfogel’s argument can therefore be applied to gender relations: in broad terms, the control of water resources effectively helped to establish male dominance in political, economic and religious terms, and enabled communities to embark upon a set of technological and cultural changes which led to contemporary social and environmental relationships.6

5. Homologues can be defined as objects that echo the human form and are often therefore gendered in their meaning (see Strang 1999). 6. I have addressed this topic more fully elsewhere, see Strang, forthcoming.

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Losing Water

Enclosing Water As the history of the Stour illustrates, the disenfranchisement of women was only the first ‘enclosure’. Much of the early water management technology in Britain was invented in the large monasteries that were such a dominant force until the dissolution. As Barty-King points out, they ‘had the time and the intellect to master the intricacies of water engineering’ (1992:23). The great abbeys’ gracious dispensation of ‘the essence of life’ to their dependent communities underlined the leadership and authority of the Christian Church.7 By the 1500s, as settlements grew, provincial authorities had also begun to take up the task of supplying water to the citizenry. To some extent this followed the lead of the Church: the provision of clean water was seen as a charitable and spiritual act, in keeping with Christian tenets of care, and this view of water supply persisted long after the process itself was secularised following the dissolution of the monasteries. Within this system, village communities retained considerable direct involvement in water management. In the 1600s, women and children were still carrying domestic supplies home from the village pumps, and men worked as millers, carpenters and ‘watermen’ on the hatches of the water meadows8 and managed the fish storage ponds constructed at monasteries and manors. Some control over the water resources was therefore integral to local economies. For example, land records dating from 1598 to 1642 chart negotiations for the building of a new weir for a local landowner: A new weir must be set up above Crab Bridge . . . the framing, making and the setting up will cost 20s, the water man’s demand will be 12s for the watering of each aker . . . The new River must come through the grownes belonging unto Sir John Strode . . . That way it will be very beneficial unto my Lord’s meadowes. (County Records)

The small-scale farming, industry and settlement that characterised the Stour until the 1600s placed little pressure on water resources. Sewage was disposed of in village ditches, cess pits and soakaways, and under common law individual rights to water were reasonably well protected: 7. For example, the Franciscan monks in Southampton agreed to allow the town their surplus water ‘out of reverence to Henry Archdeacon of Dorset and their goodwill to the community of the town’ (Barty-King 1992:27). 8. Bettey describes how by the early 1630s most communities along the Stour had a full-time ‘waterman’, who was employed by the tenants to look after the meadows. His task was to manage the watering, maintain hatches and weirs, and he was paid proportionately by each tenant as well as having some meadow land for his own use. Individual tenants were forbidden from interfering in the management of the meadows, and the control of the water was to be left entirely to the waterman (Bettey 1977:38).

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Cultural Landscapes Each person having land abutting a watercourse had . . . equal rights with his neighbours to the natural flow of water past his land. Any riparian owner could also utilise this flow . . . Although limited abstraction and pollution did occur with the tacit approval of others, an overall balance of use was normally preserved along each river course. (Smith 1972:23–24)

Land holdings were organised to maintain access to water courses, and ancient tithe maps include highly detailed information about every small spring, pond and stream. Traces of this carefully arranged access remain: My grandfather [came here] in 1892 . . . the farm had always been a cattle farm, and it’s interesting, looking at an old map, without exception, all the fields had access to a river frontage. You’d get quite a big field away from the river, but there’d be a – we’d call it a dog leg – a leg of land down to the river so that the cattle could go there. (Ron Harris)

With mills every half mile or so along the river, and water meadows all along the river banks, this required considerable cooperation, but in small and relatively stable communities this was achievable.9 In this sense water management was highly localised: responsibilities were entangled in many long-term social as well as economic relationships which supported and stabilised negotiations. This coheres with Lansing’s study of Balinese water temples, which demonstrated how social, economic and religious ties articulated with the management of water:10 The most basic question is the relationship between their [the temples’] instrumental role in managing the flow of waters and the symbolic systems that define their social and cosmological roles . . . Essentially, water temples establish symbolic connections between productive groups and the components of the natural landscape they seek to control. (1991:128)

The river linked people not only physically but also in social terms, mediating familial and community ties and reciprocal exchanges. The necessity of comanagement also maintained an ‘epistemic community’ in which people shared knowledge and values.11 In the 1600s these arrangements and the water resources themselves came under greater pressure as water meadows and other forms of irrigation permitted major

9. Even as late as the beginning of the twentieth century millers around Sturminster Newton still exchanged messages via their children in school about their plans for opening the hatches. 10. See also Rigg 1992. 11. Blatter and Ingram (2001) note Ernst Haas’s idea of ‘epistemic communities’ – communities of experts sharing beliefs in common cause-and-effect relationships and values.

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Losing Water intensifications in land and resource use. Rural communities began to experience greater tensions about the distribution of water resources, with mill owners and farmers increasingly demanding compensation for the depletion of their supplies. This depletion was exacerbated by the expanding urban population and its needs for water from further and further afield. Competition for water sources led to tighter controls and a more commercial approach. Public water supplies were increasingly protected by law, and in the 1600s commercial water carriers and water carts became a common sight in the towns. For the first time ‘water stealing’ became a criminal offence. Archived correspondence suggests some local environmental effects and greater tension over the use of water resources: Jan 2nd 1893 Dear Sir, Owing to your watering your meadow the water supply has quite failed me . . . I shall be much obliged if you will kindly let some water on as my stock are now quite without any. I remain yours faithfully, Arthur Symonds. 12 May 1893. Dear Sir, I have received your letter . . . but as I understand it your claim virtually is to the entire right to the water of the Winterbourne Stream. The watercourse hatches in my meadows, through which I have caused part of the stream to pass, have been in existence from time immemorial, and the main spring from which it rises is on my land; it is therefore preposterous that I should have to ask permission of an owner or occupier of land, distant between 2 or 3 miles, to run the water through these old established channels. I wish however to act in a considerate manner to all my neighbours, and I will as a matter of favour draw my hatches when the stream is not sufficiently great to overflow the meadow, so that you may get the whole benefit of it when the supply is small, but you must distinctly understand that I make this offer only as a neighbourly act, and that I relinquish no right by so doing. Yrs faithfully, H. Stillwell.

Reigning Over Water The Industrial Revolution brought further major changes to the articulation between people and water resources. Though the control of water in Britain might be said to have begun with the first Celtic well or Roman aqueduct, an industrial approach to water supply evoked a much greater sense of being able to reign supreme over ‘nature’. In 1795, Goldsmith wrote triumphally:

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Cultural Landscapes God has endowed us with abilities to turn this great extend of water to our own advantage. He has made these things, perhaps, for other uses; but he has given us faculties to convert them to our own . . . Let us then boldly affirm, that the earth, and all it’s wonders, are ours; since we are furnished with powers to force them into our service. (1794:143)

New urban areas, centred upon industry, created unprecedented levels of demand, and water engineering was critical to their viability. In the 1700 and 1800s over 3000 miles of canals were built in the UK; reservoirs were constructed, and rivers redirected to provide energy for the machinery of mass production. Water mills powered iron foundries and small factories: for example, on the Stour the mill at Marnhull was redesigned to turn the machinery for glove manufacturing. Gradually the mills ceased to be integral to stable self-sufficient farming communities and became independent centres for the industrial activities and mobile labour forces of a diversifying economy. The idea of water supply as a Christian duty had not evaporated entirely. Publicspirited citizens sometimes paid for engineering works, pipes or reservoirs, or left provision in their wills for the building of waterworks. Benevolent landowners installed water supplies and sanitary arrangements for their tenants, sometimes recouping their costs through rents. However, the casualisation of labour widened divisions between rich and poor, and the exclusion of the labouring classes from control over water was often revealed in their living conditions. Stanhope’s report to Parliament on Dorsetshire in 1868 noted that, along the Stour: The Estate of Lord Rivers . . . is notorious for its bad cottages . . . There is one circumstance connected with these villages which renders them more especially open to reproach, that is, the neglect of the most obvious sanitary precautions. In village after village the answer was ‘there is nothing like one privy to every cottage’. I saw whole rows of cottages with none, and abounding with nuisances of all kinds. Remonstrance is generally disregarded, and the state of filth in which many parishes are left, calls aloud for some active interference to relieve the present authorities of a responsibility they have grossly neglected. (1968 [1868]:6)

The report highlighted a problem that had been gaining in urgency since the late 1700s, particularly in urban areas. Intensifying resource use and greater population density meant that local aquatic systems could no longer absorb the waste products that emerged. There had been some warning signs: for example, the plague of the mid-1300s and other – often waterborne – epidemics had revealed the environmental pressures created by this growth.12 ‘There is a direct relationship between 12. A few people were aware of the waterborne nature of diseases, although it was some time before this was generally acknowledged: Barty-King notes that in 1574, when people were dying of the plague, the Master of Peterhouse College in Cambridge wrote to the Chancellor that ‘our synnes is the principle cause: the other . . . is the corruption of the King’s Dytch’ (1992:22).

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Losing Water the size of human settlement and the need for safe water and sewage disposal’ (Ward 1997:4). With the Industrial Revolution, effluent disposal (which now included new types of industrial waste) became a severe problem: rivers emerged from the new towns as little more than open sewers. For example, in the early 1800s the Frome in Dorchester was so foul that people wouldn’t go near it (County Records). For the first time there was a need for specialised institutions to deal with the problem. The initial solution was simply to bring cleaner water from further afield. In 1797 a Parliamentary Bill established one of the first private water companies in the UK. Weymouth Waterworks’ remit was to supply fresh water to Weymouth, Melcombe Regis and the surrounding area in South Dorset. The company was empowered to buy land, cut aqueducts and trenches, lay pipes and, if necessary, ‘clean, scour, dig, open, deepen and raise the banks’ of the streams or brooks supplying the water. Its employees could enter the land of ‘any person or persons’ to survey, take levels and ascertain which parts of the land were needed for their works. They could remove any obstacles, such as trees, rocks or gravel, although houses and gardens were ‘not to be injured’, and they remained liable for compensation for loss of tithes due to their disturbance of the land. The Inhabitants of the said Borough and Town . . . as shall be desirous of having the Water laid into their respective Houses or Offices, may . . . at their own Expence . . . open the Ground between the Pipes belonging to the Company . . . and the respective Houses or Offices of such Inhabitants, and to lay Leaden Pipes . . . to communicate with the said Company’s Pipes. (County Records)

The recipients of the water were required to pay yearly sums to the company, and if they failed to do so the company could sever their connection with its pipes. Those who could afford running water ‘tapped in’, and those who could not continued to haul it from public wells and pumps. The Bill also protected the company’s investment: In order to Preserve the Water to be conveyed into the said Borough and Town, and Parts adjacent, clean and wholesome, Be it further Enacted, That no Person shall cast, throw, or put any Filth or Dirt, or any offensive Thing, or permit or suffer the Water of any Sink, Sewer or Drain to run or be conveyed into any of the said Reservoirs, Ponds or Aqueducts, or the Feeders thereof. (County Records)

Over the next 100 years, many similar companies were created in urban areas, the process hastened by the development of new technology: for example, steamdriven pumps and condensing engines, which massively increased the amount of water that could be abstracted from rivers and aquifers and moved around. Water resources were continually appropriated for new supply systems; water stealing – 29 –

Cultural Landscapes became a common crime; and there were angry protests about water taxes being imposed on the poor. Although water supply was improving rapidly and profitably, there was less incentive to follow up with sufficient waste treatment. Cities expanded, producing ever more human and industrial waste.13 Many new houses were built on floodplains, increasing the need for flood control and sewage management. By the 1820s, some cities – most particularly London – were running short of water. Waterborne diseases became endemic: in 1831 over 50,000 people died of typhoid in the UK, and Sowry notes that: The Thames was so polluted by the 1850s that Parliament had to adjourn sometimes because the stench was so unbearable. It was not until ten thousand deaths occurred in London in 1854 that the connection between the disease and polluted drinking water was established. (1977:75)14

Finally, long-held beliefs that illness was either from an airborne ‘miasma’ or a ‘visitation of God’ were dispensed with, and water was seen, for the first time, as a potential threat to human health. This was immediately seized upon as being the result of ‘unnatural’ practices: a medical doctor advising the Privy Council in the 1850s declared cholera to be ‘Nature’s only retribution to Britain’s neglect of sanitation’. Some analysts suggested that there was a relationship between the exploitation of nature and that of the lower classes, whose living conditions made them most vulnerable to disease, and in 1849 The Economist described cholera as ‘a disease of society’ (Barty-King 1992:97). Realising that two-tier systems, in which only the wealthy had running water, were unworkable in the long term, local authorities began to take over the responsibility for widening access to water supplies. The supply of water therefore remained entangled in social, moral and environmental concerns, and integral to a growing pressure for social reform. The availability of clean water was seen increasingly as a symbol of justice by reformers such as Edwin Chadwick and Charles Kingsley, who regarded sanitary reform as the ‘Will of God’.

13. ‘Pollution became accepted as an inevitable by-product of urbanisation and industrialisation in the manufacturing areas . . . the quality of river water declined rapidly’ (Smith 1972:24). 14. Famously the connection was proved by a doctor, John Snow, who, by removing a pump handle from a public standpipe, brought a halt to the fifty deaths from cholera per day. Similar problems dogged other towns: A memo written in 1868 to the River Pollution Commission on the state of the Calder in Yorkshire, was written not in ink but with ‘river water taken this day from the point of junction between the River Calder and the town sewer’ (Smith 1972:24).

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Losing Water The conflation of health issues with morality helped to establish the idea that ‘cleanliness is next to Godliness’. This had a powerful effect upon patterns of water use and encouraged evangelical determination that even ‘the poor’ should be clean. Echoing the fourteenth century monks’ benevolent distribution of water, Victorian leaders saw the provision of ‘wholesome’ water as a moral expression of social responsibility. This was enabled by the emergence of a powerful State able to embark upon large-scale social programmes and investments in new technology. The State therefore became an active manager of water resources. In 1835 the Municipal Corporations Act gave Borough and District Councils responsibility for local water supply, and all through the 1800s new laws – Sanitary Acts, Water Acts, Public Health Acts – were put into place to prohibit pollution and ensure that the private water companies fulfilled their statutory obligations.15 In this way the Victorians initiated the impressive infrastructural development that remains foundational to modern water supply and waste disposal. This binding moral duty to ensure that every household had access to a clean water supply and safe disposal of wastes was slowly accepted everywhere. It came rapidly to the cities, where the consequences of failing to acknowledge this duty were obvious. (Ward 1997:6–7)

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the population in Dorset increased by 50%.16 Farming became more heavily reliant upon irrigation and on the provision of water for much higher densities of stock. New industrial manufacturers were also using large amounts of water. Urban water authorities extended their search for clean, cheap water into rural uplands, sowing the seeds for ongoing tensions between urban and rural water users, and many water companies purchased vital catchment areas to protect their sources.17 A network of suppliers was built up, some run by local councils, some by the private companies but with a statutory limit on dividends. Slowly a water ethic was built up . . . that saw water as a necessary common good rather than as a commodity . . . The capital cost of underground pipes was met as a public duty, and the cottager was charged with a few pence on the rent or rates. (Ward 1997:4)

15. For example, Smith (1972) notes that the Public Health Act of 1872 abolished prescriptive rights to pollute and banned the disposal of solid wastes into the rivers. 16. In 1801 there were 114,452 people in Dorset, and by 1851 the number had reached 184,389 (Dorset Census records). 17. In Bournemouth, the supply company extended its infrastructure several miles from the town, drawing water from Kinson Brook and Longham to pipe it into urban homes.

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Cultural Landscapes Water companies and local authorities were therefore subject to two sets of pressures: the requirements to ensure access to clean water for all households; and the complex pressures which emerged from local social, political, economic and ecological dynamics. Victorian paternal altruism vied with commercial aims to profit from water supply. The late 1800s were crowded with legislation, for example Public Health Acts (1875 and 1878), Local Government Acts (1882, 1884, 1894) and Waterworks Facilities Acts (1870 and 1873), which brought the management of water increasingly under the aegis of local authorities, so that in 1878 there were seventy-eight municipal water undertakings (Barty-King 1992:138). These efforts were necessarily concentrated on the towns, however, and rural areas lagged behind considerably. Along the Stour, supplies were gradually piped in to larger communities: for example, reaching Sturminster Newton in 1906. I believe it was brought down from the hills at Okeford Fitzpaine . . . That was the first truly mains water they had here . . . I can remember the old standpipes around the town and the last working one was by The Bull – and that was certainly working in the 1950s, the early 50s. (Peter Loosmore)

However, the provision of piped supplies in outlying villages required considerable investment, and many houses along the Stour were without running water well into the twentieth century. Guttridge’s photographic record shows people still carrying supplies in horse-drawn carts and in buckets. As one caption reads: Ambrose Stainer carries two pails of water through Stourton Caundle in 1929. ‘I can tell from the watering can in one of the buckets that he was fetching water from the brook to water the garden,’ says his daughter Enid Knott. ‘On washday you used to have to go half-a-mile to fetch water from a well.’ (Guttridge 1991:148)

A retired schoolteacher also noted that modern sanitation is fairly recent in some parts of the county: We visited . . . the school I used to teach in . . . While I was there [before] they built inbetween the infant and junior school, covered it over and built in toilets. Well of course you can imagine – most of the children hadn’t got flush toilets at home. This was a great novelty: they were wanting to leave the classroom more frequently than they had ever done before! . . . Looking at the houses in that area [now], they are just so much like shop windows, the facilities they have, the washing machines . . . When I was teaching there, over thirty years ago, some still had oil lamps and there was a lack of flush toilets. There’s such a change . . . the cottages are quite unrecognisable. (Elizabeth Kendall)

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Losing Water

The State of the Industry Although in Dorset and other rural areas villages and farms retained local water supplies, by the twentieth century most water supply in the UK was no longer situated within small communities in which local social and economic relationships contextualised and influenced negotiations. Instead, it became subject – as it has been ever since – to negotiations between State and industry, and to broader cultural values about social and environmental responsibilities. This was always a tug-of-war: in 1885, over 100 years before the Thatcherite privatisation of the water companies, commercial water suppliers formed an Association18 to oppose government regulation, because ‘the professionals shared the doubts of the Housing Commissioners that the elected representatives of the people at local level had the will or ability to carry it out’ (Barty-King 1992:138). Then, as now, the knowledge and expertise of the industry was mooted as sufficient reason for its independent control of water resources.19 By 1910 there were 2160 water suppliers in England and Wales, of which only 152 were private Statutory Companies. Three-quarters of the country had piped supplies, about two-thirds of which came from municipal authorities, which had countered the commercial lobby by forming the Municipal Waterworks Association in 1911. It remained easier to create new water supplies than to deal with pollution: The new authorities neglected the laborious and unexciting task of repairing the crumbling Victorian structure of pipes, sewers, pumping stations and processing plants, quite apart from the horrors of sea pollution. (Ward 1997:181)

Every decade or so a Royal Commission or Resources Committee advised the government to create a central coordinating body to deal with the pollution of water courses, but World War One halted all new schemes and the subsequent government was too embroiled in financial crises to do more than set up an advisory committee. There was talk of a water ‘grid’ in 1934, following a severe drought, but this threatened the semi-private status quo of the industry, and was successfully discouraged. The management of water resources remained within the

18. The Provincial Water Companies Association formed in 1885 later became the Water Companies Association, which, as Barty-King says, ‘has been the efficient mouthpiece of the statutory “water supply” companies ever since’ (1992:138). It is now called Water UK. 19. This empowering ‘expertise’ was underlined shortly afterwards by the formation of a British Association of Water Works Engineers, which after several metamorphoses became the Institution of Water Engineers and Scientists in 1975.

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Cultural Landscapes patchwork of municipal and private suppliers that had emerged with local developments. However, talk of Regional Advisory Committees and the need for coordination persisted, and this encouraged water companies to merge and enlarge, so that between 1900 and 1930 their numbers halved. With World War Two the government was again deflected from upgrading the water supply infrastructure, although the prospect of incendiary aerial attacks highlighted the need for water. The war itself disrupted supplies to the extent that people reverted to collecting buckets of water from communal sources.20 Post-war reforms, influenced by a political conviction that resources should be redistributed more fairly, brought radical revisions to the organisation of water supply. With a socialist government in power, immediate plans were made for water resources to be returned to collective ‘democratic’ control. In 1944 the Labour Party set up a National Water Commission overseeing Water Boards responsible for local water supply. This was an ambitious plan: The main problem was the fragmentation of supply authorities and, even as late as 1956, there were over 1050 separate water undertakings in England and Wales. (Smith 1972: 131–132)

However, the 1945 Water Act pushed the process of nationalisation forward, and in the next two decades water suppliers became much larger and fewer in number. Efforts were also made to tackle river pollution with the formation of thirty-two River Boards in 1948 and the Rivers (Prevention of Pollution) Act of 1951. In 1963 water resources in England and Wales were coordinated under twentyseven River Authorities located in each of the major river basins. A single Water Resources Board (the precursor of the Environment Agency) was established to manage the nation’s water and to control access by issuing abstraction licences. Research units and councils were set up by the government to investigate hydrological matters: for example, the Water Research Association in 1955, the Hydrological Research Unit in 1962, and in 1965 the Natural Environment Research Council. These maintained the scientific community’s powerful influence on water management. Rising usage levels and industrial demands continued to generate anxieties about sufficiency of water supply and levels of pollution. Industrial expansion put further pressure on the rivers: for example, various light industries were established along the Stour – a chemical processing plant in Gillingham, a steel tubing factory in Blandford, and several breweries. These not only required water for their

20. Pictures and accounts of chatting queues at emergency standpipes suggest that this return to using communal water sources contributed to the sense of collective endeavour that pervaded the wartime period and remains the focus of much nostalgia.

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Losing Water processes, many also discharged effluents into the river. The idea of reusing water gained acceptability, but this required greater cooperation between water suppliers and sewerage companies. In 1974 a Conservative government removed from local authorities the responsibility for managing (and charging for) sewerage services, and gave this to ten new Regional Water Authorities, replacing the Water Resources Board with a National Water Council: Each autonomous multi-purpose water authority was responsible for the whole of the water cycle in its region including pollution control, river and groundwater management, water resources, sewage treatment and disposal, water supply, drainage, recreation, navigation and fisheries. (Barty-King 1992:166)

This had some effect on the environmental problems created by more intensive resource use. It also permitted larger capital investments in infrastructure: for example, in 1973 the Western Gazette reported that £55,000 was to be invested in a new reservoir near Dorchester to replace the old water tower on the Bridport road, which ‘holds no more than five hours supply for the developing county town’ (Western Gazette, 6 April 1973:1). Previously, sewerage services had been supported in part by government subsidies for domestic users, but by the 1980s the idea that industry and business would pay for domestic usage contradicted prevailing ideology. The water industry was forced to live off its income and loans, and in 1983 the Conservative government passed legislation removing the majority position that local authorities had held by right on the Water Boards. The 1980s also brought demands for further improvements in water quality and reliability of supplies, as well as legislative pressures from the EU to improve drinking water standards and environmental protection. There was an urgent need to update infrastructure that had suffered from long-term neglect but, at the same time, the water industry’s income was falling as the manufacturing sector declined. A Wessex Water company manager commented that: There was the financial crisis, a few years ago now, when a lot of industry shut down. Demand for water dropped phenomenally, and it hasn’t gone anywhere near back to where it was. (INF43)

These pressures, and the government’s desire to avoid the political costs of paying for improvements from the public purse, prepared the ground for the privatisation of the industry. The Thatcher government chose a route reflecting its commitment to an ideology in which private industry was seen as preferable to public ownership.

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Cultural Landscapes When the Conservative government came to power in 1979 no one anticipated that one of its achievements would be to change the nature of water from a common good to a commodity. However, ten years later it was offered for sale to a public which already owned it collectively. The flotation was very successful, with the shares being 5.7 oversubscribed. (Ward 1997:10)

A long-term pattern of alienation had made this possible. For several centuries – but most particularly since the Industrial Revolution – technological developments enlarged the scale of social and economic activity, and created rapid population growth and higher levels of resource use. Demographic mobility dissolved many of the local structures in which water resource management had been embedded. Control over water was steadily abstracted from small and stable village communities, passing first to urban communities and semi-local water supply companies, then to larger and more distant suppliers which merged over and over, becoming grand corporations and municipal institutions. In the latter half of the twentieth century, these organisations underwent a rapid process of centralisation, taking the control of water resources right out of the hands of local communities into a direct tug-of-war between the central government and an increasingly monolithic industry. A historical analysis of water resource management therefore reveals a consistent pattern of lost agency and ownership. Over time, individuals have gone from sharing relatively equal involvement in the management of water through stages of disenfranchisement, first of women and, gradually, the rest of the population. In the twenty-first century primary agency is held by a tiny number of people, with wider collective agency diluted beyond recognition. At the same time the power of those in control of water resources has increased in material and symbolic terms as water has been further adulterated and acculterated. Each new process, each layer of complexity, each investment of labour and knowledge, has transformed it from a ‘raw’ or ‘natural’ substance into a product. But this is no longer the ‘product’ of the women at the well, or even of the local community: it is presented, increasingly, as the ‘product’ of the water industry, enabling crucial shifts in perceptions of ownership and control. As Bennett comments: ‘The history of water service provision . . . is a political history’ (1995:5). Or, as Worster says: Water in the capitalist state has no intrinsic value, no integrity that must be respected. Water is no longer valued as a divinely appointed means for survival, for producing and reproducing human life, as it was in local subsistence communities. Nor is water an aweinspiring animistic ally as it was in the agrarian states. It has now become a commodity that is bought and sold . . . In an age ruled by instrumentalism, nature ceases to have any value in itself. It is no longer seen as the handiwork of God . . . technological domination is an unlimited ambition. (1985:5, 52, 55)

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Losing Water It is in the context of this alienated relationship between people and resources that it became possible for the Conservative government to privatise the water industry in 1989. Although water resources remained nominally within collective ownership, via the licensing control of the Environment Agency, this effectively placed the infrastructure and access to supplies in private hands. As a Wessex Water executive explained: Well, the overall water resource is what . . . falls out of the sky, and it either falls on the land and goes into aquifers, or it goes into rivers, or if the river’s been dammed it goes into a reservoir . . . The Environment Agency own that water – they are the public guardians of quality and quantity of resources . . . We apply for a licence . . . to abstract that water, either from a surface or underground source, and they will charge us for that privilege . . . Once we’ve started pumping it, it belongs to us. (Richard Lacey)

In a historical context, the privatisation of the water industry by the Thatcher government in 1989 – which remains one of the most controversial political acts of the last few decades – can be seen as a powerful re-assertion of control by an elite minority. Worster, writing about the rivers of Empire, notes C.S. Lewis’s comment: What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. (in Worster 1985:50)

In this instance the arrangement retained some democracy: although physical control and management passed into private hands, the State retained ultimate ownership and regulatory control, and shares were made available to at least a fortunate few. Like the Durotriges before them, or the seventeenth century protesters fighting the enclosures of common land, the remainder could only protest against this appropriation; and protest they did – the government’s decision generated an uproar far exceeding that which accompanied the privatisation of the other utilities. Like their predecessors, though, the protesters were powerless to prevent the privatisation of resources. The government argued that privatisation would generate the investment necessary for new infrastructure, and that market forces would encourage greater efficiency and thus give ‘consumers’ a better deal. A manager at Wessex Water asserted that this is indeed what happened: It still needs huge amounts of capital to build the infrastructure . . . Capital expenditure was neglected by governments of successive colours . . . The money to fund water company infrastructure was competing with roads and hospitals and schools and often lost out . . . [Privatisation] enabled us to raise capital at commercial rates, on the commercial markets . . . Wessex – prior to privatisation – was spending on average £60 million a year; since privatisation we’ve averaged £130 million a year. . . . We have

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Cultural Landscapes 100% compliance [with environmental standards] with our sewage treatment works; we have 99.98% compliance with drinking water quality . . . we have exemplary customer service. (Richard Lacey)

The Regulator’s own figures chart a rise in investment after privatisation, though they also show that this was rising steadily beforehand as well (OFWAT 1999b:26). Ten years on, the Director General reported that this had brought significant environmental benefits (mainly resulting from improved sewage treatment) and enabled the industry to respond to EU Directives demanding better water quality and environmental protection (OFWAT 1999a:4). He also noted that, as private organisations, the water companies had been able to borrow capital more advantageously. However, these ‘improvements’ came at a price: in the first decade of privatisation water charges rose by 67% (about 40% in real terms) (OFWAT 1999a:23), to the point where they cost some pensioners 10% of their income. Some of the effects of this were demonstrable in the Stour Valley, where lowincome families, particularly those with a number of small children, were struggling to cut usage in order to deal with the rising costs of water: I’ve got a friend in a new housing association house, and they’ve got a water meter . . . She’s got two children and her boyfriend’s children stay over as well, so there’s four kids there sometimes . . . She will only flush the toilet once a day . . . and they all use the same bathwater . . . Or she’ll . . . have a shower, and she’ll leave the washing up. (INF52)

During this period the water companies recorded vast profits. The water-using public – which means every household in the country – was probably unaware that a priceless asset it owned had been sold at a loss in pursuit of a transient government ideology, but it rapidly became aware of the consequences . . . the companies’ profits rose on average by 20 per cent a year from 1989–90 to 1992–93, and profit margins rose from 28.7 per cent to 35.6 per cent. (National Consumer Council, in Ward 1997:10) The amount we have to pay for water now, and the other related services to water, I find it quite frightening really, the way they’ve risen . . . They say they are investing these large amounts of money, and yet where is it? (INF16)

In the Stour Valley water users acknowledged that domestic services had generally become more reliable, but despite this it emerged with striking force that even after more than a decade of privatisation almost all remained firmly – and often passionately – opposed to it: ‘Privatisation was one of the worst things that ever happened to us in this country’ (INF16). For most people, allowing private water companies both to control and charge for water supplies perceptually confers ownership of the resource, and this continues to generate anger and anxiety: ‘It is – 38 –

Losing Water a natural resource, and I don’t think that natural resources should be privatised’ (Anne Marsh). I didn’t like the idea of water being privatised at all really: I thought it should be a State thing. If they could privatise air they probably would! (Elizabeth Kendall)

Material Meanings In the twentieth century, the privatisation of water returned it to the control of a small elite. This differed in some important ways from the previous feudal forms of ownership. Then, at least, water resources had been physically managed by local communities, who therefore remained intimately involved in their control and distribution. By the latter half of the twentieth century, though, water management had also become physically very separate from the everyday lives of water users. One thing that emerges plainly in the historical account is that technological development has always articulated with shifts in ownership and control, and each change in material culture has both concretised and enabled seemingly irreversible changes in the control of water. The historical sketch outlined in this chapter began with water being carried by women in vessels from the holy wells of Mother Earth, and its appropriation for Roman channels of power through a more colonised landscape. Each subsequent technological iteration – pipes, pumps and rams – permitted greater physical control of water and enabled more intensive resource use. Initially water management was highly visible: dams, weirs and water wheels articulated with local economies and required the involvement of many different people in each community. Water users interacted directly with their water sources, and could see the effects of their collective management. Their technology was also relatively selfsufficient, drawn from local resources: for example, mills along the Stour typically had apple orchards beside them to provide a reliable source of wood for the teeth in the gears of the machinery, and wooden pipe-work was not uncommon in the early stages of water transportation, though this was rapidly superseded by lead, concrete, bronze, and cast-iron piping. All of this changed with the mechanisation of agriculture and the population shift from the countryside to urban settlements. With the establishment of the first private water companies, most people lost their direct involvement in water management. Though the early water companies were integrated into local communities, as the urban population mushroomed, these ties loosened too, becoming ever more tenuous. Industrialisation transformed the management of water, vastly enlarging the scale upon which this was conducted. Steam turbines, reliant upon coal or other

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Cultural Landscapes fuels, were brought in to push water great distances. Water ‘went underground’, making the link between source and use invisible. Wells were physically enclosed within pumping stations and treatment works. Economic uses of water also became less visible: water power was replaced by other energy sources, and farming became reliant upon artificial fertilisers and new crops rather than water meadows and silt deposition. Water was important in a range of industrial activities, but its purpose changed: instead of very visibly providing power, it became a cleaning fluid or a coolant, internal to industrial operations. Water abstraction, treatment and disposal became more sophisticated, incorporating a series of chemical and hydrological processes. Water was increasingly analysed, evaluated, measured and metered. Requiring technical skills or scientific knowledge, this professionalised the industry, passing the control of water up an ever more select and largely male hierarchy of engineers, biologists, bacteriologists and chemists, with expertise well beyond the everyday knowledge of water users. This created – among the agencies of the state and industry – a powerful and exclusive epistemic community based on ‘expert’ knowledges inaccessible to the majority of people. One of the most important changes was that of scale: within a vastly enlarged population, water resources came to be managed by a huge industry and an even larger bureaucracy, both largely detached from local managerial issues. For example, the grandson of the miller at Sturminster Newton noted the changes since his grandfather’s time: Cutt Mill and this mill also had to adjust the water levels between them and make sure that each had enough water to drive his mill . . . So there was constant contact between the millers, and they must have had to establish a good working relationship because it was no good one miller being completely selfish, because that would just mess up the next miller . . . Quite recently we’ve had problems . . . with local farmers complaining to us that we are not controlling the sluice gates properly, where in fact it’s nothing whatsoever to do with us, to look after the sluice gates, it’s one of these jobs, whoever you ask, it’s someone else’s responsibility. (Peter Loosmore)

Resource management on such a massive scale introduces levels of complexity that are impossible to encompass. The ‘expert’ knowledge of most professional water managers is highly specialised, and, as a scientist in Dorset commented, is directed towards specific applications rather than ‘the big picture’: Most of these things are applied nowadays, and true ecology hardly comes into it – the study of the science of interaction between things. (Mike Ladle)

The enlargement in the complexities is, in itself, deeply disenfranchising to water users. At the end of the twentieth century, householders interviewed along

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Losing Water the Stour had little or no idea where the water emerging from their taps came from, and only the sketchiest knowledge about the processes that enabled it to emerge. Some were concerned about this loss of involvement and the moral responsibility for caring for community needs: ‘We’ve . . . put things into the hands of the State, which is wrong, it’s irresponsible’ (Tom Suttle). In reality, the cooperation within communities that enabled involved localised consensual management of collective water resources less than 100 years ago is virtually impossible to achieve with a highly mobile population and centralised resource management. A mill owner on the Stour pointed to the gap between largescale management and action: When you get to water there is very little cooperation . . . I think that is very sad . . . It’s a hell of a responsibility, looking after a stretch of the river. Public bodies get away with doing nothing, because no one’s got the time to really coordinate action against them. (John Freeman)

The problem of directing people and resources on such a large scale has created massive bureaucracies with whom ordinary people can neither identify nor engage. As Herzfeld (1992) notes, this leads to ‘the social production of indifference’ in state structures, and a widespread belief among the populace that those responsible for governance do not have their interests at heart. Predictably these factors have generated among water users – now recast as mere ‘consumers’ of water – a deep sense of exclusion and distrust. Sale drew attention to the social and ecological consequences of this alienation: There can be no communal-interest among 200 million people, or 20 million, or even 2 million, because there is no way for the human heart with all its limitations to perceive the interconnectedness of all those lives and their relevance to its single life; we cheat on our income tax and drive at 65 mph, and ignore beggars on the street because we perceive no community at the scale at which we live. Nor can there be communal interest over distances of 3,000 square miles, or 300 square miles, or even 30 square miles, because there is no way for the human mind in all its frailty to conceive of the complexity of an ecosystem so large and its single place within it. (1980:334)

As Descola and Palsson point out, the massive enlargements of scale have also entailed a reframing of resources as global ‘commodities’, demanding a very different human–environmental relationship: The privatisation and pricing of environmental ‘goods’ has accelerated; with the expanding rhetoric of consumerism, nature becomes a market place. (1996:13)

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Cultural Landscapes

The Environmental Consequences Every human being has a responsibility for the water . . . Because if we pollute it . . . like oil spillages and stuff, if we pollute the river, we are killing all the animals and everything. (Sturminster High School children)

At various stages in the development of modern water resource management the environment has shown signs of strain. However, although new cities may have had rivers that were little more than open sewers, this pollution was localised and composed mainly of organic material. Industrial development had a greater effect, introducing into water courses chemicals that could not so readily be absorbed and rendered harmless. In the latter half of the twentieth century water courses in the UK also had to contend with industrialised farming and its dependence upon fertilisers and pesticides. Stimulating certain types of aquatic plant growth at the expense of others, these lead to entrophication21 which is harmful to many aquatic organisms. While the ecosystem may have been able to cope with localised pollution, these widespread changes in land use, along with the drainage of huge areas of wetland, have had a more significant impact on aquatic species and water quality. It is also apparent that the pressure to meet regulatory limits and demands for profitability have had some effect on companies’ efforts to improve water quality and protect the environment: On the old system of doing things we were given a budget . . . and I was expected to achieve the best that I could within that budget. So that if you had a problem with nitrate, your objective was to reduce it as low as possible, not simply to below some arbitrary number. The attitude now is – and I think our management would probably deny it – but the attitude undoubtedly is we do the best that we have to do to meet the standards. So that if your nitrate limit is 50 milligrams per litre . . . as long as you are at 49, you are OK. You’ve met your limit . . . that’s the attitude – you’ve met the standard, we don’t need to spend any more . . . I didn’t have that thirty years ago. (INF43)

The other major emergent concern in the last few decades has been not just water quality, but also quantity. The removal of the ‘sponges’ provided by woodland, meadows and marshes has massively increased problems with flooding. This has perhaps been exacerbated by wetter winters apparently caused by climate

21. Entrophication – the overstimulation of plant growth – has a detrimental effect on oxygen levels in the water, and leads to problems such as algal blooms, midge population explosions and foul smells. It also damages fish populations and other species.

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Losing Water change, the other effect of which has been drier and longer summers, leading to a converse problem of drought. Many UK rivers and their dependent ecologies are being degraded by over-abstraction and some areas now experience regular water shortages.22 Even in a relatively ‘water-rich’ area such as the Stour Valley, concerns about over-abstraction have been surfacing since the 1970s: We are ‘overdrawing’ our account, and the day of reckoning will come . . . I note that tourism is now the main industry of Dorset and presumably the valleys with their springs, streams and rivers are part of the ‘attraction’. By our lethargy we are allowing our valleys to be destroyed . . . Whatever Dorset Water Board and their hydrologists say, there can be no doubt that the ‘watertable’ is getting lower and the flow in our watercourses is reduced annually . . . it is high time we stopped this destruction. (Hill, 1974: 13)

Twenty-two years later, the Dorset Wetland Trust suggested that the ‘day of reckoning’ had arrived. Under the headline ‘Wildlife Wanes as Water Dries’ it noted that ‘Five wetland sites [including three SSSIs] are under threat from water companies and from agricultural users drawing off water.’ Long-term residents in the area are keenly aware of changes in their local environment: The water table is going down – it’s more noticeable in Mere, because we used to take the children and go in the stream and find caddis grubs, and those little miller thumb fish . . . The water is – it’s dry, quite often in the year – it’s just dry where I remember it being water . . . it’s very shallow now compared with what it used to be. (Elizabeth Kendall)

Still, people find it hard to believe that they can really be running out of water: One doesn’t think along those lines in England, because there’s always been so much water . . . People take water for granted. You turn on the tap and out it comes. (Cleo Campbell)

Some doubt that the problem is genuine, noting the potential fiscal advantages to the privatised companies if water is successfully represented as a finite and increasingly precious resource. Others note that water shortages have as much to do with the limitations of the existing infrastructure as with the amount of rainfall: 22. In 1994 by the National Rivers Authority (NRA) ‘low’ forecast predicted that the amount of water available to put into the distribution system could fall by over 25% by 2015, and the effects of increased abstraction upon the wider environment were already painfully evident (in OFWAT 1998).

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Cultural Landscapes We get water . . . every month of the year . . . If we can’t collect enough water to see our population through, I think there’s something missing somewhere. And these water . . . people who draw a million pounds a year and what have you – it’s immoral for them to draw the money and not be able to do their work! The first thing I would certainly start with [is] extraction . . . at the mouth of the river, and not at the top of the river . . . They could extract enough water in Christchurch [for] the whole conurbation of Poole, Christchurch and Bournemouth . . . quite easily, by extracting water down there, putting it through filters, instead of depriving all the rest of the countryside. (Tom Suttle)

Since the privatisation of the water industry, increasing blame has been attached to the water companies.23 Water company executives deny that their boreholes into aquifers alongside the rivers are affecting the environment: We take about 3% by volume of the water which falls in the Wessex area into public supply. So all this business about drying up rivers and less springs really is a nonsense . . . 97% of it goes exactly the way nature intended. (Richard Lacey)

However, one former manager was more forthcoming about the effects of abstraction on the Stour: I’ve seen the effects of upriver abstraction . . . Anything on the upper reaches has significant impact . . . in times of drought when the river flow goes very low, because then the natural groundwater would be tending to supplement the river, but we are actually stopping that, because nothing gets past us . . . At Sturminster Marshall, the chappie who used to run the site there reckoned he could tell simply by looking at the river level whether the [abstraction] pump was running or not. He said it made a difference of several inches . . . You can see the effect, and you can see the effect up in Wiltshire on some of the areas where there are winterbournes, they manifestly flow far less frequently nowadays than they used to, and the only people using or taking water, essentially, is Wessex Water. A few farmers take small amounts . . . so we must be the prime culprits. (INF43)

Although some water managers may admit to being the ‘prime culprits’ it is a reality that, while they may have failed to invest in less damaging ways to supply clean water, the pressure on resources is coming largely from the inexorable rise in domestic consumption. And of that 3% [of rainfall taken into public supply], if we were to reduce it by a third, [that] would be impossible, because people want their automatic washing machines, 23. Stories such as ‘County’s Rivers are Running Dry . . . flows down by over 50%’ (Walton 1992) followed hard on the heels of Wessex Water’s announcement of a 16% increase in its annual pre-tax profits of £77 million (Dorset Evening Echo, 24 June 1992).

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Losing Water their automatic dishwashers, automatic flushes on urinals, automatic car washes, you name it: these are huge water-consuming devices which didn’t exist ten years ago, twenty years ago. (Richard Lacey)

The government and the industry have generated a wide range of policy instruments designed to encourage people to conserve water. They have brought in metering to make usage more visible; they have sent free ‘hippos’ – plastic containers for reducing the volume of water in toilet cisterns – to households; in some areas they have charged extra for the use of garden sprinklers and instituted hosepipe bans. Rising prices, as well providing capital for investment and profits, are intended to encourage restraint. Water companies and government agencies alike have embarked on numerous educational ‘water-wise’ programmes to encourage efficient usage, targeting schools, gardeners and householders generally. Vast efforts have been made to educate people about environmental issues. None of these policy instruments has succeeded in stopping or even slowing the rise in per capita water use. The historical record shows that more access to water has led, at every step, to higher levels of usage. While expressing genuine concern about environmental degradation, water users refuse to limit their usage, and continue to increase it with every opportunity. To find the reasons for this, it is necessary to dive deeper, into the powerful undercurrents of meaning.

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Part II Under Water

–3 – Senses and Sensibilities Although the vast majority of the population is now uninvolved in water management or in the economic uses of water for farming and industry, the changing infrastructure of domestic supply has, in some ways, greatly increased access to water resources. This chapter considers people’s direct engagements with water, considering it as a material artefact that enters their lives in myriad ways, many of which involve close sensory interaction. In keeping with the tenets of material culture analysis, it is useful to consider the form and characteristics of this acculturated ‘artefact’, and how these qualities are experienced and interpreted (see Banks and Morphy 1997, Morphy 1998, Tilley 1990). It is also illuminating to place the ethnographic data alongside evidence emerging from other disciplinary approaches that have considered sensory responses to interactions with water. The most constant ‘quality’ of water is that it is not constant, but is characterised by transmutability and sensitivity to changes in the environment. Physically, it is the ultimate ‘fluid’, filling any containing shape and, equally easily, shrinking and disappearing into the earth or evaporating into the ether. It has an extraordinary ability to metamorphose rapidly into substances with oppositional qualities, that is, the highly visible, concrete solidity of ice, and the fleeting dematerialisation of steam. Each state is endlessly reversible, so that this polymorphic range is always potentially present. In every aspect, water moves between oppositional extremes: it may be a roaring flood, or a still pool, invisible and transparent, or reflective and impenetrable. It may be life-giving, providing warm amniotic support and essential hydration, or it may burn, freeze or drown. Each of these states has its own qualities and is imbued with its own meanings, and all are always there in potential. Human sensory experience of these qualities is to some degree universal,1 and this commonality doubtless contributes to the recurrent themes of meaning encoded in water in many different contexts. It is also specific to a unique physical and cultural time and space. Ingold (2000, following Bateson 1973, Gibson 1979, Lévi-

1. I would suggest that there are two ‘universals’ to consider here: the biological, anatomical and cognitive characteristics of humans; and the material characteristics of the environment with which they interact.

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Under Water Strauss 1974), presents this interaction as a holistic engagement of the simultaneously biophysical and social person with a particular environment.2 Thus sensory experience is formed in developmental engagement with a particular socio-cultural and physical context, mediated by cultural practices and interpreted in the light of cultural beliefs and values. This creates considerable diversity in sensory experience. For instance, as has been amply demonstrated by ‘taste tests’ comparing tap and bottled water, there is no such thing as neutral, objective ‘taste’: it is invariably subject to preconceptions about the source and quality of the water. Cultural practices ‘train’ the senses over time: for example, it appears from discussions with informants in Dorset that people accustomed to taking hot baths commonly enjoy water temperatures that would be considered painfully excessive by others. And people’s experience of immersion in water depends to a great extent on whether they expect this to be a positive or negative event.

Experiencing Water Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged into the deepest reveries . . . and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be . . . Water and meditation are wedded forever. (Herman Melville, cited in Rothenberg and Ulvaeus 2001:53)

In visual terms, water ‘meets the eye’ in shapes and forms too diverse to enumerate, and which range in scale from the immediate to the infinite. However, it possesses some consistent visual qualities. For example, water is wholly influenced by the light and colour available in its surroundings. Because these are rarely fixed, its appearance changes rapidly and continuously. Often water is also physically ‘on the move’, flowing from one place to another, pouring from the tap, moving in waves, alive with cats-paw changes in the wind, or simply shimmering with minute and subtle shifts, picking up and scattering even the tiniest glimmers of light. The Dorset study suggests that many people find the visual and aural characteristics of water literally mesmerising. In this particular cultural context it is the most ‘gazed upon’ object within the landscape, whether occurring ‘naturally’, or carefully placed as an aesthetic focus. People will spend hours sitting by the sea or beside a lake or river, simply watching the water:

2. Gibson (1979) presented perception as a holistic engagement between an organism and its environment, and Ingold (2000) notes that this integration is achieved by conflating the concept of a (biological) organism with that of the (social) person. In more abstract terms, White argues that ‘we cannot understand human history without natural history . . . The two have been intertwined for millennia’ (1995:ix).

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Senses and Sensibilities If you’ve got an area, and there’s a pond in it, you can naturally expect most people will gather and walk around the pond. That will be the focal point to go . . . nearly always it will be the place that people will go. (Douglas Kite) Almost anyone who comes here – there’s something that draws them to water . . . there’s something special about being at the seaside with the water, and the flow of the water in and out and so on. Rivers and any source of water seem to have that sort of magic. (Peter Loosmore)

Many informants drew an analogy with the magnetic attraction of fire, which of course shares some of the visual qualities of water: elusiveness and transmutability, continual change and movement. It sort of mesmerises you doesn’t it, looking at fire . . . I suppose fire and water are the basic elements of life. (Michael Rule) It’s wonderful, then you start to get the breeze which just ripples the surface, and that’s always changing . . . It’s not dissimilar [to looking at a fire] . . . it certainly has a magic and a fascination. (Edward Dawson)

The mesmeric qualities of water are of particular interest in considering sensory perception and the creation of meaning. Schiffman (1996:101) notes that the eye is automatically drawn to flickering or moving stimuli,3 and Gell (1992) and Morphy (1991, 1992, 1994)4 have shown that shimmering or visually exciting patterns can stimulate affective responses in many different cultural contexts. The shimmer and brilliance of water provide visual stimuli that are quite different from those of most objects. The visual interest of inanimate objects is gleaned by the eye actively tracing the form and colour and detail. With water or fire, or images that in some way replicate their qualities, it is different experience: the eye is presented with a luminescent image it cannot ‘hold’. Instead, it must simply absorb all of the rhythms of movement and the tiny shifts and changes. It never looks the same twice . . . there’s always that uncertainty about how it will be . . . There’s something very therapeutic about watching water – I love sitting and just watching it . . . the movement is nice isn’t it . . . and the light on the water is lovely . . .

3. According to Vernon, the retinal cells of the eye are more sensitive to changing than to static visual stimuli (1962:134). 4. Morphy (1994), in writing about the shimmering ‘brilliance’ or bir’yun in Australian Aboriginal dot paintings, which is regarded as the manifestation of ancestral forces, also points to other cultural contexts in which ‘shimmer’ or ‘shine’ is considered to have a particular aesthetic or magical impact on the senses.

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Under Water I always find I just sit by water and think . . . It’s something to do with the movement. (Sue Jackson)

Water also ‘creates’ light: as Watt says: ‘we do not see light; we see the world as it is revealed by light . . . [Water] behaves like a light source’ (1991:3, 43). With an apt analogy to explain physiological responses to visual input, Vernon provides a further clue as to why water may be mesmeric: The visual pattern that impinges on the brain is not static; it continually moves and flickers. The light and shade and colour of the pattern alter as the light reaching the eyes changes in colour and brightness . . . If we were conscious of this pattern, we should see something like shimmering lights reflected from moving water. (1962:13–14)

It is not possible to do more than speculate about the effects of visual images that resonate with unconscious processes, but the ethnographic evidence is suggestive. It seems that, like the hypnotist’s flickering candle or swirling optical images, the visual qualities of water are indeed mesmerising. People like to go and sit by water and look at it . . . I guess it’s to do with its restless energy . . . watching the waves coming in and out, I just seem to get lost in it. (Richard Lacey) Rivers . . . they are superb for meditating aren’t they – the fact that you can lean over a bridge and look down. I find them enormously compelling and calming. (Rodney Legg)

Various writers have noted that an emphasis on visual perception is ‘objectifying’ and encourages rational distance (see Jay 1993, Levin 1993), but the accounts from the Stour suggest deeply affective responses to ‘gazing upon water’, though it does appear to engender a ‘reflective’ mode of engagement. People also pointed to some ‘mesmeric’ qualities in the way that water is experienced audially. Water sounds are frequently repetitive. As Sloboda points out (1985:1), measured responses to sound show that loud, fast rhythms are arousing (i.e. heart-rate rises with increasing tempo and volume), while slow, soft sounds are ‘soothing’, inducing corresponding physiological changes. It is therefore unsurprising to discover that people find waterfalls or white water exciting: It’s glorious – the magic of waterfalls: there’s one you go to, and you feel good, that’s great! (Bing Spencer) I like the sea when I can go down with my wellies on, rather than when it’s very hot . . . I like it when it’s very stormy . . . I think it’s the unpredictability of it and it’s the sort of sound, the colours . . . waves crashing up against rocks! (Anne Marsh)

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Senses and Sensibilities In contrast, trickling streams, rivers or the gentle swash and backwash of the sea are described as highly ‘relaxing’. It’s very relaxing isn’t it, just to be by water, hearing it . . . We live quite a stressful life . . . You feel water somehow is an answer to all that don’t you. Getting by it – just being there – is a relaxant really, I always feel it’s very tranquil, it’s peaceful, it smacks of holiday and recreation. (Dorothy Cooper) The noise in water maybe – it certainly calms you down listening to it. Sitting by the sea, you listen to the waves. It’s very relaxing isn’t it; it gets rid of stress. (Michael Rule)

Or, to quote an earlier inhabitant of the Stour Valley: I love to hear thy gently murmuring flow, Music that calms and smoothes the brow of care, (From ‘The River Stour’ by Thomas Cox, circa 1870, in Berkeley Score 1919:107)

People’s accounts also echo popular beliefs that water sounds replicate those ‘heard’ or ‘felt’ in the womb and that, consequently, humans associate rhythmic and circulatory sounds with prenatal security. Recordings of waves, heartbeats and trickling streams are often used to lull babies and insomniacs to sleep. There is ample ethnographic evidence (e.g. Lee and DeVore 1968, Turner 1982) that repetitive sound is crucial in the inducement of trance states or altered states of consciousness. The Dorset research benefited greatly from collaboration with the arts and environmental group Common Ground,5 whose musical composer, Karen Wimhurst, facilitated music-making in local communities to articulate people’s experience of the sounds produced by the river: Somebody might say something like: ‘Okay, what you can hear is something which is incredibly regular, if I close my eyes I can just hear something very very regular going on and it kind of draws me in, in a meditative way.’ Or somebody said: ‘When I close my eyes and listen to the river you know, it was really sort of present, and it fills your whole head, and it’s just this thing which always blots everything out.’ . . . Looking at the water falling over a weir . . . he felt he kind of heard this beat, in the water sound. (Karen Wimhurst) I suppose it’s just the senses being awakened by the movement of the water, the sound of the water, ’cause there’s something absolutely beautiful about the sound of water trickling over stones. (Anne Marsh)

5. Common Ground’s project ‘Confluence’, focused on music and oral history, was a major reason for choosing the Stour Valley as an ethnographic case study.

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Under Water Water’s compelling effects upon the senses extend to what most informants regarded as the third sense, that of touch. Of course, it is somewhat artificial to treat these sensory avenues as separate – as Ingold comments: ‘touch, in a word, confirms the materiality of the visible’ (2000:259). However, some sensory experience arises from direct physical contact. As well as offering some of the ‘prenatal’ sounds described above, immersion in water offers a ‘lulling’ rocking motion. Immersion or flotation produces a state of ‘weightlessness’ defying the gravity of normal life. People frequently commented that immersion freed them from the usual constraints of gravity and contact with other elements. Johnson and Odent assert that this is highly suggestive of prenatal experience, and something that neonates find very comfortable: Within the uterus the foetus floats in clear, watery fluid, the composition of which is very similar to sea-water . . . During their first four months babies are able to propel themselves short distances when placed face down in the water . . . The human newborn baby is perfectly adapted to immersion and automatically holds his/her breath when submerged. The newborn baby does not cough or show distress after immersion. (1994:13–14)

When the experience of ‘being in water’ was discussed with informants, they spontaneously drew this powerful analogy over and over again. Probably going back to the womb I suppose – the first nine months are in water aren’t they so you probably feel happy being back in the environment you are used to. (Michael Rule) Maybe it’s something to do with the womb – maybe it’s something we come into this world with. A lot of people do seem to take to water, or enjoy it that way. (Colin Marsh)

Immersion in water suspends normal feelings of being ‘embodied’ in weight, particularly for pregnant women, who are keenly aware that they are ‘carrying’ more than usual: The moment I entered the pool . . . I felt relaxed, the water felt good, and my heavy, tired frame was at last relatively weightless. My breathing became regular and I wallowed in the sheer pleasure of swimming and feeling that I was also relieving the gravitational force on the babies that I was carrying. (Jessica Johnson, in Johnson and Odent 1994:44)

Many informants in the Stour project reported similar feelings of ‘disembodiment’: Swimming is a freedom isn’t it really; it’s almost like flying . . . In the water you’ve got no gravitational problem . . . I fly as well . . . I think swimming is more basic – it’s just you. (Michael Rule)

– 54 –

Senses and Sensibilities You can float in water, and it’s cool . . . and it’s like you are light and it’s funny, weird. (Neon Hitch) It’s the three-dimensional freedom – you’re not restricted . . . It’s something like floating in space I suppose. (Colin Marsh)

These experiences match reports of experiments that have explored the physiological and psychological effects of weightlessness and sensory deprivation.6 McCally notes the linkage of ideas: Because gravity is one of the factors in the Earth’s environment which undoubtedly influences many biological processes, the reduction or absence of this influence would be expected to have far-reaching effects . . . Man still starts each new life with a simulated condition of weightlessness within the womb, and he now aspires to the weightlessness which awaits him in outer space . . . The uterus is the original space capsule of mankind. (1968:2–3, 241)

McCally speculates that regression to prenatal conditions may trigger related psychological regressions. The jury is still out on the possibility of prenatal memory, and likely to remain there, and it is similarly conjectural – though hardly controversial – to suggest that post-natal experiences of being bathed and given attention may strengthen these associations. However, people’s descriptions of their experiences in water are highly consistent, and the logic conforms to theories on the recursive relationship between physical experience and affective response: The dialectical relation which unites bodily postures and the corresponding feelings . . . has been known since Pascal . . . The gesture . . . reinforces the feeling which reinforces the gesture. (Bourdieu 1990:167)

Human subjects of experimental immersions have demonstrated measurable physiological effects which include the lowering of pulse rates and changes in EEG. Moods following short immersions were reported as ‘energetic’ and ‘buoyant’, and with longer immersions people reported visual and auditory hallucinations, suggesting stimulation to the imaginative centres of the brain (McCally 1968). Such effects are classically replicated in trance states, which, as Sheehan (1979) points out, produce a heightened ability for fantasy production. Since the early experiments in sensory deprivation, flotation tanks have gained popularity in America as a therapeutic artefact, and are now appearing in the UK:

6. There is a rich body of literature on this subject, though much of it is clustered in the 1960s and 1970s, when – alongside the space programme – there was a florescence of interest in the subject.

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Under Water Evolving from the water immersion sensory deprivation techniques of the 1960s, tank flotation has recently become a popular recreational activity, with commercial manufacturers and facilities available in most major American cities. (Suedfeld et al. 1983: 147–148)

Popular usage of the tanks affirmed the findings of the formal experiments: The level of stress after the float was significantly lower than before . . . The most common feelings after the session were being ‘calm’, ‘still’, ‘at rest’, ‘alert’ and ‘acquiescent’. (Suedfeld et al. 1983:153)

Though the experimental evidence is limited and the links controversial,7 the picture that emerges does cohere with the ethnographic data. It appears that water, experienced via the three primary senses, has effects that are repeatedly described as ‘soothing’ and ‘meditative’, capable of focusing attention and releasing the imagination. There are other tactile qualities of water that have significant sensory effects. One commonly mentioned by informants is its ability to alter the temperature of the human body very quickly. As Blatteis points out: Water has high thermal conductivity (0.561 W/m.K), more than 20 times that of air, and a high heat capacity; thus, heat loss is much higher in water than in air . . . The average skin temperature in a water environment will . . . be very close to the water temperature. (1998:86, 133)

Humans’ ‘set-point’ of ideal temperature, normally 37oC, is sensed via the skin. If people are too hot, they will feel pleasure in touching something cold, and vice versa (this is called alliesthesia). Much depends upon individual physiology, for example patterns of sub-cutaneous ‘insulation’, and there are well-established gender differences: for example, women tend to enjoy warmer temperatures than those tolerated by men: I find being plunged into hot or warm water extremely unpleasant . . . My wife can sit in a hot bath and steep, and she loves it – but if I get in a bath it bloody well burns me as far as I’m concerned. I can’t abide it that. (Mike Ladle)

7. As Rainville et al. comment: The neural mechanisms underlying hypnotic experience and responses to hypnotic suggestions are largely unknown and even the most general hypotheses remain controversial. Right-hemispheric function has been emphasised . . . because of its presumed association with imaginative, holistic or appositional thinking . . . all believed to be characteristic of hypnosis. (1999:110–111)

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Senses and Sensibilities People are intensely aware of the physical effects of alliesthesia: We go into Blandford and we go in the big pool first and it’s absolutely freezing, then you go into the little pool, and it’s totally boiling! . . . You go in the big pool and get totally frozen, and come out trembling with the cold, get in, and it’s like you are being burnt! (Wyke Primary School children)

Many of those interviewed, particularly the younger people, described intense physical engagements with water. I like swimming because it’s cold and relaxing, and when you go underwater you block yourself off from the world and just swim. (Bethany Pocock)

In discussing immersion in water, people tended to use terminology commonly used to describe other sensual experiences – ‘pleasure’, ‘fun’, ‘exciting’, ‘relaxing’, ‘you feel really good’ – underlying a reality that water can provide sensual as well as sensory experiences. Sprawson, in his exploration of the erotic delights of swimming, cites Paul Valéry’s account of a Mediterranean ‘fornication avec l’onde’. Swimming . . . It seems to me that I discover and recognise myself when I return to this universal element . . . To plunge into water, to move one’s whole body, from head to toe, in its wild and graceful beauty; to twist about in its pure depths, this is for me a delight only comparable to love. (in Sprawson 1992:101)

Water’s potential to given sensory enjoyment, and to provide a feeling of ‘oneness’ with the elements, is clearly important. However, as in its other qualities, there is always the potential for the opposite, and some people’s experiences of immersion are far from pleasurable: I’ve never learnt to swim, because I’ve always, when I get a certain amount of water round me, I tend to just feel I can’t breathe and I’m choking, and I panic . . . I just don’t like being in water, I don’t like swimming, I’ve never liked being in water. (Elizabeth Kendall)

Most informants, though, spoke in largely positive terms about their physical interactions with water, and this is doubtless related to changes in material culture. The household bath has become an icon of luxurious domestic pleasure, relaxation and sensuality. Most swimmers in the UK now go to heated indoor pools. Fears about immersion related almost wholly to ‘undomesticated’ water: rivers in which plants might entangle and drown them, or of course the sea with its wild ‘rip’ tides. Still, even in the domestic sphere, water retains its potential for opposite experiences. This recurs, for example, in assessments of the texture of water as being – 57 –

Under Water either ‘hard’ or ‘soft’. People seem to idealise water that is centred neutrally between these extremes. You know that hard water is bad for you in some ways, you know that soft water is bad for you in some ways, so where do you go? I guess my attitude is a happy medium in these things, if you can. (Mike Ladle)

Duality is also a central theme in the way that water presents itself to the other two senses, taste and smell. Occasional positive reference was made to the ‘fresh’ smell at waterfalls, which was deemed healthy, but for the most part smell was only welcome in saline, non-potable water: If I haven’t been down to the sea, for say two months, I get withdrawal symptoms . . . It’s the air; you can smell the sea, it’s got its own distinctive smell – the ozone . . . it’s like having a massage, it takes all the stress away . . . I usually sit there and think ‘thank you God for creating this!’ (Pat Herbert)

Otherwise, in their drinking water, people look for precise neutrality, requiring their water, if possible, to be neither salty nor sweet, and to taste and smell ‘of nothing’. Neutral as far as pH is concerned – neither acid not alkaline to any extent . . . The taste – if there was a very strong taste of something I would suspect it. (Colin Marsh)

Some of this discourse is clearly descended from Victorian ideas about ‘miasmas’. As Giblett points out (1996), wetlands and marshes in the west have long been described as exuding pestilence, death and disease. Thus for people along the Stour, smells from water are generally associated with pollution or stagnation: Because it doesn’t normally smell at all. I suppose if you noticed a smell, it would probably set the alarm signals going a little bit. If the water’s been turned off I’m wary too . . . you do worry don’t you. (Beryl Coward)

Different evaluations of water outside and inside the home also reveal an expectation that ‘domesticated’ water will have been brought under control to the extent that its ‘wildness’ – any unpredictable chemical compositions and other organisms – will have been removed. This highlights a process of acculturation in which water, in its movement from river or aquifer into domestic space, undergoes a series of physical and ideational transformations into an artefact, with commensurate shifts in evaluations of its qualities. These evaluations demand a balance between water’s oppositional extremes: in the case of taste and smell, registering

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Senses and Sensibilities absolute neutrality. The concept of balance also enters assessments of people’s physical need for water. Humans require quite a specific intake of water – about 1.75 litres a day. Usually this is self-limiting, but some mental illnesses can lead to compulsive water drinking, and the physical results include ‘anorexia, headache, blurred vision, muscle cramps, and ultimately stupor, convulsions and death’ (Noonan and Ananth 1977:183). However, most people are much more aware of the dangers of becoming dehydrated:8 anyone who has ever been unable to get a needed drink of water knows how quickly thirst becomes an urgent desire. Along the Stour, people recognised that there is a basic need for water to maintain normal physiological processes that depend on ingestion and excretion.9 They do reckon we should drink a lot more than we do . . . [I tell the children] it flushes the system through, keeps them nice and healthy, and they’ll get things like a nice skin because it’s flushing out the things that would clog up their skin. (Sue Jackson)

Even the youngest children interviewed were well aware that human beings can survive lengthy periods without food, but only – at most – for two to six days without water.10 You’d get dehydrated . . . you become weaker, and you can die. You can’t live for more than two or three days. You can last three weeks without food, as long as you take fluid, but you have to take fluid in every day. (Sturminster High School children)

It is plain from these accounts that people have an intense, intimate relationship with water, and that sensory experiences engender powerful affective responses and imaginative associations. The lucid articulation of these responses by people along the Stour provides invaluable material with which to consider how subjective experience is made ‘meaningful’.

8. ‘Even at 10% loss of body fluid, the patient will show signs of confusion, distress and hallucinations and at 20%, death will occur’ (Astrup 1993:156). 9. Batmanghelidj (1994) suggests that an adult needs between six to eight glasses of water per day. 10. ‘Water is constantly being lost from the living, and this water content must be constantly replaced. The water content of animal tissue must stay within strictly defined limits, where the dilution of various chemicals cannot change without serious consequences. Salt content echoes the salinity of primaeval oceans. Man can live without food for perhaps forty days and more, but without water he perishes fast – after only a few hours in a tropical desert (with high temperatures and low humidity), though lasting several days in colder climates’ (Haslam 1991:1).

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Under Water

Water on the Brain The cognitive development through which subjective experience is conceptualised and interpreted is described by Hegel (1977) as a ‘dialectic’ with the world that, as Shore says, ‘takes place within very particular and variable socio-cultural environments’ (1996:4). In this dialectic, people project themselves psychologically onto the world, objectify that projection and ‘reel it in’ to be reintegrated into their own knowledge and experience. In accord with prevailing cultural norms, each new piece of information is assigned values that may be simple (cold, hot) or complex (moral, immoral), each with a potential continuum from one extreme to another.11 In making sense of new information, people use familiar models, searching for a frame of reference within their own experience (see Horton and Finnegan 1973). Images, associations, values and organisational principles from one sphere are transposed onto another in what Bourdieu (1977) called ‘scheme transfers’.12 Because development begins with simple sensory inhabitance of a physical self, the human body is the first and most fundamental model, and (as cognitive development is an epigenetic process13) this provides a basis for many other models. The resulting ‘homologues’ – strings of conceptual associations in words and images – use the human body as a referent. Because humans share – more or less – the same model as a cognitive starting point, these are ubiquitous, occurring in every language, and in every sphere of experience. They are used to describe social relationships – kin, friends and linked groups: for example, the ‘head’ of a family; a ‘right-hand man’; ‘sister’ organisations.14 They are also used to describe every part of the environment, and are so integral to language that it is barely noticeable that tables and hills have ‘feet’, that journeys – to ‘a particular neck of the woods’ – have ‘legs’, that the skies ‘frown’ or ‘glower’ and that the sun (occasionally) ‘smiles’. There are numerous watery homologues ‘at hand’: brooks ‘babble’, ‘chatter’ and ‘chuckle’; rivers have ‘arms’ and ‘mouths’; people swim in ‘bodies’ of water, and are sometimes unlucky enough to be ‘swallowed’ by them. An entire volume could well be devoted to homologous associations with water, but they are 11. As Munn has noted (1986), values are necessarily binary opposites. 12. Neurologists and evolutionary psychologists (e.g. Edelman 1992, Pinker 1997) maintain that the human brain is to some degree ‘self-constructing’, i.e. that values learned early ‘inscribe’ themselves physically upon the brain, creating a template which is to an extent self-perpetuating and self-reaffirming. 13. This is an accretative process, in which knowledge is accumulated in every widening spheres (see Miller 1987). 14. To give an Antipodean example, in Aboriginal Australian kin terms each family relationship shares terminology with a particular part of the body: thus, in Kunjen (a Cape York language), the term for breast (afum) is also the word for ‘mother’, while the word for shoulder (egnggal) also means ‘son’ (see Strang 1997, 1999).

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Senses and Sensibilities so unavoidable that a stream of examples has already permeated this text, so in a sense the linguistic aspects of human relationships with water are dealt with organically. Because engagement with the environment is dialectical, people also draw on the things they observe to create metaphors to describe themselves and their own physical, emotional and mental processes. In watery terms, they may be ‘fluid’ dancers, ‘flooded’ with emotion, ‘swamped’ with work or ‘icily’ contemptuous (though perhaps not all of these at once). Thus they use themselves to describe the world, and the world to describe themselves. The result is flowing patterns of linguistic and visual association, meaning and value. Although every cultural context contains a particular arrangement of these, it seems that there are some persistent undercurrents generated not by a mysterious ‘psychic unity’, but by common sensory experiences, cognitive processes and physiological needs, and the recurrent qualities or characteristics of aspects of the environment.15 Sensory interaction with water is a recursive relationship in which nature and culture literally interpenetrate each other. It may therefore be reasonable to expect some cross-cultural commonality, some recurrence in the major themes of meaning that emerge from this interaction. This is particularly important in exploring water and meaning, because, as Illich says, ‘water has a nearly unlimited ability to carry metaphors’ (1986:24). Its characteristics of transmutability and fluidity make it the perfect analogue for describing complex ideas about change, transformation, mood and movement. Because it can transform from one extreme to another, it can readily convey all of the binary oppositions through which people construct meanings and values. Of all the elements in the environment, it is the most suited to convey meaning in every aspect of human life.

A Matter of Life and Death In articulating major themes of meaning, it is logical to consider ‘the essentials’: the common ‘meaningful’ undercurrents which flow into much more diverse and specifically cultural ideas about social being, health, environmental care and the use and management of water. The cosmological constructs which people draw upon in Dorset are discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, but it is useful to consider briefly how these relate to the most ubiquitous meanings of water.

15. To some extent this follows Berlin’s argument (1992) that common human experiences and perceptions generate some cross-cultural ‘regularity’ of categorisation and evaluation (see also Atran 1990, Bloch 1998, Ingold 2000).

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Under Water Essential for life, and therefore seen as the essence of life, water is a ‘life and death matter’ in both literal and symbolic terms. As Eliade put it: ‘Water symbolises the whole of potentiality; it is fons et origio, the source of all possible existence . . . Water is always germinative’ (1958:188).16 Death itself, ‘dust to dust’, is the opposite of water. You’ve got to have it, it’s the lifeblood of everything isn’t it, water . . . I think that’s probably why people are interested in it, because deep down somewhere . . . they realise without it there’s nothing. (Fred Hunt)

Along the Stour, the biblical concept of ‘living water’ is still powerful: ‘It is such a symbol of life itself’ (Edward Jacson). Informants commonly conflated ideas about biological and spiritual composition, reflecting the influence of different religious and scientific models. They were well aware that human bodies are composed largely of water and that it is the major component of their ‘lifeblood’: ‘we are mostly water anyway aren’t we’ (Beryl Coward). Interestingly, most overestimated the percentage of water in their bodies. The percentage is actually about 67%, but people frequently rated it as being over 70% and well over half of those who tackled the question thought that it was between 80% and 90%. This overestimation underlines a powerful idea about water as literally an ‘essential’ constituent of human ‘being’. In this sense, water ‘substantiates’ links between the body and the material environment in which it is, equally, the substance of life for every organism. This offers considerable potential for water to act as a symbolic medium for human– environmental relationships, as well as being conceptualised as a substance that carries common ‘humanity’ and so mediates social relationships. It is therefore unsurprising to find water encoded over and over again with concepts that integrate individuals into society, or to see it appearing persistently in rituals that confer spiritual and social identity, establishing the place of the individual in a particular ‘congregation’. In generating life, water is also seen as part of a larger process of regeneration integral to a cycle of death, dissolution, reintegration and renewal. In keeping with the homologous logic described previously, the hydrological cycle provides a model for cosmological constructs about ephemeral cycles of existence. These ideas match the ability of water to maintain its formal characteristics at macro- and 16. As Eliade notes: ‘In myth, ritual and iconography, water fills the same function in whatever type of cultural pattern they find it; it precedes all forms and upholds all creation . . . Every contact with water implies regeneration’ (1958:188–189). To illustrate this point, in the Dorset study it is indeed seen as a generative substance and, in a completely different cultural context, Aboriginal Australians beliefs cast water sources as the home of ‘spirit children’ which ‘jump up’ to enliven the foetus in a woman’s womb (see Strang 1997, 2002).

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Senses and Sensibilities microscopic levels. Tuan (1968) notes that this ‘doctrine of microcosm’ has recurred regularly in theological and scientific texts:17 [Man’s] blood, which disperseth itself by the branches of veins through all the body, may be resembled to those waters which are carried by brooks and rivers all over the earth. (Ralegh in Tuan 1968:59)

On an evolutionary scale, the vast temporal circle spirals backwards into the primeval oceans and forwards into eternity. At a human level, ‘life time’ is eloquently represented by the flowing river. Thus to sit by a river is to watch time passing, and there is an unlimited supply of everyday homologues equating human life with the flowing river, and vice versa. As Heraclitus said: ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’. In poetic usage, the image of the river as ‘time’ and the sea as ‘eternity’ recurs persistently: streams are ‘born’ in the heights of mountains, fulfil their ‘destiny’ as rivers, and on reaching the sea are ‘lost forever . . . identity fading into the vastness of the ocean’s waters’ (Boag 1990:136). Coetzee imagines the self as a swimmer, ‘swimming with even, untiring strokes through the medium of time’ (1980:143). Similarly, the human spirit is often presented as returning to a ‘body of water’. O infinite deep I never knew, I would come back, come back to you, (Rupert Brook ‘Retrospect’, 1918:22–23) The river is a natural living entity . . . it has a birth and – not really a death is it, it’s a form of recycling once it goes into the sea, which I suppose is what we’d all like, because it’s a form of everlasting life . . . it can sort of run forever. (Rodney Legg) People see the river as a meditative place [they] come to it to reflect and to see their life as a whole . . . The twists in the river are like kind of the twists in life . . . They say you go through rocky difficult passages, and then you enter calm waters . . . You start at source and you end up at the sea, and that somehow is a translation of birth to your death . . . The river going through seasons and people going through their seasons in life. (Karen Wimhurst)

17. Tuan observes that: The hydrologic cycle served as an ordering principle . . . The idea that circular motion is characteristic of the nature of things is ancient. By the fifth or fourth century B.C. . . . the water cycle . . . was already known to the Greeks near one end of the Eurasian continent and perhaps to the Chinese at the other. (Tuan 1968:6, 22)

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Under Water The ‘downside’ to this concept is that it aligns the end of the river with the end of life and the mortification of the flesh. In his excellent book on ‘postmodern wetlands’, Giblett notes that, in Western cultures, these landscapes have traditionally been regarded homologously as the ‘nether regions’ of water courses, and as places of moral and physical decay (1996:3). ‘Parts’ of the environment are aligned with parts of the body, and dealt with accordingly: Effluvia arose not only from the human body but also from wetlands . . . As colonial marshes and swamps have been colonised by surveying and engineering, draining or filling, so bodily effluvia have also been colonised by medicine. (1996:122–123)

In this view, the end of the river and the end of life coincide, and it is only through dissolution that moral and physical rebirth is possible. Thus the flow of the river demonstrates the passage of time and locates human life spans within a larger hydrological cycle of existence. White draws attention to the idea that the world is always in motion: All natural features move, but few . . . as obviously as rivers. Our metaphors for rivers are all metaphors for movement: they run, roll and flow. (1995:3)

This vision was echoed by the inhabitants along the Stour. Essentially, life itself entails movement: those who are not ‘quick’ are dead. You need to keep this constant flow of water inside, because if you lose it . . . You would die. I can just envisage something a bit like a grape ending up a bit like a raisin. (Mike Ladle) [Water] gives you energy. It’s like part of your blood isn’t it. (Sturminster High School Children) Water makes plants grow . . . and people. It keeps you alive. It makes you survive. It cleans your body out. Everything has water in it . . . and that makes you grow. All the good stuff in water goes to your blood and makes it more. (Wyke Primary School Children)

Order and Disorder Whether these concepts are applied at an individual ‘blood in the veins’ level, as a way of describing human life spans, or in considering hydrological cycles and – 64 –

Senses and Sensibilities aeons of time, they are basically models of ‘systems’. Like any mental scheme, these rely on ordering principles – internal logic and rules about how things work. The fact that water’s properties remain constant, whether in microcosm or macrocosm, facilitates metaphorical leaps from immediate, small-scale ideas, to larger social and global systems. Descriptions of individual, local and wider systems in Dorset suggest that homologues or ‘scheme transfers’ about human health and well-being are readily transposed onto ideas about ecological well-being, or spiritual issues. In an ‘orderly’ system, things flow as they should: in the ‘right’ amount, and in the ‘right’ place. But, of course, orderly systems must also have a concept of disorder. Just as water is a metaphor for describing order, it may be used equally to define its opposite, which draws attention to a final ‘undercurrent’ – the concept of pollution. This is a major practical and perceptual issue relating to water resources in the UK, but as anthropologists have observed (see Douglas 1966, 1975), it is also a very powerful cross-cultural concept. ‘Pollution’ or ‘dirt’ is whatever contravenes an accepted cultural order: Lord Chesterfield defined dirt as matter out of place. This implies only two conditions, a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order . . . Dirt is a kind of compendium category for all events which blur, smudge, contradict, or otherwise confuse accepted classifications. The underlying feeling is that a system of values which is habitually expressed in a given arrangement of things has been violated . . . The idea of dirt implies system. Pollution rules . . . impose order on experience. (Douglas 1975:51– 53)

Cultural values thus define what is deemed ‘orderly’ or ‘balanced’, and will contain boundaries and limits, the crossing of which implies ‘disorder’ and ‘imbalance’. In a sense, in creating ‘life’, water creates form and order, and death, with its de-forming dis-incorporation, is the ultimate dis-order. Values about what constitutes order or disorder permeate every aspect of culture: for example – as the ethnography demonstrates – ideas about what constitutes balance and ‘proper’ flow in social systems, regulatory systems, economic systems or ecosystems. This idea, that pollution is ‘disorder’ or things ‘out of place’, usefully illuminates a number of water issues. As Turner puts it, ‘the unclear is the unclean’ (1970 [1967]:97). This chapter has touched on several important ‘undercurrents’ of meaning. Water appears as a matter of life and death, and as the substance of spiritual, social and physical being. It offers models of time, change and transformation, and provides a multi-valent concept of order and disorder. There is a discernible consonance between the characteristics of water, people’s sensory experience of these, and the conceptual schemes in which water appears as a powerful metaphor. Dive deep enough, and it seems that there is coherence between human experience of the world and the cultural meanings that flow into everyday life. – 65 –

– 4– Thinking Water Although located in the individual, sensory experience incorporates the learned perspectives and interpretations that are the product of collective social and environmental interaction. Thus the meanings engendered by experience are simultaneously part of the cultural landscape that every person enters and exits over an individual lifetime. As many ethnographies have shown, shared meanings are upheld – and continually developed – through a range of cultural forms, including myth, art, ritual and everyday practice. In the cultural landscape inhabited by the social groups in Dorset, as in many European contexts, ideas about ‘the mind’ and human emotion make extensive use of water imagery, and in the process foreground meanings that are clearly influential in constructing their relationships with water.

Water on the Mind Freudian and Jungian analyses of ‘the mind’ and its neuroses have fallen from grace, but their seminal theories offer some interesting confluences with the broad themes discussed previously, while also providing a particularly European ‘mythology of the mind’. More importantly, these ideas are still very current in popular discourses and continue to inform the ways in which the inhabitants of the Stour Valley employ water imagery in describing their mental and emotional life. Images of water have been central to psychoanalytic ideas since Freud (1961 [1900]) analysed their use in the expression of meaning. Jung (1964) proposed the body of water as an ‘archetypal symbol’ of the unconscious, an idea which readily coheres with the major themes of meaning described previously, in that it presents water as undifferentiated source – a ‘sea’ of potential: In a way the unconscious prevails in all specific myths about water as it is the ‘undifferentiated matrix’ into which all things are submerged and from which all things arise. This is the inherent structural commonality of the unconscious and water [my emphasis]. (Young and DeCosta 1987:69)

Just as water provides a vision of collective existence (and common human identity) before and after human beings ‘take form’, its qualities as a ‘sea of potential’ – 67 –

Under Water offer an image of the ‘unformed’ and ‘natural’ part of the individual self: the unconscious ‘id’ with its instinctive tides and undertows. As water reflects and symbolizes the world as cosmos and life, it is also the symbol of destruction and death. It is the mysterious depth which kills and annihilates . . . the very image of the irrational, uncontrollable element in the world. (Schmemann 1976:39)

In keeping with its particular qualities, the body of water as ‘the unconscious’ has a dual nature: it can represent the unconscious as an alien, shadowy world in which the individual can become ill and lose her- or himself (in other words dissolving the rational, objective aspects of the self which define personhood); or it can be seen positively, as the ‘deeper’ or ‘greater’ self that is a source of regeneration and creativity. Wittels (1982:178) describes how images of water in the therapeutic artwork of her psychotic patients were reliable indicators of particular disorders: thus schizophrenic patients drew great oceans describing ‘the ego’s desperate struggle to protect itself from flooding by primary thoughts and impulses’; depressive patients tended to depict ‘rocky paths leading to stormy seas’; and manic patients, suffering from feelings of ‘omnipotence and grandiosity’, drew smaller bodies of water, lakes, quarries and pools, with phallic objects of one sort or another entering into them. These imaginative usages of water are commonly echoed, though less extremely, in everyday descriptions of emotions. As with other constructions of meaning, this is linked not only to the qualities of water, but also to sensory experience of it: As an issue of the human body [water] contains all the expressive diversity of its physical properties. The strongest feelings of joy, sadness, and despair are found in tears; rage, contempt, and obeisance are found in spittle and urine. The giving of water signifies the act of giving itself. Diverse analogies to psychic states arise from its characteristics . . . States or conditions of their circumstances are frequently described in terms of water. (Young and DeCosta 1987:68)

So as well as literally expressing emotions in fluids, people employ metaphors of water to describe their states of mind or emotions: they may ‘freeze with terror’, ‘boil with rage’, or ‘deep down’ they may be ‘simply lukewarm’. This draws attention to a crucial point: that emotional lives are conceptualised as systemically as any other aspect of existence. People imagine ideas and emotions flowing between themselves and the world, and in this system, as in any other, there is a ‘proper’ order – boundaries and limits, a ‘correct balance’ of flows. Internally this is represented, using images of water, by a manageable ‘flow’ between the deep and wild ‘well’ of the unconscious and the surface of the rational ‘cultured’ self. At a social level, there is a similarly conceived ‘flow’ between the individual – 68 –

Thinking Water and her/his social context in which ideas, values, experiences, and so forth, are poured into or received from the larger social body. The Dorset study suggests that this powerful imagery about emotional and mental ‘flow’ connects with the way that people feel about ‘real’ water at a material level. Metaphors employing water imagery are used interchangeably to describe people’s physical, emotional and mental health, and (with homologous logic) transposed to concepts of ecological balance – or the lack of it. To ‘dry up’ has negative connotations obviously because without water every living organism would die: You would get dehydrated . . . I guess your body would start to shrivel if it went on long enough. (Colin Marsh)

People therefore associate dryness or drought with aging and death. As one informant said: ‘I’m just a dried-up old prune!’ (Colin Coward). However, there are many other levels of association that can come into play: creativity ‘dries up’ and so do funds. Individuals can ‘dry up’ in speech, or remain ‘dry-eyed’, unable to ‘express themselves’. They may become ‘brittle’ in an ‘emotional desert’, ‘shrivel’ with shame or – literally and metaphorically – with impotence, and (perhaps in consequence) ‘curl up’ in embarrassment or ‘crack up’. So the connotations of insufficient water are closely associated with many forms of misery and with physical and social death. The psychic weight of the converse – to be ‘flooded’ – is just as great. As Wittels (1982) illustrated, this is classically associated with the waters of the unconscious flooding overwhelmingly out of control, and the terrors of the deep surfacing to swallow the ego. ‘Here be monsters’: it is worth noting the coincidence between mythological themes and the concepts used to describe ‘clinical’ mental states. It is hard to find any cultural body of mythology without lurking water creatures of one sort or another: serpents, kraken, devil fish, giant octopi and other leviathans – these ideas run deep. Pliny the Elder wrote about large creatures ‘mostly to be seen about the solstices’ when ‘rushing whirlwinds and rain-storms and tempests . . . upturn the seas from their bottoms’. In Historia Animalium, Aristotle spoke of ‘sea-serpents capsizing triremes off Libya’ (in Baker 1928:10).1 Other Western sea beings which have entered the popular imagination include Jormundgandr, the Midgard serpent whose heaving coils made storms; the Norse water god Ran, who dragged drowning men down with a net; the Sirens; Scylla

1. There are countless other examples: the Babylonians left tales of a terrifying sea-dragon, Tiamat; beneath Japan lies Jish-in-uno, a 700-mile-long cod fish, blamed for tidal waves and earthquakes. A Maori being, Tipua, lurks in the depths of the ocean, and Fijian mythology contains both a monster clam and a giant octopus.

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Under Water and the great ‘sea mouth’ Charybidis. Most pertinently, there is the Greek Hydra – the many-headed monster that gave its name to water. Mythological representations of the ‘terrors’ of the deep are classically matched by the efforts of male heroes such as Beowulf, Perseus or Jason and the Argonauts: When they draw upon the heroic plunge into the watery abyss to contend with sea monsters, as in the story of Jonah and the whale or Beowulf, are they not also evoking the heroic venture into the ‘watery’ abyss of the unconscious? Or similarly, is not the heroic mastery of forbidding waters with their feminine allure a reference to the male’s unconscious fears of a drowning engulfment by a woman? . . . The feminine and water appear to be virtually merged as representations . . . as seductive and destructive mermaids and sirens; the ocean as life-giving mother; the Arthurian Lady of the lake. (Young and DeCosta 1987:69)

It appears that the symbolic role of these heroes is to represent the triumph of ego over id, mind over emotion, and culture over nature: in other words, to strive for or restore what is conceived as a ‘proper’ balance of the system. Of course as Young and DeCosta imply, this is a plainly patriarchal vision of balance, in which female/nature is subdued. In Western terms, as Giblett says: The swamp is a secular hell, or underworld, through which the post-epic hero of the imperialist adventure story has to fight his way . . . from the mother to manhood . . . The descent into the secular underworld of the swamp entails a return to the maternal (and matriarchal) womb of the wetland as home before returning to the paternal (patriarchal and filiarchal) home of the dry land, a simulation of the first home . . . Only after penetrating the seemingly impenetrable can the hero then emerge triumphant with his manhood vindicated secure in the knowledge that he has sought out and subdued Mother Earth of Nature in her innermost recesses, that he has ‘known’ her in the sexual sense. (1996:149–150)

Floods are symbolically overwhelming, but like every other aspect of water, they are characterised by duality: mythical water monsters often contain generative as well as destructive forces.2 For many Westerners, particularly those willing to embrace the ‘feminine’ in ‘nature’, this role is filled by sea creatures such as whales and dolphins, which appear as benign symbols of creativity and emotional ‘harmony’. Everyday ‘floods’ can also be positive: for example, people may be ‘flooded with joy’, and physical flooding ‘in its place’ – on wetlands and water meadows – is perceived as a necessary and positive process of ecological regeneration. More often, though, ‘floods’ represent internal or external nature ‘out of control’: the underworld/underwater rising to overcome the edifices of human endeavour. 2. For example, the Aboriginal Rainbow Serpent, which appears in ancient rock art, can be either a negative or positive force for change and transformation.

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Thinking Water People fear floods in a way that they rarely fear drought. In the temperate valleys of Dorset, drought is seen as a more insidious death – a slower deprivation of essential needs, or a gradual emotional desiccation. A flood, on the other hand, immediately overwhelms, generating fears of drowning both physically and emotionally. Sometimes water seems quite sinister to me. I know it drowns people, and it’s scary in that sense . . . It is that dual-faced thing. One of the women . . . she was in a farm house and the floods kept on – it kept on getting flooded – so when she looked out of her bedroom window, she’d see these waters rising and it made her ill. It sounded like she’d had a nervous breakdown. (Karen Wimhurst) When it rains very heavily . . . it runs off the field, down the steps and ends up in a large puddle where the gravel is outside. I’ve seen it sort of lapping, and I was thinking ‘Oh my God, when’s it going to come in the house?!’ (Sarah Solly)

Some of the fears that people expressed related not just to water’s capacity to overwhelm, but also to its physical transmutability, which was deemed ‘untrustworthy’: It can seem quite a bizarre substance really, this kind of shimmery stuff which is translucent. It can almost seem scary and not in a sense that it drowns people . . . just the substance of it . . . it can transform into many things. (Karen Wimhurst)

Situated on the southern coast of England, Dorset has a rich literature concerned with seafaring and its attendant dangers. People are aware of the risks of swimming and sailing, even in benign circumstances. Local mythology includes a story about a pond in Marnhull believed to be haunted by the ghost of a girl who drowned there (Roscoe et al. 1952), and there is a legend, referred to by a number of informants, in which the Stour was said to ‘claim a life’ each year. You’ve got the belief . . . that rivers actually do claim lives and this is particularly so for the first one of the year . . . I’ve seen [it] in old Dorset County chronicles of drownings on the Stour at Blandford and at Sturminster Newton. (Rodney Legg)

Fear of water is not uncommon, and though ‘diving in’ may be exciting physically and metaphorically, most people share some anxiety about finding themselves ‘in too deep’. Thus, the children at the primary school in Gillingham don’t swim in the river, because ‘it has too strong currents, and it’s too deep’ (Wyke Primary School children), and a number of adults confessed that they were afraid of the water. – 71 –

Under Water My mother had a thing about the water. Although she would go down and look at it, see the little fishes and sit on the bank, she put railings and she planted – quite densely – shrubs at the top of the bank, because she had a horror of falling into it when it was deep. (INF12)

The great terror, in the symbolic imagery of drowning, is the loss of self – a fear that the sea walls of the persona will be breached. Voluntary or controlled immersion may represent a comfortable way of experiencing a loss of self and ‘disembodiment’ – an opportunity to imagine a symbiotic (or erotic) reunion with ‘nature’ and its generative seas. It may even be a way of ‘dipping a toe’ into the dissolution of mortality and the underworld. But if control is removed, immersion becomes drowning: the ultimate overwhelming of identity. Because the self is swallowed by ‘the other’, or by internal emotional seas, people often equate it with other forms of ‘being consumed’, not just by imaginary monsters, but, for example, by fire: I’d never buy a house with any possibility of [being flooded] . . . it would be just as bad as being burnt down. (David Solly)

The fear of being consumed is clearly a fear of social or physical mortality, and therefore a powerful undercurrent of meaning in people’s anxieties about water that is ‘out of control’ in any form.

Bodies of Water An understanding of how water represents the flow between self and other also provides insight into one of the most important meanings encoded in it: its symbolic place as the ‘essence’ of social connection. In anthropological terms, identity, whether individual or collective, is seen as a persona constructed via interaction with others (see Parkin et al. 1996). It is embodied through experience, knowledge and practice (Csordas 1994, Foucault 1978, Lacan 1977), and materialised in artefacts of social integration or differentiation (Csikszentmihályi and RochbergHalton 1981). Several aspects of these analyses are particularly relevant to this study: for example, an acknowledgement of the importance of ‘blood’ in the construction of identity, particularly in defining membership – or non-membership – of groups. As Herzfeld points out, symbols of nationalism, race or local community rely heavily on ‘the imagery of blood as the common substance or essence, conferring common identity’ (1992:11).3 Equally – in every social context – identity is also ‘embodied’ through the boundary-crossing ingestion of food and drink, and their particular cultural 3. See also Wade 2002.

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Thinking Water meanings and values. There is a rich literature dealing with issues of food and identity (see Caplan 1997, Douglas 1966, Fischler 1988, Lupton 1996, Macbeth 1997). As Fischler points out, ‘if one does not know what one is eating, one is liable to lose the awareness of certainty of what is oneself’ (1988:20). Bakhtin’s comment that ‘in taking in food we take in the world’ is particularly pertinent (in Lupton 1996:16) and, along with de Garine and de Garine’s work on the meanings of social drinking (2001), suggests that these issues are as important in the drinking of water. The extent to which identity is perceived individually or collectively depends upon the level of emotional interchange in relationships and their particular arrangement of boundaries. In the Stour Valley, as elsewhere, people make considerable use of the formal qualities of water to describe social relationships and their degrees of closeness or distance. In this metaphorical social landscape people are said to be ‘cold and icy’ in withholding connection from others; they may ‘thaw’ over time’, ‘warm up’ and get ‘into the swim’ of things. They may even ‘melt’ into each other’s arms and have a ‘steamy’ affair. Thus ice – unyielding and cold – provides one extreme: a representation of individuals frostily unconnected with others, refusing the ‘flow’ of sociality. Conversely, water heated into its most ‘excited’ form provides the ultimate in social intercourse: ‘steamy’ relationships characterised by passion and intimacy and (one might say cynically) ephemerality. All of these water images describe complex balances of ‘self’ and ‘other’. Human beings experience a small ‘loss of self’ when caught up in the ‘whirl’ of social events or ‘immersed’ in physical or intellectual endeavours. They do so more intensely when they are ‘re-born’ in baptismal waters or undergo other transformative rituals (which often involve water, wine/champagne and ablution of one sort or another). However, in emotional terms, the most powerful dissolving of boundaries and flowing together of self and other occurs in several related situations: the symbiosis of prenatal experience; post-natal breast feeding and bonding; and the intimacy of sexual relationships. All represent the creation of life in literal and symbolic terms, and all, because they are ‘matters of life and death’, are also linked metaphorically with death and reconciliation with nature. Rescue dreams are connected with birth dreams. In women’s dreams, to rescue . . . from water has the same significance as giving birth. (Freud 1961 [1900]:439) People . . . they realise it’s their lifeblood, water is their lifeblood. (Fred Hunt)

Significantly, all of these involve the exchange of fluids: amniotic fluid, blood, milk and semen. In any cultural context these substances have enormous symbolic power, and are invariably subject to taboos and prohibitions. In terms of how people think about water in Dorset, and most particularly in their ideas about health and pollution, these are – quite literally – ‘critical issues’. – 73 –

Under Water As a cultural concept, ‘health’ is etymologically founded on ideas of ‘hale’ or ‘whole’-ness: individually or collectively, it represents a system whose integrity is intact.4 As Bradby notes, writing about food in Scotland, this is a vision of systemic order: Maintenance of equilibrium was the key concept in a different set of relations between health and good choice that featured in all respondents’ accounts, and is referred to here as the systemic model. (1997:291)

And Cohn points out, the sense of order that underlies concepts of balance within the body constitutes the ‘moral’ person: ‘health and the body are inevitably concepts dominated by moral criteria’ (1997:194). People conceptualise their bodies hydraulically, in terms of physical inflow and outflow of substances and energies. In intimate relationships the physical exchange of fluids is positive, providing sustenance and generating life. However, body fluids are more ambiguous in less ‘merged’ social interactions: people’s feelings about contact with the sweat or saliva of others – their ‘substance’ emerging – depends entirely on the relative closeness of the relationship. Thus while other people’s sweat or spit – or even urine – might be unworrying for partners or close family members, who feel that they share the same substance – the same ‘blood’ – it generates considerable ‘contact anxiety’ with strangers. Ideas about the exchange of blood are even more powerful: the intense emotion this engenders are amply illustrated, for example, by the enduring fascination of mythology concerned with vampiric sexuality and control over life and death through the breaching and ‘infection’ of the individual system. Blood exchange of any kind raises similar anxieties: life may be given through transfusion or taken through pollution and infection. Few diseases inspire as much fear as those, such as AIDS, that contradict the life-giving meanings and properties of blood and semen.

A Matter of Substance Of all the questions about water quality and meaning, the most fraught are those concerned with ‘other people’s substance’. In Dorset, people commonly expressed very strong feelings about simply sharing bathwater with others. There is probably no better indicator of the closeness of a relationship than who will share bathwater

4. Lupton records a nice example of how such concerns can be articulated, noting Iossifides’ study of how, in a Greek convent, the nuns conventionally blessed themselves before and after a meal to protect themselves from the dangers associated with ‘opening’ and ‘closing’ the body (Iossifides 1982, cited in Lupton 1996:15).

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Thinking Water with whom. Some people have quite negative feelings or anxieties even about their own substance, to the extent that they regard bathing as providing too much contact with ‘dirt’ (i.e. they classify their own sweat etc. as excreta): ‘I don’t particularly like baths anyway, sitting in dirt’ (INF52). People’s views on baths (and sharing them) have clearly changed considerably in recent years: People used to – one or two of my friends at school – they all got in the same bathwater, the whole family, starting from the youngest, that sort of thing, which they wouldn’t dream of doing now . . . I suppose it’s just another cleanliness thing, thinking that you are getting into dirty water. (Beryl Coward)

Where families share bathwater sequentially, some interesting ideas emerge in decisions about ‘who gets the water first’. In some the order appears to reveal status, especially between siblings, but a ‘youngest first’ order is very common, and has little to do with perceived grubbiness. It seems that concerns about other people’s substances is closely related to their age. The fluids of children – their sweat and urine – are generally seen as much more innocuous than those of adults. Once past the ‘full flush’ of youth, it appears that intimate substances become more powerfully associated first with potency and sexuality, which raises a number of complex issues (particularly within a familial context), and then with mortality, so that the substances of ‘dried-up and desiccated’ elderly people generate particular anxiety. This is obviously exacerbated when ill-health is part of the equation. A nice illustration of these concerns and their effect on water use is given by a nurse’s description of how a request to record handwashing in hospital wards raised her anxiety levels about ‘contamination’ considerably, while at the same time conflicting with her efforts to save water at home: Standing in the ward watching doctors not wash their hands between patients. I think 9% of doctors wash their hands properly . . . I became obsessed with handwashing in the house, making sure that . . . I was sort of passing on all this information, and particularly to the men, who don’t seem very good at washing their hands. K—’s in there saying ‘but you said hot water’s the best Mummy’. So she’s having the hot water tap on for quite a long time before the hot water is coming through first thing in the morning, so I said ‘Oh they are wasting all this water, put the plug in.’ Which goes against everything about good handwashing! Because you are washing your hands in dirty water after about five seconds – you’ve rinsed your hands off, all the dirt’s gone into the water and you are splashing your hands again with it. (INF52)

People recognised that human bodies ‘consume’ the ‘substances of life’ (air, water and food) and convert them into ‘dead matter’ – the ‘used-up’ part of themselves that they need to get rid of before it contaminates the body. ‘[Drinking a lot] it’s – 75 –

Under Water certainly healthy – cleans you out doesn’t it’ (Michael Rule).5 Thus the physical ingestion of water transforms it from one extreme of meaning to another – from life to death. The feelings expressed by most echoed an idea that is predominant in Western cultures: that human waste substances are ‘dead’ and are thus life threatening rather than life enhancing. Water that has passed through another person has the ‘life’ extracted from it: ‘dead water is water that has been used before, and therefore it’s not suitable for drinking water’ (Tom Suttle).6 Although people in the Stour Valley were at ease with the use of ‘manure’ in the immediate environment, and accept that it ‘fertilises’ (i.e. creates life), they preferred it to come from herbivorous domesticated animals (which, like children, have ‘innocuous’ waste), or at the very least to be processed to the extent that it could be distanced and re-created safely as compost. It is worth noting that the excretions of carnivorous animals are regarded very differently, being composed of dead flesh and therefore ‘much dirtier’. Similarly, most informants viewed adult human waste with deep repugnance, and (as examined in Chapter 12) a major obstacle to saving water in the home is their desire to ensure as much distance as possible as quickly as possible between themselves and this ‘dead matter’. The meanings with which waste substances are imbued help to explain the deep horror that people have of foul flooding (floods bringing sewage). The Stour does flood occasionally, and while this research was being conducted some houses in Gillingham experienced foul flooding onto their front lawns. The outcry about this ‘disgusting’ and ‘vile’ event was intense: the local paper headline read ‘Storms Bring Sickening Tide’, and described ‘horrified householders’ having to clear human excrement off their lawns and drives. It seems that few things could be more threatening than the combination of being flooded (the system out of control) and the fact that, like a virus entering the blood, this breached the boundaries, and carried other people’s ‘dead matter’ into the personal space of the home. Of all contaminants in dirty water those that come from a man’s body can be the most dangerous to another man’s health. Human faeces carry pathogenic organisms of many sorts. (Dean and Lund 1981:3)

The idea of ‘miasma’ has not disappeared. Hertz (1960) noted that smells signifying death, corruption or disease are frequently regarded as being contagious. In Dorset, 5. In this respect water and food are similar. As Lupton points out: Food is a metonym of the mortality of human flesh, the inevitably entrophy of living matter. Food is therefore a great source of ambivalence: it forever threatens contamination and bodily impurity, but it is necessary for survival and is the source of great pleasure and contentment . . . Food continually threatens to become dirt. (1996:3) 6. This is not the case in other cultural contexts: for example, ‘night soil’ is still in common usage in many countries in the Far East and Asia.

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Thinking Water this idea was supported by people’s responses to the smell of sewage or what they perceived as harmful pollutants: I have heard concern expressed about . . . fumes that come off the river round by Sturminster Mill. When the water’s agitated from going over the weir . . . sometimes, if the wrong substances have [been] released upstream, you can also have unnatural foams . . . some people certainly say ‘Oh, don’t want to hang around there too long’ because whatever is in the water would actually come out into the atmosphere over the hatches. (Clare Freeman)

People were revolted by the idea of being immersed in the same water as ‘dead things’: I think they’d be very wise not to swim in the river . . . Rivers are dirty places anyway . . . I remember when I was at school . . . near the Stour . . . diving in one day happily and coming up at the wrong side of what I thought was a rather somnolent fellow bather, and found it was a dead sheep . . . I wouldn’t, from choice, bathe in the Stour. (Anthony Pitt-Rivers) When I came here and they started to clear [the river bank] they were amazed to find how many dead sheep there were in it, that had got in there and been trapped . . . Very very dangerous as well for young children . . . Particularly with your cocktail of crude sewage as well – it adds that sort of ‘je ne sai quoi’! (John Freeman)

The prospect of actually drinking water polluted with ‘deadness’ was even more repugnant: If I saw a dead sheep lying in the stream, I wouldn’t drink the water downstream of it! (Mike Ladle) We had a bit of a scare . . . I went up to have a look where the springs were and I found the remains of a skeleton of a cow there . . . Most of the water was coming out of the bank anyhow, but [it was] disconcerting. (Edward Jacson) I drank [from the spring at Cerne Abbas] and I got the most vicious vile cold of my entire life! This particular bug did get me worried, because . . . it’s very much a working churchyard now, you can see all these graves above, so though one hopes the water comes up from below, you do start thinking, ‘I suppose it has gone through a few recent bodies as well. So perhaps it’s not a good idea to be drinking from this well! (Rodney Legg)

This contravention of a basic order, when the ‘water of life’ is infected and ‘disordered’ with dead matter, is critical to evaluations of water quality. People – 77 –

Under Water were clearly not willing to swim in ‘smelly’ water, and have become increasingly wary of swimming in the Stour: I asked her if I could swim in it [her pond], and she said ‘Oh yes you can’, but it’s just so offputting, because she said, ‘Well you know of course all the sewage of the village comes into the river.’ (Karen Wimhurst) I suddenly realised there was excreta floating around. Didn’t go in again. (Tom Suttle)

Many informants commented that there is now very little swimming in the river, whereas this was more common in their youth. This has doubtless been influenced by the construction of numerous swimming pools and changing recreational patterns, but also highlights a persistent idea that the rivers are much more polluted than previously: About thirty years ago . . . they used to spend hours, hours. This island here is known as Fishers’ Island, the next island further up is called Bathing Island, and they used to have diving boards on there then . . . But I certainly wouldn’t recommend it now. (Arthur Morris)

These comments raise a couple of points: one that people appeared to become more anxious about pollution as they get older. This may be partly because they become more physically cautious, but it may also indicate that over time people create more defined personal boundaries. Some of the younger people were still willing to take a plunge into the river, although they were quite well informed about pollution (often more so than the adults), while the adults very rarely went swimming at all, though most spoke about having done so ‘in their youth’. No, I wouldn’t swim . . . Rivers aren’t as safe as they were . . . There’s all sorts of things go into the water these days . . . bits and pieces off the fields, chemicals and things. You see it – it gets quite frothy at certain times of the year . . . When we’ve had a lot of rain you get run off from the fields, and it does froth up considerably. (Michael Rule) Not with the pollutants that’s in the river now. That’s why all sensible people have stopped. Of course you’ve still got the youngsters got no more sense. (Arthur Morris)

A similar pattern emerged in the uses of coastal waters. Children and teenagers spoke with enthusiasm about swimming at the seaside, while adults were more dubious about it, although some felt that the dilution offered by the sea, and the ‘disinfectant’ properties of the salt made a considerable difference (see Astrup 1993). The larger hydrological cycle contains sufficient time and distance that recycling is unproblematic. As Dean and Lund put it: – 78 –

Thinking Water Any given liter of water in the world today . . . contains about 50,000 molecules from any given liter of water . . . at the time of Julius Caesar. Caesar, like all men, passed about 750 liters of urine a year, or some 30,000 liters in his lifetime. So to paraphrase Hamlet: Imperious Caesar dead and turned to clay Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. Of Caesar’s water, atoms in the Sink; A many million dwell in every drink. (Dean and Lund 1981:4–5)

At a more immediate level, though, people are anxious about recycled water emerging from modern supply systems. There are some important differences that seem pertinent. Firstly, people are undoubtedly more educated about the pathogens and viruses that may ‘invade’ them. There is also the simple matter of density of population, and less scope to assume that sewage will soon be diluted to the extent that it ceases to be threatening: water is recycled much more quickly, and there is a perceived lack of time and distance in its return to the tap. Perhaps more critical, though, is the reality that people now find themselves confronted with the waste products of strangers, rather than members of the same ‘community’. The meanings attached to water raise very fundamental issues. Cast as the ‘source of life’ and as a metaphor for ‘life time’, water imagery is used in thinking about cycles of life and death, and microcosmic and macrocosmic circulation of various kinds. It is presented as a metaphorical ‘sea’ of life, and as the psychological sea of the unconscious. It provides a way of conceptualising the ‘substance’ of the self, emotional states of being, and social relationships. All of these ideas are linked through a set of ‘scheme transfers’ in which images and meaning flow from one conceptual frame to another. All of them, in one form or another, contain a systemic order that can potentially be ‘disordered’. Thus it is unsurprising that water issues such as droughts, floods and pollution create enormous anxiety: resonating with all of these linked associations, these are literally and meaningfully ‘life threatening’.

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Part III Hydrolatry and Hydrology

–5 – Holy Water The characteristics of water and its visible movement through macro and micro ecosystems are evidently a major source of metaphor in the elaborate cosmological schemes that people construct to describe the ‘order’ of the world and their place in it. Participating in the collective maintenance and development of these, informants along the Stour pointed to ‘family’, ‘school’, ‘the Church’, ‘the media’ and to their own experience as primary sources of knowledge, giving different emphases to the relative importance of these in accord with their age, gender, socio-economic status, and so forth. In discussing cosmologies, two things were clear: that people made untrammelled use of many different – and sometimes conflicting – sets of knowledge and explanation, and that (as with their ideas about ‘community’) contemporary ideas have extremely deep historical roots. Popular narratives of Celtic well worship and biblical ideas about ‘living water’ were as meaningful to many informants as scientific deconstructions of H2O and its ecological significance.1 Just as the social composition of the Stour Valley has absorbed people and technology from various parts of the world, the cosmologies of its current inhabitants are the product of centuries of cultural flows and exchanges. Like individuals, societies do not discard earlier models so much as build on them epigenetically, so that the future is always a discussion with the past. Because the past remains foundational to contemporary ideas in Dorset, it is useful to situate people’s particular schemes in a broad historical context. This also serves to sketch in some of the major tropes of imagery that people employ, and to underline the powerful continuities in the meanings encoded in water over time, despite apparently radical changes in understandings of the world.

Well Beings The majority of people in Dorset have Christian antecedents and, in this demographically mature and conservative rural area, the percentage still attending 1. The observation of an unproblematic co-existence of varying scales and types of explanation is of course not new in anthropology (see Evans-Pritchard 1937)

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Hydrolatry and Hydrology church is higher than the UK average. As with most British people, even those who now eschew religious practices are only the first or second generation in their family to do so, and most received some Christian education as children. Younger people tended to show more interest in pre-Christian religious beliefs, and a large number of informants, while expressing predominantly largely secular worldviews, made frequent reference to general spiritual and moral beliefs in discussing water and meaning. In drawing on historical images of hydrolatry, people in the Stour Valley can cast a wide net. Water gods or water worship are ubiquitous in ancient mythology. Rock art dating back for millennia commonly depicts water beings, and water symbols have been found on many figurines from south-eastern Europe, dating from the period 6000–4000 BC (Bord and Bord 1985:2). Some of the most wellknown deities are associated with alluvial rivers whose floods were critical to the worshippers’ ability to produce food. For example, the Babylonians looked to Aquarius to ensure that the Tigris and the Euphrates fertilised the floodplain annually (Astrup 1993:79). The Egyptian sun god Ra had a similar role regarding the Nile, which also became the focus of a Roman cult of Isis and Sarapsis, whose devotees, according to Wild, ‘most typically valued Nile water as a sign of the prosperity, fertility, and familial well-being offered them . . . by their gods’ (1981:3). The sacred Nile water . . . was the water of the annual inundation. The flood represented a ‘renewal’ or even a ‘rebirth’ of the river. (Wild 1981:28)

There is a discernible homologous pattern in this Durkheimian2 creation of water gods: benevolent male gods such as Aquarius and Ra are generally associated with soil fertility, rain and ‘life bringing’ floods, and some (such as the Phrygian Agdistis) are explicitly described as showering heavenly semen onto the world to make it productive. Schama notes that the myth of Osiris and the Nile was a ‘(literally) seminal fable’ (1996:256).3 With similar homologous consistency, female water gods were responsible for the generation (or regeneration) of human life. For example, the Roman Egeria protected unborn children, and the Greek Aphrodite, the goddess of love and fertility, ‘rose from the waves’ as the Roman Venus. Giblett cites many instances in western literature in which water bodies and swamps

2. See Durkheim 1995 [1912]. 3. As Schama elaborates: ‘Plutarch tells us, Osiris functions as the personification of fecundity: “the whole source and faculty of creative moisture,” and “the Nile . . . the effusion of Osiris”’ (1996: 257). He also notes that ‘quasi-pagan customs of propitiation and sacrifice persisted along riverbanks throughout Europe well into the late Middle Ages. On St. John’s Day, 1333, for example, Petrarch watched women at Cologne rinsing their arms and hands in the Rhine “so that the threatening calamities of the coming year might be washed away by bathing in the river”’ (1996:265–266).

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Holy Water ‘appear as the womb of life, fertile, productive’ (1996:85), and notes the gendered meanings aligned with these: To complete the triangle of troping between the unconscious, the feminine and the swamp, patriarchy has gendered the unconscious as feminine and the conscious as masculine . . . Rivers have been masculined and swamps feminised. (1996:87)

The concept of water as a ‘sacred substance’ is ubiquitous in religious history: cultures located on alluvial plains made sacrifices and propitiary gifts to their river gods. Water has been used in baptisms, libations, holy ablutions, fertility rites, for blessing and protection from the ‘evil eye’ and for mortuary rituals. Water deities, water rituals and ‘healing water’ are found in abundance in Dorset’s local history, and the Stour Valley landscape is rich with archaeological evidence of hydrolatry. Like other Celtae, or Gauls, the Durotriges (water dwellers) of Dorset probably saw rivers and wells as inhabited by – or manifestations of – various kinds of female deities. Rivers all over Europe were named for water goddesses: for example, the Seine (which has one of the few remaining Celtic temples at its source) was sacred to Sequana, and the Marne was named for the Gaulish ‘Divine Mother’ goddesses, the Matronae. In Britain there is the Dee, named after ‘the goddess’ Deva, the Clyde for Clota ‘the Divine Washer’, and the Thames for a deity known as Tamesa or Tamesis (Bord and Bord 1985). In Dorset, the Bride is named for a Celtic goddess called Bridget or Brighid (Knight 1998). The name of the Stour itself, according to Hutchins (1973), is derived from Eas Dur (east water), which became Sdora or Stora. However, it also seems to have carried some connotation of being ‘powerful’ and appears in the Domesday Book as Sture.4 Water was very much a ‘matter of life and death’ in this cosmology. As noted previously, rivers were believed to claim human sacrifices, and this belief has persisted. It was not merely ancient rivers that were deified in this way. Records of Celtic religious practices are minimal5 (though there is no shortage of modern interpretations of these), but it seems that they inhabited a sentient landscape animated by deities, most particularly in wells, rivers, lakes and pools, but also in trees, which were intricately linked with wells.

4. Rivers called the Stour are also found in Kent, Essex, Worcestershire and Staffordshire, and the Stour in Dorset also gives its name to a number of villages, including East and West Stour, Stourpaine, Stour Provost, Sturminster Newton and Sturminster Marshall. Dowr or Dwr, for water, is retained in a number of French rivers: for example, Stura, Doria, Doira, Doire, Dore, Dour. 5. The written records of Celtic practices are sparse but consistent, generally contained in reports by conquering Romans or in the subsequent work of their poets.

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Hydrolatry and Hydrology The Roman poet Lucan [AD 39–65] gives a lurid account of a sacred Celtic grove in Gaul where ‘An abundance of water spouted from dark springs . . . the barbaric gods worshipped there had their altars heaped with hideous offerings.’ (Irvine 1989:31)

Archaeologists have argued persuasively that many prehistoric monuments are connected with water, noting that in many cases avenues link Neolithic stone circles to water sources. Thus the avenue at Stonehenge leads to the River Avon,6 and those at Avebury are close to water sources (Bord and Bord 1985). In Dorset, Irvine (1989) points to a connection between a rare Bronze Age stone circle and the source of the Winterbourne Stream. Richards suggests that these kinds of arrangements reflect a particular conceptual model celebrating the connection between humans and the elements: The relationship between henges and rivers provides a metaphorical conjunction between the natural flowing of water and human movement into the monuments. (1996:313)

With rivers prone to flooding, settlements often clustered around wells and springs, and these offered a particularly powerful homologue, as ‘the exit from the womb of the Earth Goddess’ (Knight 1998:105), or ‘the eye of the Great Mother’ (Bord and Bord 1985:144).7 In this sense they represent a point of contact with an under or ‘inner’ world, the source of life, death and regeneration: ‘the well or spring itself symbolises the womb of the Great Mother, and therefore has a special significance for birth and children’ (Bord and Bord 1985:144). Folkloric records suggest that there were over 8,000 holy wells in Britain and Ireland, although these records are patchy and many wells disappeared as the water tables fell. Rattue (1995)8 lists about thirty known holy wells in Dorset, some recorded in local names such as Holywell, Iwell and Warmwell. The most famous is St Augustine’s well at the foot of Britain’s iconic ancient fertility image, the Cerne Abbas giant. Though commonly described as a Roman Hercules, this notably wellendowed giant is thought to have overlaid pre-Roman Celtic imagery, and the spring beneath the hill is believed to have been a Celtic sacred site.9 6. For those unfamiliar with English geography, Stonehenge is only about twenty miles north-east of the Stour Valley, and Avebury is just a little further north. 7. These are recent reinterpretations, but Bord and Bord point out that: There are folktales which tell how an intruder who has looked into a forbidden well will be punished by the ruin of his eyes, because he has incurred the wrath of the divinity by looking into her eye. (1985:144) 8. See also Whitaker and Edwards 1926. 9. Pugh (1968) cites Bede’s record of the landing of Birinus, the first bishop and apostle, in 635, in which he found the inhabitants to be ‘mostly pagan’. Pugh also notes evidence of Druidic worship at Poxwell, and of phallic rites at the Cerne Abbas site.

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Holy Water The religious importance of ancient wells is supported by archaeological evidence of votive offerings. They have been found to contain pottery, urns, baskets, amber beads and wooden bowls, iron knives, swords, shields, daggers and cauldrons. Hazel nuts have also been found in them, which Bord and Bord (1985) suggest were closely associated with Celtic wells.10 Clearly there was considerable ritual activity, and the dual meanings of water brought powerful associations with both life and death. The historian Livy (59 BC–AD 17) recorded that Celtic warriors decorated human skulls with gold and used them to drink the water at holy wells, and the presence of human and animal bones in many wells raises the possibility that ritual sacrifices were made. The image of wells as a sentient ‘eye of the earth’ also seems to relate to hydromancy – the ritual use of water for the divination of the future and to the use of wells for the laying of curses.11 More often, though, wells seem to have been the focus for rituals concerned with fertility, regeneration and healing. As noted previously, ideas about wholeness (‘haleness’), ‘holyness’ and health (‘hale’) are tightly linked, or, as Mackinlay puts it: Healing and holy have an etymological kinship . . . If the body is healed, it is said to be whole and its owner hale; and if the soul is healed, it is said to be holy . . . we need not wonder that healing wells were, as a rule, reckoned holy wells, and vice versa. (1993 [1893]:86)

The Roman invaders of Dorset shared many Celtic beliefs about water deities, and their holy wells.12 They had a major annual festival, Fontanalia, which still informs 10. ‘In Celtic lore the hazel is clearly associated with wells and water. The spring of Segais, in the Land of Promise, was traditionally the source of the Rivers Boyne and Shannon, the spring also being the source of all knowledge. Hazel trees grew around it, and their nuts fell into the water, producing bubbles of inspiration, or being eaten by the salmon of knowledge’ (Bord and Bord 1985:4). 11. Bord and Bord mention a Devil’s Wishing Well near Bishops Lydeard church in Somerset. At a cursing well at Ffynnon Gybi near Holyhead (Anglesey) the victims’ names were written on paper and hidden under the bank of the well. Another famous cursing well at Llanelian yn Rhos had a guardian through whom a curse could be laid. In the early 1800s this guardian is said to have earned nearly £300 a year (1985:64). 12. Local collections in Dorset include Roman model heads found in wells, as well as votive pins and other offerings: In Dorset, several Roman sites can be identified with the water-cult. In 1875 a number of Roman coins, together with other votive offerings . . . were found at the source of a stream near the village of Horton . . . In 1899 a Roman well was discovered near Winterborne Kingston . . . Among the finds was a small strip of bronze with the crude outline of a hare punched into it. Caesar specifically mentions the hare as being an animal sacred to the Celts and it has been suggested that this bronze fragment was . . . used in the long-forgotten rituals which were practised at the well. (Irvine, 1989:31)

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Hydrolatry and Hydrology modern well dressing rituals. Dedicated to the nymphs that inhabited springs, this involved well decoration, fountains being crowned, and nosegays thrown into springs and pools. The Romans were similarly convinced of the healing power of water, for example identifying the hot springs at Bath (formerly associated with Sulis, the Celtic goddess of healing) with their own healing goddess, Minerva. These female water deities and Romano-Celtic religious associations were subsumed by the tidal wave that was Christianity. Here was a male, sternly patriarchal God, who resided not in nature but in a far-away Heaven, glimpsed only in ‘man-made’ structures and artefacts held to be somehow different from the ritual objects of the idolatrous (hydrolatrous) pagans. Christian clergy tried to dissuade people from other forms of worship, and even in 1018, King Canute, who died at Shaftesbury Abbey near the head of the Stour, had to pass laws forbidding people to worship ‘heathen gods . . . rivers, fountains, rocks and trees’ (Irvine 1989:32).13 Decrees against hydrolatry continued into the twelfth century, but the water cults were not easily suppressed. Astutely, Pope Gregory recommended that holy places should not be destroyed, but simply converted to Christian use. Wells all over Britain and Europe were renamed for Christian saints or martyrs, and water was used by missionaries (many of whom became saints) to baptise converts into the Christian church. As Mackinlay says: ‘the annals of hagiology are full of the connection between saints and springs’ (1993 [1893]:39). Christian festivals were timed to coincide with pagan well-visiting rituals, and chapels and churches were built over holy wells and springs.14 For example, an abbey was constructed at Cerne Abbas, and a chapel built over the sacred spring. Thomas Gerard, writing in the 1620s, said that St Augustine is supposed to have ‘pitched down his Staffe on the Grounde . . . whence immediately flowed a quick Fountaine, that served to baptise manie’ (Irvine 1989:40). The recumbent pagan giant was unable to stand up to this marvellously phallic challenge: the well became known as St Austin or St Augustine’s well, and became an important site for Christian pilgrims in the Middle Ages. Christian conversion of the holy wells in Dorset was thorough: St Lawrence’s Church was built at a holy ‘eye well’ near Sherborne, and major healing well near Wareham was renamed for St Edward the Martyr, a Saxon king. Despite this

13. King Canute of course is famous for trying to hold back the tide, but some writers have suggested that this is a misreading – that his demonstration on the beach was intended to show the futility of opposing the power of water. Given his failure to halt pagan hydrolatry, this may have been quite a heartfelt gesture. 14. Mackinlay (1993) notes that ancient churches were often aligned with the point on the horizon where the sun would rise on its saint’s festival. Pre-Christian holy well ‘charm stones’ were sometimes kept on altars, and harvest festivals, which involved the throwing of water onto participants, retained elements of ancient rain-making rituals.

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Holy Water widespread appropriation, the meanings attached to water maintained great continuity. Wells simply segued from being ‘magical’ into being ‘miraculous’, retaining their power to predict the future or foretell disaster.15 In ‘miraculous’ events they turned objects to stone, sprayed out barley grains, crystals or tiny bones, and, significantly, turned water into wine or produced milk. They also acquired a punitive ability to ‘see’ sins or find out if people were witches, assisting the Church in its ‘moral’ crusade. Their healing powers remained similarly undiminished: ‘Water from a sacred spring was an important ingredient in many . . . herbal infusions, charms and ritual practices’ (Irvine 1989:30). Throughout their Christianisation, fertility remained the most important power in wells and springs, and there are numerous accounts of rituals requiring people to leave offerings (cloths or pins) or circle the well ‘sunways’ – in accord with the sun’s diurnal course. This touches on a persistent belief that it was vital to go ‘with the order of things’ at all rituals, including baptisms, weddings and burials.16 Other pagan beliefs persisted in the imagery used by the Christian Church: the sacred fish – generally interpreted as a phallic/fertility image – was often associated with wells, as were serpents and eels, and pagan symbolism was similarly carried into Christian religious art. Once firmly established, though, the Church grew away from these roots. Much stricter suppression of hydrolatry came with the Reformation in the sixteenth century: penances were imposed for visiting holy wells, and many sites were deliberately destroyed. Still, beliefs in the power of water seeped back in, and Irvine reports that even in the 1880s people at Cerne Abbas maintained ‘that St Austin’s Well . . . still works wondrous cures’. The spring water was considered to be a cure for infertility among women . . . A Victorian journalist . . . made a discreet allusion to this property of the water when he commented ‘We should recommend lady travellers passing through to rest a while and pay a visit [to the well] and they will experience . . . the happiness of having their wish granted within a year.’ If a woman did give birth to a child, it was considered beneficial to dip the new-born infant into the waters of the spring ‘at the time when the sun is first shining on the water’. (Irvine 1989:40)

By the seventeenth century, though, such ideas were largely categorised as folk tales and superstitions. A few major healing sites (such as Lourdes) remained, but

15. Wells had a variety of ways of predicting events, running dry, bubbling, drumming, or even running with blood. 16. To go ‘widdershins’ or ‘widdershine’ was to go against the sun, and was therefore regarded as a violation of the established order of things. This was reputedly done only by practitioners of the Black Arts (Mackinlay 1993:294).

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Hydrolatry and Hydrology centuries of Christianity had severely weakened the location of the spiritual being in nature. More critically, concepts of human physical and spiritual health had diverged. Some wells underwent a secular renaissance of their healing role in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as ‘mineral springs’ and ‘spas’, and Denbigh (1981) notes that while country folk went on making sporadic use of former holy wells, the gentry flooded to newly popular health spas such as Bath and Malvern. This coincided with the burgeoning of ‘science’. In reconceptualising the environment as a product rather than the home or manifestation of God, Christianity had opened the door to Cartesian materialisation, or, as Weber (1952) called it, ‘the disenchantment of the West’. One of the outcomes was a new ‘analysis’ of water in terms of its mineral content and possible medical efficacy. In 1684, for example, scientists from Oxford examined the water from a Stour well at Milton Abbas, which was said to be a purgative; and a sulphurous well near Weymouth aroused interest because it had long been used to cure cattle and dogs of the ‘scabbe and mange’. A health spa was established there in 1830.

Water in the Church Christianity reflected the increasingly patriarchal social organisation that accompanied the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture. It placed spiritual authority firmly in the hands of a male God, while representing nature and its emotive ‘female’ principles as inherently subversive and requiring the control of this authority. As noted by various writers (Delaney 1991, Giblett 1996 and Schaffer 1989), this provided a charter for the ‘dominion’ of nature by male ‘stewards’ who would own and direct economic activities and make nature ‘productive’. In some respects, early Christian representations of God echoed the homologous preChristian male water Gods pouring their ‘fertility’ onto the earth. There are numerous passages in the Bible in which the spirit ‘rains down’ and makes the land productive. In Ezekiel 36:25–26, God promises, ‘I will sprinkle clean water . . . A new heart will I give you, and a new spirit I will put within you’. (Pocknee 1967:18)17

In biblical terms God’s spirit also ‘subdues’ the wild female seas. The parting of the Red Sea offers a perfect homologue of male sexual dominance of women and male dominion over nature, and few images could symbolise the triumph of culture over nature so powerfully as that of God’s son walking on the water. Unlike the mythical 17. Reisner (2001 [1986]) suggests that this underpins a Judaeo-Christian ideal to make the desert productive, which has persisted despite the emergent environmental costs as irrigation has produced widespread drought and salinisation of land.

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Holy Water heroes who had to tussle with Leviathan monsters, Jesus calms the seas and exerts total control, symbolically acculturating the waters of the earth. These religious changes had some important effects on the way in which people constructed the meanings of water. As rituals based on the inherent fertility of wells and springs were discouraged, harvest festivals celebrating the productivity of human labour upon the land rose in importance. Springs were enclosed and channelled into fonts and baptisteries, and water’s meaning as a sentient substance of earthly vitality was replaced by the image of ‘living water’ as the symbol of the spirit. Shifting beliefs were reflected in changing ritual practices: instead of being baptised through immersion in (female) bodies of water, people were ‘sprinkled’ with the (male) holy ‘spirit’. As Goethe put it: A mortal’s soul seems like the water from heaven coming to heaven rising again renewed then to earth descending, ever changing. (From Song of the Spirits over the Water, 1779, in Symmes 1998:123)

Despite the greater emphasis on masculine symbolic fertility, water retained all its associations with transformation and regeneration. The concept of ‘living water’ became intensely powerful in the Christian Church. ‘Living water’ can be understood in four ways . . . in its ordinary literal meaning it denotes spring water, running water as distinct from standing water. In its ritual sense it means baptismal water. In its Biblical sense it denotes God as the fountain-head or source of life. In its Christian sense it symbolizes the Holy Spirit. (Daniélou 1961:42)

Early baptisms took place in the newly appropriated holy wells before being shifted to church fonts, and it is worth noting that the word ‘font’ derives from the Latin fontis, meaning ‘a spring’ (hence Fontanalia), and the Old English functa, which was derived from this. Fonts and baptistries were constructed with taps and channels to ensure that they were supplied with moving water, which, as Schmemann points out, is symbolically crucial: The early Christian prescription is to baptize in living water . . . This is not merely a technical term denoting running water as distinct from standing water . . . it is this understanding that determined the form and theology of the baptismal font . . . The characteristic feature of the ‘baptistry’ was that water was carried into it by a conduit, thus remaining ‘living water’. (1976:164)

As well as keeping the water ‘alive’, this prescription also ensured that it did not stagnate into ‘unclean’ water and contradict baptismal aims to ‘wash away’ the disorder of sin and mortality and replace these with moral purity and immortality. These principles emerged from ancient Levitical law: – 91 –

Hydrolatry and Hydrology In Hebrew thought baptism or cleansing with water and with the Holy Spirit come together . . . Zechariah 13: 1–3 says, ‘On that day there will be opened for the house of David and for the inhabitants of Jerusalem a fountain to purify them from sin and from uncleanness . . . I will remove from the land the unclean spirit.’ (Pocknee 1967:18)

Baptismal water therefore retains its meaning as the medium which provides the loss and dissolution and the rebirth of self. It is seen to ‘liberate’ people from their old life and identity, and the sins (and mortality) of the flesh: From the beginning of the Christian Church, baptism followed repentance, followed a person turning from self . . . Baptism was done as a sign of that change. It represents the dying and rising with Christ . . . going under the water and coming out again. But it has also got associations with the ritual of washing, so there is that link as well, it’s to do with cleansing. (INF6)

There is an important conflation of ideas about sin, death and pollution. Both psychologically and religiously, pollution is death: as Schmemann says rather pessimistically, ‘the world is hopelessly polluted with sin, evil and death’ (1976:26). The purpose of baptism is ‘to be filled’, instead, with the unpolluted purity of the Holy Spirit and thus attain eternal life. Several churches in the area displayed a poster showing a painting of a waterfall and the words ‘I am the Living Water. Come, Drink, Live’. By providing a new identity within the Church, baptism also expresses social as well as a spiritual ‘congregation’. To be infused with the spirit is to share the spirit, and this social meaning emerges clearly in the equally ‘substantial’ ritual sharing of the collective body and blood of Christ. Though this ritual and the use of holy water declined with the Reformation and the Protestant ‘materialisation’ of Christianity, many older churches in Dorset still have a ‘stoup’ at the entrance, which at one time would have contained a bowl of holy water. Though most of the Christians interviewed were non-Catholics, the majority remained dubious about the propriety of actually drinking holy water unless it was – as they tellingly describe it – a ‘matter of life and death’: I don’t think I’d presume to drink it . . . I think if the church had set it aside as holy water I wouldn’t drink it. (INF18) If I was terribly thirsty, and it was a matter of life and death I would. (INF13)

Many felt that water that had been blessed was ‘special’: ‘the spirit would be in it, the holy spirit’. The same woman described how, as a child, ‘when I went to the convent . . . I honestly believed that they . . . had a tap in the wall, a special tap – 92 –

Holy Water they just turned on and this water came straight from heaven!’ (INF15). Even nonChristians used words like ‘aura’ or ‘mythical power’ to articulate their sense that it was somehow empowered by being blessed. Roman Catholic uses of water retain closer links with ancient rituals: for example, funerary rites involve sprinkling holy water onto the grave (sometimes with a sprig of hyssop), and there is – even now – the occasional exorcism. This last concept clearly links with fears about the invasion of the self by an evil, polluting ‘other’, and there is a plethora of popular imagery in which holy water retains its defensive power. There are similarly clear associations between Christian ideas about sin, pollution and death and the everyday fears that people along the Stour expressed about drinking or being immersed in water containing dead animals or dead matter (particularly human sewage). The idea of the ashes of the dead being scattered into water raised similar anxieties: people were comfortable with the idea of sea burials (which coheres with the meaning of the sea as ‘the great sink’ of dissolution and regeneration), but found the prospect of human ashes going into rivers or lakes distasteful. As one woman put it: That’s a very emotive subject, because it’s so much more into the water supply that people are going to be [drinking] . . . I don’t think I’d like it very much. No, I think it would have to be open sea really . . . There would be a public outcry I should think! (INF18)

In the last few decades in Dorset, as in many parts of the UK, there has been a return to earlier Church practices combining pagan and Christian rituals. New Christian movements in which people are ‘reborn’ are increasingly conducting baptisms with complete immersion in bodies of water. Most Baptist churches have long had baptistries permitting this, and – perhaps not coincidentally – they have also led the way in having women priests. It’s just like a little sort of pool, steps down to it . . . It is usually warmed to a certain extent, and usually people are baptised in the summer. [You wear] a white robe to represent purity, and then you go down into the water . . . You actually go right under the water . . . It’s a wonderful way to be brought into a Church really . . . You make this proclamation, that you have repented of all your sins, and that is meant to purify you . . . So you die, you go into the water and then you come out completely pure, and that is your act of faith . . . the sins are forgiven. (INF13)

‘Born again’ Christians are now also choosing to be baptised in the rivers and sea: A lot of people now go to Canford Magna . . . A lot of the churches . . . have public baptisms at Canford Magna on the river, and there’s a few parish churches with baptismals now – it’s not just a Baptist church. (INF18)

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Hydrolatry and Hydrology The reappearance of rituals emphasising the feminine aspects of generation and promulgating a ‘return to nature’ accompanied the rise of the feminist movement, which of course challenged the patriarchal authority of the Church and its appropriation and subjugation of feminine religious symbols. It also coincided with a major expansion in the environmental movement that (although this is often forgotten) was partly generated by modern feminism. Challenging Christian assumptions of dominion over nature,18 this remains politically linked to an idea of ‘order’ based on balance and equality between nature and culture. Liberal Christians today have embraced some of these ideas through groups such as ‘Christian Ecologists’: Their aims are really to bring environmental issues into the Church and through the Church to bring environmental issues to the notice of people outside. So it’s a two-way thing really . . . I suppose of all organisations we should be the most environmentally conscious really, but I think we are too preoccupied with other things. (INF6)

However, the mainstream Christian Church remains attached to the idea of ‘stewardship’ as opposed to ‘partnership’, and is generally a conservative element in modern discourses about environmental management. I think it’s right that human beings, who are a special creation of God, are set apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. I don’t think it is just a matter of a certain level of intelligence. I believe that we are invested with a spirit which has the capability of being immortal. (INF6)

Mixed Blessings Changes in religious thinking along the Stour are revealed in the increasing numbers of younger people for whom modern Paganism and environmental activism hold more appeal than patriarchal Christian religious forms. This is not new: throughout the long dominance of the Church small groups of people, with quiet subversiveness (and sometimes very necessary secrecy), celebrated Beltane and Lammas festivals, and continued to use non-Christian images of nature and fertility. This underground stream surfaced occasionally in rituals that were either Christianised or simply popularised. Thus the unsubtle fertility symbolism attached

18. Davies argues that ‘For Christian theology, distinctions between nature and culture are inappropriate’ (1994:31) because all life contains a moral dimension and nature is a creation of God and thus inseparable from Him. He adds that in Christian theology ‘it is practically impossible not to see humanity as central to the world of nature’ (1994:47). However, this does not conflict with the idea of a continuum of nature and culture, or with an imbalance in their perceived importance.

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Holy Water to Maypole dancing was integrated into general May Day celebrations, and the ‘green man’, Morris dancing and other ancient ritual practices were rendered as ‘harmless’ folklore (though some might describe Morris dancing in other terms). Alongside efforts to establish greater gender equality and ‘equal rites’19 for nature, these alternative rituals have undergone a renaissance. Many new sub-groups have emerged: some (environmental organisations for example) are putatively secular, although their moral discourses often have a religious subtext. Druid and Celtic revival groups, meanwhile, have focused on the creation of alternative forms of community and a more collective religious interaction with Mother Earth. There is a considerable flow of ideas between these groups, and their interests often overlap. Most share a concern about the effects of ‘man’s dominion’ over the earth, and seek greater harmony and reconciliation with nature. Many believe that spirituality should be relocated in nature, and the landscape re-sanctified. Even the most pragmatic of conservationists implicitly proposes a more equal and holistic relationship between nature and culture and thus, at a symbolic level, a more even balance between feminine and masculine principles. Although some post-modern New Age discourses have tended to emphasise a more individual vision of human– environmental relations, most ‘alternative’ groups – religious or secular – observe that such a reconciliation also involves new forms of ‘community’ at a social level. The new Pagans draw imaginatively on Dorset’s hydrolatrous past. At Cerne Abbas the holly (‘holy’) tree beside the holy well often bears ribbons and other remnants of well dressings. This practice is becoming popular all over Britain.20 Contemporary well dressings typically revive Celtic practices and those from the Roman Fontanalia: people decorate trees around the well, make bowers and put votive offerings – often garlands – into the water. Mercifully, they have eschewed making human or animal sacrifices, but some well dressings have become very elaborate, with detailed pictures (often religious and sometimes Christian images) made from flower petals, shells and pebbles. The participants may not describe themselves as Pagans: many see it simply as an imaginative expression of history, or an appealing artistic expression of community identity. Nevertheless, it suggests a somewhat ‘alternative’ vision of nature and spiritual being. Few of the people interviewed in the Stour Valley were wedded exclusively to any particular religious or scientific cosmology, and none expressed fundamentalist views. Some of the scientists were firm atheists and dismissed ‘water spirits’

19. I believe that the writer Terry Pratchett deserves credit for this perspicacious phrase, which so precisely draws attention to the relationship between power, ritual and gender. 20. In 2003, for example, there were seventy-six well dressings in Derbyshire alone (East Derbyshire District Council 2003: website http://www.ne-derbyshire.gov.uk/sys_upl/templates/ StdRight/StdRight_disp.asp?pgid=1008&tid=97).

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Hydrolatry and Hydrology and suchlike as ‘rubbish’ and ‘imagination’, but most had still had their children baptised. The majority simply took a fairly fluid position in an inclusive postmodern cosmological scheme that, though dominated by scientific ideas and Christian beliefs, seemed increasingly influenced by various alternative worldviews. Depending up on their age, gender, educational background, socio-economic class and other more subtle factors, people appeared to draw freely on different idioms to explain and evaluate the world, typically foregrounding particular aspects of these in different contexts. The consistency of the meanings encoded in water enables an unproblematic flow of ideas from one cosmological explanation to another. In each transition, water retains its core meanings as the source of ‘life’ and of the spiritual and social ‘essence’ of human being. In common with the Celtic ‘water as generative source’, and the ‘water as spiritual life’ of the Christians, alternative cosmologies also have a clear concept of ‘living water’. Along the Stour these were variously interpreted as the general ‘life forces’ contained in water, as ‘spiritual forces’, the ethereal ‘energies’ of the universe, or as more pragmatic ‘sort of electrical energies’ or ‘positive and negative ions’, suggesting the influence of a scientific cosmology. Wells and springs remain the most crucial source of ‘living water’: I go along with the ley-line theory that there are special points of high energy and that often there are wells in these points, and therefore the water is charged with more energy than other sources of water . . . I think it’s probably a sort of neutral sort of energy. I don’t see it as particularly holy: I just see it as a strong form of energy – I don’t even know if it’s spiritual energy . . . I believe it’s more physical than a lot of New Age sort of cosmic ideas . . . I do think it’s more spiritual than electricity or . . . closer to the spiritual than the physical I suppose . . . Water is basically a good conductor . . . to put it in a mundane way. (INF30) To me it has hasn’t got to come from a dirty font and from dubious bottles, or whatever: you’ve got to see it come out of the ground, you’ve got to have the spirit in it as it bubbles up. (INF7)

One local farmer, well known locally for his water divining skills,21 was at a loss to explain how the water acted upon the hazel twig or copper rod in his hands, but he drew a relationship between this ability and his own life forces: 21. Neighbours described Ron Harris’s water divining abilities in glowing terms: He can do it . . . he’ll do it with a hazel twig . . . That’s the way we dug the six tests [boreholes]. He walked around and stuck in six . . . I said ‘I fancy a place’, and it was so dry that at sixteen feet we were bringing up dust, where I thought it would be . . . Where he’d been, water was gushing up all over the place. We found water in them all [the places he’d marked]. (Cleo and Chris Campbell)

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Holy Water I really don’t know. I can assure you that it isn’t a send-up. When you are holding that [twig] I feel nothing more than the stick moving in my hands. It doesn’t affect me in any other way . . . It’s just in my case, I come to a source, it activates the divining rod, it turns up . . . I had a stick so tight once that it actually twisted and distorted because it was trying so hard to turn, so it is real. But what causes it I never really . . . It’s just something that happens . . . If it stops happening, will it be a sign my number’s up? (Ron Harris)

The ‘liveness’ of the water was consistently presented as being dependent upon its freedom from ‘unnatural’ substances: When you see factories spewing out chemicals into rivers, that’s death in a way, that’s corruption and death. It literally kills the water, the river. (Sue Degan)

A number of people reported enacting mini-rituals at springs, wells and pools. Most were ‘casual’22 rituals – tossing a coin into wishing wells, and enjoying the legends and ‘superstitions’ that cling to water places: Well of course I chuck a coin in wishing wells, I wouldn’t walk by one without, especially if they collected for charity. (Tom Suttle)

The wishing well at Upwey, near Dorchester, remains popular, though the advertising literature makes little reference to the fact that, located in a garden close to the church, it is almost certainly an ancient holy well. Nonetheless, many people ‘do the ritual’ of filling a glass with water, taking a sip and throwing the remainder over their shoulder into the well. People also described various private rituals that drew freely on an array of traditional examples: I did baptise my oldest [child] myself in . . . an old disused abbey/church thing we found with some water in it . . . I was just out for a walk with a friend and we found this . . . derelict church there and we just used the water that was there . . . I’m not a Christian, but it seemed like a nice way of celebrating. (INF30) I get turned on by water in a spring or in a fountain – I sometimes drink – this is almost a ritual thing, if you’ve got an old well head or anything, and it’s got any form of tap, I will turn it on . . . I normally then just lean over and put my head under it . . . It’s ritual because it’s a spring. (INF7)

Some of the reported rituals drew on pre-Christian practices. The miller’s grandson at Sturminster Newton Mill, now working at the museum there, recalled one such ceremony: 22. Informants themselves defined these kinds of rituals as casual, but in anthropological terms, of course, any behaviour that persists so determinedly through centuries of change is hardly a casual matter.

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Hydrolatry and Hydrology There is . . . a lady who comes down here every year . . . and scatters some flowers on the water here in memory of her husband . . . She comes down and puts a little wreath on the water . . . I’ve only met her once, I’ve been aware that she’s been down here almost each year, because when she puts the flowers into the water here they do tend to stay in the mill pond, so even if I come down here two or three days after she’s been . . . I can still see the remnants of her wreath or bunch of flowers floating on the millpond there. The currents mean that things tend to go round and round and round . . . it’s just one of those things she likes to do to commemorate her husband’s death . . . I can understand it. I think I’d be pleased to think somebody thought that much of me. (Peter Loosmore)

Some older public rituals have been revived too: There’s a fascinating belief in water tied up in Shaftesbury, because Shaftesbury has no water of its own, because of the hill . . . The water comes from Enmore Green, and every year they used to have a ceremony . . . the people of Shaftesbury had to go to Enmore Green to ask for the water . . . They had this thing called the Bysant, which was like a peculiar-shaped thing on top of a pole, and when they revived [the ceremony] . . . it was adorned with ribbons and things, and there was a lot of Morris dancing, that sort of thing. (Sue Jackson)

All of these rituals focus in some way on the perceived ‘life’ or regeneration offered by water and its spiritual energies. Several informants drew attention to the ties between water and larger cycles of death and rebirth, or suggested that wells give access to the distant past as well as the future. One mentioned the importance attached to the immense length of time involved in the creation of ‘living water’: [Spring water] I want it to taste different: it would be quite interesting to me if it tasted of sulphur, or . . . some sort of deep geothermal taste to it . . . For instance, Bath waters – I’ve tasted that – it’s gorgeous . . . not only is it Roman water, from Roman Baths, but it is the water that fell on the Mendip Hills at the end of the last ice age . . . Our successors, if you want human beings to be on the planet in 10,000 years time, they will presumably be drinking at Bath the water that’s falling on the Mendip Hills now. (Rodney Legg)

Healing Water There is a similarly consistent relationship between the ‘vitality’ imputed to water and its capacity for healing. Contemporary explanations of the healing power of water matched particular cosmological stances, creating both religious and secular explanations: Because I am Christian and I would know that it’s been blessed. It’s probably had something to do with one of the saints . . . To me it would be purified, not as purified

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Holy Water through carbon filter, but purified by the spirit . . . I think I would feel that it was making me better . . . It’s since I turned back to the Church, in the last eighteenth months . . . I have got better . . . I feel it’s all through becoming a Christian, and the Holy Spirit . . . Like having a fix! (INF15) I would hope [spring water] would fill me with some sort of positive energy . . . I think it would probably increase the body’s ability to heal . . . I think a lot of illnesses are to do with when that energy becomes depleted, which comes back to chemicals . . . and what we take in, depletes that energy, and that’s why it makes us ill . . . Basically they are alien sources and the body has to work to deal with it . . . I think [spring water] can do it in other ways, because if you feel it’s spiritual that alone gives you a different sort of energy. (INF30) I am sure many of these sources of water contain all sorts of minerals and we know very well that minerals have effects on our bodies . . . It makes a lot of plain common sense to me that there should be healing properties recognised within sources of water – springs and wells and so on. (Peter Loosmore)

A particularly popular place for ‘taking the waters’ is the famous garden at Stour Head in North Dorset where the spring that becomes the Stour emerges in a Renaissance-style grotto.23 Observation of the steady flow of visitors to the grotto was telling: many drank from the bubbling pool, and comments about its positive effects on their health were common, ‘maybe your cough will go now that you’ve had some’ being a typical response.

The Fountain of Knowledge The grotto at Stour Head also brings to the surface another important set of meanings attached to water that came with its symbolic conversion to Christianity. This is the use of water as a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge, encapsulated in an image of ‘the fountainhead’ as a source of wisdom. Beliefs about the Holy Spirit hinge upon an idea of consciousness: the assumption that spiritual knowledge and wisdom permit conscious action, controlling the unconscious ‘animal’ drives of ‘nature’. Biblically, God is represented as the Fountainhead or Source. As Schama points out, the fluvial literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was obsessed with images of the Fountainhead as the ‘ fons sapientiae: the mystically revealed union of goodness, beauty, and wisdom, (1996:267). Just 23. The grotto at Stour Head was not originally the start of the river: with a higher water table this was slightly higher up the valley at Six Wells Bottom, at the top of which is a well head called St Peter’s Pump, but this is dry now, and an underground culvert gathers the tiny springs together and carries them to the grotto.

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Hydrolatry and Hydrology as Renaissance literature drew on ancient myths to add mystique to this imagery, so too did architecture. The gardens, temples and grottos at Stour Head imitate classical landscapes with carefully staged pathways to illumination. In fact Schama’s description of the Villa Albrandini at Frascati could well describe the grotto at Stour Head, with its tufa walls and pebbled floor, its nymph and protective River God: From the middle of the sixteenth century these carefully programmed progresses increasingly featured a journey toward a primal Source or . . . a Spring of Initiation, concealed in a cave or grotto. Such places were sited at the symbolic boundary between the visible and invisible worlds, and often guarded by grotesque or gigantic figures, frequently in the form of reclining river-gods. Within, the pilgrim would step over polished pebbles and experience the dim iridescence of an aqueous or submarine world. Walls of volcanic tufa would give the impression of penetrating inside the world’s crust . . . At the center, a fountain personification of bathing deities Venus or Diana would reveal themselves as the Source of Wisdom, the Fountainhead. (Schama 1996: 275–276)

Thus the Renaissance underlined an idea that as well as providing life and health, the ‘living spring’ was also the source of spiritual knowledge and wisdom. This meshed with the beginning of a discourse about ‘consciousness’ and rationality that increasingly enabled Western cultures to set themselves apart from ‘unconscious’ nature, and culminated in the resounding cogito ergo sum of the Enlightenment. However, there was a price on this ‘stream of consciousness’: the concept of a ‘conscious mind’ in opposition to ‘base instinct’ placed the responsibility for moral behaviour squarely on human shoulders. The Fountainhead carried not only the Holy Spirit and enlightenment; it also carried morality and the possibility of conscious sin and ‘impure’ thoughts and acts. In becoming the substance of the Holy Spirit, water acquired a role as a metaphor of moral consciousness – of ‘purity’ and immortality, with the pollution of sin and ‘impurity’ bringing eternal damnation. Thus evaluations of water came to bear a specifically moral dimension: the ‘living water’ of the ‘high’ mountain spring offered illumination and spiritual rebirth, while the impure ‘low’ water of the swamp was polluted with ‘corruption’, signifying both moral disorder and death. This powerful set of meanings ensures that even the most pragmatic evaluations of its quality carry very weighty moral baggage. As Schmemann says, with a whiff of fire and brimstone: In the Christian worldview, matter is never neutral. If it is not ‘referred to God’, i.e. viewed and used as a means of communion with Him, of life in Him, it becomes the bearer and locus of the demonic. (1976:48)

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Holy Water So cleanliness has ‘substantial’ reasons for being close to Godliness: Purity and holiness are tied up . . . all water is holy really. (INF13).

In the Dorset study a small exercise was conducted with some of the younger participants (ages 8–16)24 to explore their ideas about the relationship between water quality and morality, They were asked to visualise and describe the qualities of water in Heaven and – if there were any – in Hell. Alhough quite a few of them professed not to believe in ‘that religious stuff’, the results were imaginative and consistent. Heavenly water was invariably clear, clean and pure, issuing from beautiful springs and fountains, and there was an abundance of water, streams, rivers, waterfalls and lakes. In Hell, there was very little water or none at all, because ‘they wouldn’t have the luxury of water’: any measly trickles that could be found were ugly, filthy and polluted, and often contained creatures that would kill and eat humans. As a footnote to the above discussions, these are the children’s visions of water in Heaven and Hell: Water in Heaven There would be clear spring water, sparkling, glittering, like a river of diamonds. It would be all the colours of the rainbow, floating with gold. It would be diamond clear, light and warm for swimming in. It would be very clean and golden, warm in Autumn, cool in Summer. It would defy gravity. It would feel refreshing, relaxing, cool, like cotton, Cool and soft to drink, it would taste fresh, sweet and clean, like milk It would smell fresh, like soap, you can smell the cleanliness of it. It would smell of flowers, grapes, apples, peaches or bananas. It would sound like bells or crystals dropping from the sky. It would be a quiet river, and you can hear the wind. There would be a fountain and a lake, and a circle of water. It would be fresh and cold, from a waterfall, and you could drink it. There would be a clear stream, with trees and fish and ducks, It would be clean and calm, with fish that would let you touch them. There would be lakes, rivers and waterfalls, with flowers at the side and there would be sun. It would be still and silent, calming.

24. Work was done with a number of groups at Wyke Primary School, aged 8–10, and with children aged from 12 to 16 at Sturminster High School.

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Hydrolatry and Hydrology Water in Hell Black, very dirty, thick with mud and oozing waste. Hot and red, burning lava, boiling, fire, or freezing cold, brown and petroly. The smell would be horrible, like poo, gruesome, like a sewer or cow dung. It would smell polluted, like burning coal. It would feel like mud, clammy and dirty, slimy, it would come from a swamp. It would taste like meat and blood, sour, like a bad curry. It would taste like mud and salt, like stale milk. It would sound like a pot of bubbling gunge. It would make loud sounds and contain evil fish; it would be unsafe. It would come thudding down from the sky, permanently falling. It might contain piranha and sharks, or dead fish. It would have germs in it. It would be used for killing.

Hydrolatry Springs Eternal In the evolution of religious cosmologies, there are important consistencies and changes in the meanings of water. The Durotriges lived in intimate collusion with nature, locating male and female gods in trees and springs. They revered water as the great generative force emerging from Mother Earth imbued with healing and holy powers. In the transitions to modern Christianity that marched in with the Roman cohorts, nature was steadily de-sanctified and in a sense dehumanised, losing its projected sentience and its dense population of deities. God masculinised and evaporated from the wellsprings of the earth, taking up residence in a nebulous Heaven from which He showered benevolent male fertility onto human economic activities. After a while, though, even this rain stopped, and He focused more on spiritual and intellectual matters, pouring Enlightenment from inside the technology of the Fountainhead, and offering – mainly to men – spiritual rebirth on a higher plane, away from base earthly fecundity. Bubbling up irrepressibly from beneath these Christian visions, though, are older ideas about the ‘forces’ of Nature which demonstrate that even if ancient visions have evaporated in the harsh glare of ‘science’, hydrolatry is alive and well in the English cultural landscapes of the twenty-first century.

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Secular Hydrolatry

–6– Secular Hydrolatry The Aesthetics of Water The complexities of religious cosmologies sometimes obscure the way that they employ the formal characteristics of water to conceptualise human lives as part of larger systems and enable people to articulate concepts of order and disorder. This section explores some of the secular frameworks with which people in Dorset think about water and what it means. However, these are not without spiritual content, and the first, an ‘aesthetic’ vision of water, is quite clearly a bridge between the secular and the sacred. As outlined in Part II, the sensory stimuli offered by water ensure that human interactions with it are often pleasurable, imaginative and mesmerising. There is a direct relationship between sensory experience and the subjective aesthetic responses that people have to water. Morphy defines aesthetics as: The effect of the physical properties of objects on the senses and the qualitative evaluation of those properties. Aesthetics is concerned with the qualities of things along particular physical dimensions, such as softness and hardness, dullness and brilliance, and so on, or in relation to formal criteria such as balance or harmony . . . [it] is something that exists independently of a particular culture. But the qualitative perception of sensation, and its interpretation and evaluation, varies according to context and culture. (1994:258)

Though cultural rules about what is aesthetically pleasing or displeasing differ considerably,1 each is a vision of what constitutes order. An object or activity is beautiful if it accords with an ideal of how things ‘should’ be. Although people often talk about aesthetic pleasure in terms of sensory or emotional experiences, it is, in effect, an agreement between these and conscious, intellectual engagement with the world – a coherence between subjective and objective experience.2 Such

1. This discussion builds on a long-running debate in anthropology as to whether aesthetics are cross-cultural (cf. Coote and Shelton 1992, Morphy 1994) 2. Schama picks up on this indirectly in his description of Francesco Colonna’s work the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Dream of Poliphilus), published in Venice in 1499:

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Hydrolatry and Hydrology consonance or ‘rightness’ gives satisfaction and pleasure and – crucially – encourages reverence. As Haslam says, water is numinous, ‘inspiring awe, as if in the presence of God’ (1991:281). So it is unsurprising that water in its ‘proper’ form – as a ‘living’ spring or fountain, as a mesmerising river or liberating sea – is considered as an object of beauty, and it is equally predictable that, polluted or disordered in any way, it becomes ugly and abhorrent. Aesthetic enjoyment depends, to some extent, on people having the luxury of time with which to engage with their surroundings in a relaxed and receptive mode. The fact that the particular qualities of water encourage affective engagement may explain why it is central to so many recreational activities. All recreational activities are – intrinsically – ‘outside’ the constraints of domestic or commercial life, allowing people to experience water more meditatively or sensually. Along the Stour painters sit – as Constable did – beside mills and bridges, trying to ‘capture’ the sparkling water. Edward Dawson, a local artist, tried to articulate why he found water aesthetically enthralling, and what he was trying to communicate:3 It’s the colour . . . a beautiful beautiful clear cobalt blue sky, but the reflection [in the river] is about two tones deeper . . . It’s wonderful, then you start to get the breeze which just ripples the surface, and that’s always changing . . . it certainly has a magic and a fascination . . . And these wonderful aquatic plants and the reflections . . . it’s an impossibility, but one tries . . . It’s always a challenge . . . even if you get it all wrong and make a mess it’s still fascinating. I think what I try to paint – this world is full of misery – and I think I am trying to get back, and put onto canvas . . . something of the beauty and the poetry that exists for all of us.

However, while Dawson was passionate about the beauty of water, he was equally certain that if it were polluted, he wouldn’t feel the same about it. He made an explicit connection between pollution, evil and death. I don’t think I’d want to paint it quite as much . . . it would have an unclean, tainted feel about it. There’s enough taint in this world anyway.

The Stour has been a source of inspiration to poets for many centuries, and many new poems have been written recently as part of the arts and environmental group Common Ground’s project, Confluence, which encouraged people to recount oral

The fountains of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili contrived an affect that was somehow both erotic and philosophical, animal and ethereal. And it was this irresistible combination that cast a spell on the landscape architects of the Roman and Tuscan villas of the mid and late sixteenth century. (Schama 1996:274) 3. Sadly, Edward Dawson died in 1999.

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Secular Hydrolatry histories, write ballads and compose music about the Stour.4 Many articulated ideas about the river as a metaphor of time and transformation and were highly successful in linking the social aspects of the river with an aesthetic appreciation of it.

Walking Along Water In Dorset, as elsewhere, walking alongside the river is the activity through which the majority of people interact recreationally with water: [People] find it very relaxing, it’s quite engrossing, and all the sort of mystery with it as well. I think it holds so much life even though you can’t actually see it on the surface. (Clare Freeman)

The most popular ‘water walk’ of all is the garden at Stour Head. The estate, covering 3000 acres, is now run by the National Trust, and receives over 250,000 visitors a year. The gardens were created in the 1740s by Henry Hoare, the son of a wealthy banker. He was inspired by classical paintings and a tour of the Italian villas, and his gardens, described by Horace Walpole as ‘one of the most picturesque scenes in the world’ (Roscoe et al. 1952:16), became a model for a whole landscape style in Britain, influencing the work of Capability Brown and many other designers. Like the Italian villas with their ‘paths to Enlightenment’, Stour Head is arranged so that walkers can stroll from one poetic vista to another, via classical temples decorated with images of ancient myths and deities, to its fons sapientiae. Around the perfectly formed lakes, exotic trees serve as a reminder of earlier sacred groves that go, as Schama says ‘directly to the heart of one of our most powerful yearnings: the craving to find in nature a consolation for our mortality’ (1996:15) Stour Head thus draws attention to the meanings that are often subsumed in more pragmatic types of engagement with water. People ‘get the message’ that it is a life story from the spring head to the lake, at which there is either respite (at the Spread Eagle Pub) or – perhaps – more permanent dissolution: Stour Head is a journey – it’s a journey round through the ages, through this wonderful landscape round the lake . . . The beginning of the garden . . . the place of birth would be Six Wells, where the actual spring rises . . . and this [the grotto] is where you replenish life . . . When you got to the end of the journey, I suppose it’s the Spread Eagle, when you are weary and you go and have a rest. And there’s the church yard there as well! (Fred Hunt)

4. Common Ground is a highly innovative arts and environment group. Their work on the Stour produced many creative outputs including Clifford and King 1996 and King and Clifford 2000.

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Hydrolatry and Hydrology Undertaking this metaphorical journey, people walk quietly around the lakes or sit thinking, painting or reading on the many benches facing the water. In the grotto, a poem inscribed on a stone in front of the crystal clear pool, requests reverence: Nymph of the grot these sacred springs I keep And to the murmur of the waters deep Ah spare my slumbers, gently tread the cave And drink in silence or in silence lave.

Awed, people exhort children ‘not to put your grubby fingers in it’, whisper respectfully or sit and meditate. Many scoop sips from the spring as if taking communion. Their responses suggest that this painstakingly constructed place offers a satisfying ‘rightness’. As the present estate manager said: The beauty of the place, the scale of it, the design, the naturalness, whatever . . . it’s uncanny how many people have definitely been moved by the place, spiritually or emotionally moved, in such a way that they do switch on, they do become in tune with what they are looking at. Lots and lots and lots of folk – you regularly hear reports, especially in the grotto – folk just break down in tears, it’s just so moving . . . And on those moments people are definitely seeing. They are stopping in the busyworld, and it is like a little window, where they are just seeing . . . seeing there’s something bigger, there’s a different side to life. (John Turner)

The power of Stour Head lies in the fact that the whole landscape poem is constructed around the little stream of ‘living water’ pouring into the crystal-clear pool in the grotto. Again, as John Turner put it: You can stand by a river midstream, or midway through its life cycle, and there is something very different about Stour Head being a captive area of the start of it all . . . You know that no-one’s dumped anything in it further upstream because you are at the head of the stream . . . ‘this is pure, this is new, this is straight from the ground’.

If the spring were to dry up, and Stour Head were to become reliant upon mains water, he felt ‘that whole dimension of it being the original, the source – all of that dimension would be lost . . . I believe it would lose out, lose something’. A retired Head Gardener agreed: It’s natural water. I think if you filled it up with a tap, people would feel completely different about it. You couldn’t put tapwater in here – it wouldn’t be the same – that beastly fluoridy muck! (Fred Hunt)

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Secular Hydrolatry For Fred Hunt, the idea of the place without water seemed like the end of the world: This water doesn’t stop on the driest of summers . . . You just cannot imagine Stour Head without the springs . . . If Stour Head did dry up, then I don’t think there’s much more . . . I think I’d be very generous in saying that the earth didn’t have much more than ten years – a lot less, to survive . . . I think if Stour Head dried up then quite honestly I think everywhere else would.

The prospect of the water at Stour Head being polluted was equally worrying, and great anxiety was created a few years ago when overflows of sewage resulted in blooms of blue-green algae. The National Trust promptly invested in better waste management systems, and has since eschewed the use of fertilisers on the surrounding land (and encouraged its tenant farmers to do likewise). Now the major anxiety is that, with the falling water tables, the spring could fail, taking the ‘spirit’ of the place away from the gardens. The Stour Valley is fortunate in having, at its source, a classic fountainhead of ideas about aesthetics, spirituality and meaning, and the influence of this tradition is apparent all the way down the river. For example, in Milton Abbas, a couple who converted a farm into a religious retreat spent ten years creating a waterscape of springs and streams, lakes and fountains. Carefully planted trees surround these, and benches are placed by the water for quiet reflection: It is calming and healing, and we put in . . . seats in various places where people can sit and just sort of be. (Edward Jacson)

At Whistley Water, near Milton-on-Stour, Cleo and Chris Campbell constructed a series of lakes for sport fishing, but also because it is ‘lovely in all seasons – you get the full moon coming up and then you see the swan going along . . . and everything sparkles’ (Cleo Campbell). All down the Stour, people described myriad ways of finding a sense of order through aesthetic interaction with water. Downriver from the lofty aspirations of Stour Head, the picturesque mill sites along the Stour make the power of moving water visible and emphasise the river as a symbol of human life and time: Watermills have quite literally formed the living heart of the countryside for hundreds of years. Like the slow, regular ticking of an old clock, their cogs and gears . . . have charted both the seasons and the centuries. (Sturminster Newton Mill 1999:3)

The old mills also offer a romantic vision of a slower and socially ‘simpler’ era in which ‘real’ communities lived in greater harmony with their environment and each other, and they ‘make space’ for relaxed engagement with the river: – 107 –

Hydrolatry and Hydrology The mill provides a unique opportunity to journey back to a simpler time, where you and your family can discover the age-old secrets of harnessing natural power amid the natural beauty of the real Dorset countryside. Set back from the modern world on the banks of the picturesque river Stour, the Mill also provides a renowned haven for painters, poets, and for those who wish to spend a lazy hour or two picnicking or fishing, walking, or just soaking up the atmosphere. (Sturminster Newton Mill 1999:4)

Gone Fishing The other most popular form of engagement with water is fishing, and the banks of the Stour are lined with anglers ‘reading the river’ through the delicate antennae of their fishing lines in a different kind of connection ‘with nature’. Angling now rates as the most popular recreational activity in the UK, attracting millions of people5 (mostly men) to sit for hours along lakesides and river banks in the hope of catching tiny fish which at the end of the day they will release back into the river. Fishing clubs often go to great lengths to find sufficient funds to build their own lakes. For example, in Gillingham the local club bought an old brick works on the Lodden (a tributary to the Stour), constructed a lake and stocked it with large fish to be caught over and over again. The reasons anglers give for this dedication are usually pragmatic. Some focus on the excitement of ‘the game’: I just love the water . . . I do sea angling, deep sea angling, lake fishing, river fishing, when I’ve got the time . . . on my days off I try and go fishing. You sit there all day and maybe not catch anything, or all day and catch two fish, and you throw them back . . . It’s going back to our hunter-gatherer days isn’t it? Like the hunt, the chase, the stalk. You see a chub down there, and you are hooked. You say ‘I’m going to get that chub’, and you try all lures and baits and that chub keeps swimming up, gradually towards you, and at the end of the day, if you’ve got it, you are one happy angler. And then you put it back in the water. You take the classic photograph, to pose like this, to show the fishing club, or your wife, or your kids. Or anybody else you could . . . yeah. Right, the next day: ‘I saw his mate alongside, and he must be about a pound and half bigger than that one’, so here you go again . . . The bigger fish, the cleverer fish . . . There’s specimen hunters and then there’s the pure carp man who’ll stay on the lake watching his buzzers for days on end, and not get a bite. (David Jones) It’s the instinct isn’t it – it’s a hunting instinct really, and also you face the elements, you are one to one really. (Tom Suttle)

5. There are reputedly more than three million anglers in the UK, and, according to the Environment Agency, sales of rod licences have increased by over 40% since 1993.

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Secular Hydrolatry Others draw attention to the opportunities to see aquatic wildlife: See that branch over there . . . normally . . . the kingfishers dive off there, go off that branch over there and try and eat the fish over there . . . You’ve got all the wildlife, the coots and moorhens, and if we’re lucky we might see an otter. (Arthur Morris)

For many it is about finding meditative silence: ‘it’s quiet and it’s peaceful and there’s no nagging women’ (INF91) (or, presumably, familial demands). Certainly there are very few women anglers, and many of the fishermen interviewed noted (some rather sheepishly) that their wives or partners were at home with the kids. ‘Our fishing club, we have about 450 members . . . a few women . . . I don’t suppose there’s more than a dozen’ (Tom Suttle). Despite the pragmatism of these responses, angling seems to attract a particular reverence, suggesting some powerful symbolic undercurrents. Men spend vast sums6 on the material culture deemed necessary, and these artefacts are often discussed in terms that suggest a degree of fetishisation. The creation of lures for fly fishing is frequently depicted as a specialised art form, and the design of flies to mimic the insects that entice fish has more than a hint of sympathetic magic about it. Fishing is a highly ritualised activity from beginning to end: the careful packing of the objects required; the thoughtful choosing of sites; the precise laying out of nets and bait. There seems to be considerable aesthetic satisfaction in the steady cast of the line and the soft splash of the lure, the skilful reading of the currents, and the ritualised capture and release of life from the river. It is also an imaginative leap into the water – ‘You’ve got to think like a fish’ (Arthur Morris). A good fishing spot is the place you fancy really . . . you all have your favourite spots . . . It’s quiet and it’s peaceful . . . [it’s] just contentment I suppose. Sooner that than being in the pub drinking beer . . . I’d sooner be sat on the river here, quiet, and watching. (Arthur Morris)

Fishing provides a highly intimate interaction with the river and its environs, through which anglers achieve a connection to place. Fishing club maps reflect this detailed engagement, encompassing not only basic information about riparian landowners and the boundaries of negotiated fishing rights, but also closely observed knowledge about the river and its surrounds: sloe bushes, patches of thick reed, otter sanctuaries, drainage gullies and withy beds.7 They map old and new landmarks: gas pipes, bridges and tracks, ‘the blacksmith’ and local pubs. They record good fishing sites and snippets of club history: deep holes where larger fish

6. A basic rod will cost a few hundred pounds, but specialised poles can cost several thousand. 7. A withy bed is a marshy area overgrown with willows.

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Hydrolatry and Hydrology have been caught; places where fishing records have been broken; and the names of record-breaking anglers. There is also a deeper layer of history marked here and there: a place where a local man committed suicide, a roman mosaic, a reed bed where an angler’s grandfather collected reeds for thatching, and long-disused field names such as ‘Little Starving’.

Messing About in Boats For many people few pleasures can compare with those involved in ‘messing about in boats’. Just as swimming immerses people in the meanings of water, sailing and canoeing draw them into an excellent metaphor of a balance or tension between nature/id and culture/ego – between helpless submission to and control over the vagaries of wind, tide and current. I’m lucky enough to live down here . . . in a house which is very close to the water . . . and I spend a lot of my time on it. I don’t fish in it very much, but I sail around in it quite a lot . . . So that’s the attraction of it to me . . . the process, just being at one with the elements I suppose, at one with nature. (Richard Lacey)

There is also a frisson from flirting with the ‘elemental’ forces of water as a matter of life and death. You don’t actually think about the danger when you are in the canoe. If you go in, and you are being sort of munched up by the white water . . . You don’t think about it at all, till you get out, it’s quite odd, and then you go ‘Oh my word!’ When you are in the canoe, I suppose it’s challenging yourself . . . it is about whether you can . . . actually survive it. (Charlie Smith)

Boats provide a ‘close-up’ of water’s characteristics: its changes from tranquil glide to bubbling rapids, and the powerful tides and currents of the sea. It requires a continuous and close reading of conditions, a focus upon rapid changes in the water: You never get taught how to read the river, but . . . it just comes naturally. You see things and that’s all you think about – your eye is totally on the river . . . looking out for trees and danger spots. (Charlie Smith)

Maps for boating or sailing ‘read’ the river or sea as a series of obstacles or challenges: rapids, weirs, strong currents, wind directions, rocks and sandbanks, markers and ‘no-go’ areas. In its more benign forms, boating on the river provides an intimate, close-up experience of water, an ‘insider’s’ view:

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Secular Hydrolatry It’s just a different view really. No-one else really gets that view . . . sort of inside from the river – everyone else sees it from the outside. (Charlie Smith) [Canoeing along the Stour] was lovely . . . ducks, and the little voles – they go along in front of you and they don’t think you can see them, so they just go up on the bank and get behind a leaf and look at you! . . . You see different things . . . People say there aren’t kingfishers . . . there’s an abundance, and they don’t take any notice of you in a boat. (Vera Brown)

Whatever the recreational activity, the focus upon the water enables a communion with place in which nature takes centre-stage. John Turner describes Stour Head as: Allowing nature to still have the upper hand . . . you get that initial intervention by man saying ‘oh we’ll have a lake here and a building over there’, but then the tree growth and the whole scale and the light and all that is just Mother Nature doing her bit . . . it’s a very special place.

In the subtext of discourses about recreation lies a theme of reunification: with self, with others, and with the environment – a ‘coming back’ to nature that restores and regenerates. Such language is entirely typical of representational forms designed to encourage tourism. The whole point about ‘re-creation’, after all, is that it is about play, a release from adult responsibilities, a childlike journey of rebirth and discovery. As such, it enables an intensive focus upon sensory interaction with water, whether this takes the form of dignified aesthetic appreciation, or the intense engagement of swimming, canoeing, fishing or walking alongside the river. All of these enable the collection of close-grained knowledge and an identification with place that permits people to feel that they are part of the orderly system that they observe. Water as an ‘aesthetic object’ therefore emerges as a form of secular hydrolatry: the sanctification of water without the burden of religious dogma. Reconciling intellect and emotion, Culture and Nature, it offers a vision of balance and order and, above all, reconnection.

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–7– The Hydrodynamics of Order H2O Scientific cosmological models, rather than sanctifying nature, take a reductive material view of water. Early scientists had initially attempted to blend science and religion in ‘natural theology’, but in the 1800s, when modern science parted company with religion, water emerged more specifically as H2O. By the mid-twentieth century it had been largely re-evaluated in Cartesian terms: The transformation of H2O into a cleaning fluid was complete. In the imagination of the twentieth century, water lost both its power to communicate by touch its deep-seated purity, and its mystical power to wash off spiritual blemish. (Illich 1986:75)

There are scientists examining water from a variety of perspectives in Dorset. The Institute of Freshwater Ecology near Wareham investigates river ecology. The Environment Agency maintains a large centre of operations on the Stour, and employs numerous biologists and chemists, as do the regional water companies (Wessex Water and Bournemouth and West Hampshire). Some local environmental and conservation organisations have their own scientists. All of these ‘experts’ bring an influential voice to debates on water issues. Their secular vision has its own rules and order, deconstructing water in microscopic chemical detail, and investigating its material properties and interactions. In this literal idiom H2O is composed of atoms and ions; it contains minerals, chemical and biological organisms; it is subject to the laws of physics; and its behaviour and processes are measurable. In discussing ‘disorder’ in this system, scientists divide water pollution into two classes: organic/biological and inorganic/chemical. This differentiates between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ pollution: There are two separate classes. There are the chemical physical problems – dirt, and dissolved chemicals, pesticides, you name it. That is a chemistry problem, how to bring those things out of the water or within safe limits. But then you also have the biological factors – the bacteria, the viruses, the protozoans like cryptosporidium, and that requires a different approach. You think about the biological side, you think about the chemistry side. (John Fisher)

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Hydrolatry and Hydrology Biological pollution refers to living organisms that are simply ‘out of place’: for example, cryptosporidium or smaller bacteria. Although some of these are harmful to humans,1 they are in a very different category from chemicals, which are viewed with deep concern when ‘out of control’. However, some chemicals, such as chlorine, are used to disinfect water – i.e. to kill bacterial organisms. So in this rational, secular cosmology, ‘pure’ water is produced not by ‘Nature’ but by ‘Culture’. With the eye pressed to the microscope, water is revealed as a complex balance of chemical compounds and minerals that fill the scientific vision and marginalise its broader symbolic meanings. The wider ecosystem is similarly conceived as a series of interactive cycles and processes: rainfall and runoff, flows and flood events, hydration, hydrodynamics, hydraulics and hydrology. Yet, despite the strait-laced literal discourse and its exclusion of metaphor and affective meaning, there are aspects of this cosmological perspective that cohere with religious and aesthetic visions. A material ecosystem is still imagined as an intensely busy set of processes, moving and changing continuously, with plants and organisms living and dying, and matter transforming from one state to another. Water is a biological hydrating, oxygenating matter of life and death, critical to every ecological event. As one researcher put it: The sea is so rich in life . . . And rivers . . . because they are great sort of collecting devices that channel everything through, are actually very very productive. All the food and stuff that gets washed in there is used by these animals living down there. (Mike Ladle)

Even reduced to aquatic ecology, the river still ‘pours life into the countryside’ (Boag 1990:10), and there is a sense that for the biologists, chemists and hydrologists themselves the specialised secular idiom of their work is only one of the layers of meaning through which they interpret water. Nevertheless, this vision has come to dominate discussions about environmental issues. Scientists argue that this is precisely because it is grounded in observable universal principles, but is it also, inescapably, a cultural construct, and needs to be situated within the wider cosmologies that provide ‘the meaning of water’. The dominance of such a reductive vision is problematic, because the Dorset study suggests that analysing water issues from a narrowly ‘scientific’ basis – and excluding other kinds of meanings – will not lead to the most effective form of management.

1. Cryptosporidium, for instance, causes acute diarrhoea

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The Hydrodynamics of Order

Only Natural Nowadays in the Western world, nature is commonly perceived as separate from human culture and civilisation. (Seeland, 1997:1)

Meshed with the material model that considers water as a material object is a complex set of ideas in which human action upon ‘nature’ transforms it into ‘culture’. Qualitative evaluations of water are often based upon what is perceived as ‘natural’. In Dorset, informants offered very consistent criteria: to be natural, things are ‘always like that’, and have ‘always been’ that way, carrying the authority of time and evolution. That is not to say that some things may not ‘become natural’ or ‘semi-natural’: organic objects, such as hedges or introduced flora and fauna, can be naturalised quite quickly. As long as they are composed of organic matter and ‘have a life of their own’, they can be re-categorised as ‘natural’ with relatively little difficulty, though may remain partially ‘cultural’ if they require intensive management. Much depends upon the degree of human control: natural objects have their own processes and rules; cultural objects are created, directed or maintained by human agency. This raises a central issue: that ‘natural’ means unadulterated and unmanipulated by human activities – i.e. by the enactment and imposition of culture. To be natural or ‘wild’ is to be free of the constraint of culture. So although informants generally represented nature and culture as binary opposites, there is an implicit continuum: they conceptualised culture in terms of its distance from nature. Natural things, however much ‘culture’ is imposed, can always revert. Even the manicured Dorset countryside can always ‘go back’ if cultural control is released: If you left it natural, it would all return to a woodland . . . If you didn’t actually manage grassland by grazing or cutting . . . coarse species would invade and eventually it would return. (Karen Eppey)

Water, with its transmutable and fluid qualities, is readily placed in any position along this continuum, and moves along it with equal facility, ‘taking the shape’ and absorbing the values of any context. If it not made to deviate from a supposed norm, it is natural. If it emerges from a ‘natural’ setting – a spring, a well, a tree-lined rainwater catchment – it encodes the authority of that setting. Thus water emerging from deep in the earth – however sulphurous and unpleasant to drink – is assumed to have ‘natural’ life-giving qualities, curing all kinds of ills, while water emerging from a tap with a strong smell or taste would produce only a rash of complaints. The most important criterion is the perceived distance between the ‘living water’ of the spring and ‘the stuff coming out of the tap’. This distance is only mildly

– 115 –

Hydrolatry and Hydrology literal: the major part of it is produced by the imposition of culture and its various technical processes. As the water is captured, treated and used, it is both acculturated and adulterated and its ‘naturalness’ is compromised. In these terms it is inevitable that ‘pure’ ‘fresh’ spring water will be perceived as ideal and the most ‘ideal’ springs are those in the mountains, far from urban settlement. The closer to human activity, and the further from these sources water travels, the more adulterated and ‘impure’ it is seen to be: I mean if I saw water running down straight off a mountain spring or something I wouldn’t have any qualms about [drinking] that. A bit further down the river where maybe there had been a town or two upstream . . . then I’d certainly hesitate. (Colin Marsh)

Treatment takes water steadily further away from its ‘natural’ state, and every process, refinement or additive is another step towards a crucial re-categorisation as ‘unnatural’.2 This elucidates the intensely negative responses that people often have at the prospect of anything at all being added to their water. Proposals to chlorinate drinking water at the beginning of the twentieth century met with intense opposition,3 and have revived recently. Similarly, objections to fluoride have rumbled along for many years, and people’s fears about its potential to compromise their health were amply illustrated in the passionate debates that resurfaced about this issue in 2003. In the Stour Valley, concerns about the chemical ‘adulteration’ of natural water include a clear distinction between natural and unnatural forms of pollution. In general terms, people considered as ‘unnatural’ anything ‘manmade’ enough to be categorised as a ‘chemical’. I don’t think [chlorine] should be added at all. It’s like the fluoride – I don’t like all these additives, I don’t like it in food . . . Nobody really knows what they do to you . . . I would say it has an awful lot to do with things like headaches, and other muscular aches and pains, we are hearing more and more about . . . childhood cancer-related diseases like leukaemia . . . It’s just getting worse and worse and worse. (Pat Herbert) I prefer to use the spring water . . . the basic’s reason’s that it’s less tampered with, less chemical, less refined. I’d rather take the chance of a few bacteria and germs, than chemicals I think, in the water . . . I suppose [because of] my fears of pollution, fears of what chemical processing does. (Sue Degan)

2. Fischler, writing about food (1988), notes the same problem with regard to refined foodstuffs such as sugar, and the way in which these have been stigmatised by their distancing from nature. 3. Although chlorination soon demonstrated a rapid reduction in waterborne disease incidents, it was 1939 before the government could be convinced to override objections and permit its widespread use, approving it hastily while the country was focused on imminent conflicts with Europe.

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The Hydrodynamics of Order The most anxiety was generated by chemicals such as pesticides and herbicides, whose nomenclature signifying that they are ‘designed to kill’ positions them in direct opposition to all of the positive meanings of water. However, any chemicals gave cause for concern: There’s so many types of pesticides, chemicals, and what do you call them, GM crops, all creeping up now . . . I read an article in the paper this morning about Frankenstein salmon, they’ve been doing experiments . . . Where’s it all lead to? (David Jones)

Biological organisms, although potentially harmful, did not engender such revulsion. As one young canoeist explained, the pollution in the Stour is assumed to be more benign than in rivers running through heavily industrial areas: We do go up . . . to Teesside, and that’s a manmade area, so if we do go up there, we just make sure we stay either in the canoe, or keep your mouth shut if you go in! [Here there is] just natural sort of things . . . dead plants, natural things. You do find things like bikes and shopping trolleys . . . washing machines . . . but that’s a different sort of pollution. (Charlie Smith)

People applied the same principles on a larger scale: water has its own ‘natural laws’ and the hydrological cycle represents these in action. Floods and droughts are therefore ‘natural disasters’, unless they are seen as the product of excessive ‘cultural’ interference with ecological processes. At the same time, water management remains, to some degree, an ongoing battle to impose cultural order over a resource that constantly threatens to dwindle away or burst out of control. These concerns point to an interesting tension: on the one hand, people want to consume water that is alive, natural and unadulterated by culture. On the other, they plainly want enough control that water supplies are secure and convenient. There is much satisfaction in controlling water managerially in domestic situations, aesthetic activities, and other metaphors of ‘creating order’, and yet in all of these different contexts considerable efforts are made to maintain or re-create what is seen as ‘natural’. The extent to which ‘control over nature’ should be exercised is central to debates on water between environmentalists, farmers and water managers in Dorset. One environmentalist described how his priorities sometimes differed from those of local farmers: He wanted [the water] corralled, and I said ‘No I want it to run free, over the land.’ . . . Many farmers think that’s bizarre, because all their life is their struggle to get water off the land so they can actually get their cattle or their livestock on there . . . That’s the difference you see, farmers try to corral the ecosystem so they have ultimate control of that. What I want is to let the ecosystem run free so that basically the dominating forces

– 117 –

Hydrolatry and Hydrology there are those of nature, but with human interference which may be directing it in one direction or another . . . If you look at most of our wildlife systems here, they [have] fairly constant intervention by man. (Douglas Kite)

Nevertheless, he described how, when the Dorset Countryside Volunteers organise management tasks, opportunities to control water have enormous appeal: One of the most popular tasks – I’ve found – where many areas were drained in the past with ditches, we are now looking at bunging up ditches with dams. And that’s incredibly popular with volunteers – going in and building dams.

Everyone has an idea of a ‘proper’ balance between free-flowing water and control of it. As the former Head Gardener at Stour Head commented: They like the idea that it comes out of the ground up there and it’s fed naturally here. And it’s dammed up: I think people – odd as it may seem – they feel consoled by the fact that there’s water dammed here. (Fred Hunt)

Like woodland, water can also ‘go back to nature’ once it is allowed to re-enter its normal cycle. People commonly expressed the idea that polluted water will recover if it is diluted sufficiently, fed through the natural filtering and purifying processes and given sufficient time and space. Such indirect recycling or reuse is invariably more acceptable than chemical treatment. Our head of water, one side of it comes from the other side of the [main road], so I said to Chris, ‘Should we be concerned?’ and he thought we were far enough away. But I thought ‘Where does all the road washing go? It probably goes through.’ But if it filters through enough soil before it gets into the stream we’re okay. (Cleo Campbell) The sea is more clean . . . because rivers, people’s [wastes] sort of sink in, they sort of get caught in the sides, and so they stay there. But in the sea it spreads it out, it’s bigger. (Wyke Primary School children)

The sea is also seen to ‘disinfect’ water because of its saline content. More importantly, it offers a vast scale of time and space: by the time the water has poured into the seas, evaporated into the sky (leaving pollutants behind), precipitated, and filtered through the mountains of the earth, it is reborn as a ‘natural’ spring: Water comes down through the mountains . . . it goes through the rocks it gets cleaned . . . It filters things, the rock . . . Then it comes out . . . It isn’t like our tapwater, they put loads of stuff in – loads of chemicals and stuff – it’s just fresh, ‘cause it’s freshwater, it’s like nature’s water. Yeah, with nothing added to it, just pure. (Wyke Primary School children)

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The Hydrodynamics of Order

Hydrology and Ecology In all of these cosmological schemes – religious and secular – the hydrological cycle provides a spatio-temporal model of change, transformation and regeneration. The sea may be a saline disinfector, or the ‘great sink’ into which the human spirit dissolves, and the re-emergence of water from the earth may be a rebirth of ‘living water’, or ‘simply natural’, but there is no real dissonance between these ideas. People transpose hydrological principles of order to describe internal and external cycles of change. Envisioning human health as a ‘proper’ flow and balance that can be compromised through pollution, they see ecological health as subject to similar rules. In the Stour Valley, as elsewhere, these principles are bound up with concerns about being alienated from nature. A number of informants described themselves as becoming increasingly ‘unnatural’ in their sanitised way of life, and believed that this affected their ability to deal with biological pollution: There are countries who can still drink [polluted water] but we can’t. They’ve got the fighting mechanisms in their bodies, and I think, sadly, some of [the] complaints that we get are because we haven’t got our antibodies so much . . . We’d be healthier if we hadn’t over many years become sanitised. (Geoff Galpin)

The idea that modern life has weakened human ‘defences’ suggests an anxiety about boundaries: the crossing of ‘unnatural’ substances into ‘natural’ systems, of culture disturbing a ‘natural’ order. As noted in Chapter 3, the perceived outcome of an invasion of ‘otherness’ into the self is disease and ‘disorder’: When you have these funny viruses that you don’t really know where they have come from or how they are caused, I sometimes think there’s so much in the way of pesticides put on the food, I think maybe that sort of filters into the body. (Anne Marsh) In Essex, where you’ve got the . . . nitrates from the vast grain fields of East Anglia getting down into the aquifer . . . There’s a sort of ‘blue baby’ syndrome or something, down to that water, because of its high nitrate quantities . . . And on the other end of the scale, most of the Essex water is in effect . . . feminising society, as we share all our hormones now through the water supply, which I suppose you could argue might not be a bad thing . . . We’ll all become Essex Woman! (Rodney Legg)

These visions of water carrying health or harm across human boundaries are readily enlarged to consider principles of ecology. The ‘ecosystem’ is a postmodern bricolage – a composite of historical and contemporary, religious and secular schemes, drawing upon cosmological explanations such as natural theology, – 119 –

Hydrolatry and Hydrology as well as scientific principles. Individuals along the Stour have their own formulations, but each presents an orderly vision of natural and cultural processes articulating according to rules that maintain homeostatic ‘rightness’ or balance. Like the religious cosmologies, secular models make use of images that maintain homologous links between the individual and the ecosystem.4 Such scheme transfers recur in everyday discourses about water: leakage from supply pipes ‘haemorrhages’ and ‘bleeds’, echoing other ideas about a loss of ‘vital’ substance. Rivers and bodies suffer from insufficient pressure, stagnate, become polluted by toxins or increasingly sanitised and unnatural. Now because we’ve gouged and grooved great holes in the river banks . . . to increase the flow downstream . . . sometimes you can get a flood up at Sturminster Newton and if you blink you’ve missed it, because the water manages then to get all of the way down, sort of like flushing a lavatory . . . down to the sea. (Rodney Legg)

Images of waste matter ‘flushed out’ of the body by drinking water are used to imagine the collective ‘body’ of the house and its mechanical ‘flushing’ away of dirt, and reappear in ideas about how the wider collective ‘body’ of the sewer removes waste and disperses it into the ‘nether regions’ of the ecosystem for regeneration. According to staff at waste treatment plants, people often assume that the sewer system can dispose of anything and everything. For example, at Wessex Water’s Holdenhurst plant near Poole, a former manager described the company’s ‘Dirty Museum’ of objects disposed of in the sewers: Golfballs, tennis balls, bits of teddy bear and dolls . . . not only do we have all the things you would imagine . . . (including old folks’ teeth) but we do get from time to time . . . bits of four-by-two wood . . . a lawnmower . . . And we’ve had a mattress . . . There was a blockage in a domestic area, and they went house to house looking for where the blockage might be . . . and there was this dear lady stuffing a horsehair mattress down her toilet bit by bit. When you first hear these things you think ‘that’s fairly amazing’, but after you have worked in the industry for a while . . . (Geoff Galpin)

One outcome of this imaginative homologous scheme transferral is that people often assume similar effects at each level. Thus a woman who drank a lot of water to ‘flush the system’ also described how she ran the tap for a while to clean out the domestic system:

4. For example, Lovelock’s resurrection of Hutton’s planetary physiology of the eighteenth century uses the ancient Greek term Gaia (‘Mother Earth’) to describe the human species as a planetary ‘brain’ (1987 [1979], 1988).

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The Hydrodynamics of Order I’d got into that habit of letting . . . the water run through the pipes to clean the pipes, you know, we used to leave the cold water on first thing in the morning . . . It’s that image of flushing through isn’t it. Almost like if you let the water go through it is going to flush the end of the tap through and make it cleaner. I can remember my Nana being like that, that sort of attitude. (INF52)

At each level there are ideas about the importance of ‘flow’ and lack of impediment. Fears about ‘deposits’ or ‘growths’ in the body are echoed in anxieties about the dangers posed by the river being ‘choked’ or ‘blocked’: Drinking water is good for your kidneys, we know that, but what deposits does it leave behind when you are drinking it to flush you out? (Pat Herbert) The reeds don’t get cut, the weeds don’t get cut . . . and the consequence is, your reeds and rushes build up . . . That silt builds up against the rushes, and therefore you’ve got less volume going, and then of course it causes flooding. Whereas in the old days . . . the Dorset and Hampshire river board, they used to cut the rushes and reeds, but the modern ones don’t. (Arthur Morris) The public are warned to take great care when swimming in rivers . . . there are so many dangers out there. Even if you can swim well there are reeds which swimmers can get tangled up in. (Police spokesman in Campbell 1999: 1)

Similarly, people were concerned about the idea of nitrates and pesticides ‘getting into the system’: I am very sympathetic to the whole organic farming movement . . . I heard that it takes about thirty years for the nitrates to penetrate to the groundwater, and then get back into the system. (Colin Marsh)

In all of the models that describe human and environmental health, there is an interweaving of ideas about what is ‘natural’ and ‘as it should be’, and what is moral. Because of the conceptual links between physical and moral cleanliness or purity, water is integral to the creation of a moral person and an orderly, moral environment: ‘because it cleans you, I suppose . . . Physically you are clean so therefore you think you are morally clean’ (Arthur Morris). Similarly, it is the ‘cleanness’ and ‘unadulterated’ nature of organic food that places organic farming on the moral high ground. Thus a farmer described his land as ‘glorious’ because it is farmed according to ‘natural’ organic principles: One reason why it’s so glorious is because I’ve farmed it in a particular way. I’ve got the grazing right. There’s no chemicals, herbicides, nothing like that – wonderful

– 121 –

Hydrolatry and Hydrology flowers. It’s kept grazed, we look after it. It looks beautiful – it has never looked more beautiful, because it has been farmed correctly, according to the correct principles. Now that’s for everybody’s joy. (Bing Spencer)

Evaluations of water quality – in every context – therefore depend on the extent to which people perceive it as being in accord with a particular set of principles. Any disordering of these – such as pollution – threatens systemic balance and is thus deemed ‘wrong’ or ‘immoral’. As Douglas comments: We would expect to find that the pollution beliefs of a culture are related to its moral values, since these form part of the structure of ideas for which pollution behaviour is a protective device. (1975:53)

In the Swim In each of the cosmological schemes described, water provides a recurrent series of metaphors about the proper functioning of different systems: human physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health; water supply and treatment systems; local, regional and global ecosystems. Within these comprehensive schemes, however, there are some more specialised systemic models that also encode water with important meanings. Those describing social and economic processes are particularly relevant, because the way in which they incorporate water imagery has a very powerful effect upon water ownership, management and use. Previous chapters explored the meaning of water as a shared ‘substance’ and the use of its characteristics to create metaphors of connection or distance at an emotional and interpersonal level. As noted in Chapter 3, water is the major constituent of blood and the ‘substance’ of identity, flowing between – and connecting – individuals with groups and with the environment. This embodied interconnection is echoed on a larger scale by the rivers that provide socio-spatial connections between communities, and is also powerfully manifested in material culture, the capillaries of piped supply that link every household into a collective physical infrastructure through which water flows continually. Images and understandings of these ‘substantial’ material connections transfer readily into a model of society, with the formal qualities of water used to express flows, cycles of change over time, and ideas about fluidity, mutability and circulation. Illich notes that a vision of society as a circulatory system is relatively recent, arriving with eighteenth century scientific ideas about human anatomy and environmental processes.5 As cosmological schemes became dominated by ideas of 5. The theory that blood circulated the body had been mooted much earlier: for example, Illich records that a scholar named ‘Ibn al-Nafiz, who died in Cairo in 1288, was one of the first to put

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The Hydrodynamics of Order cycles and circulation, ‘society comes to be imagined as a system of conduits’ (Illich 1986:43). Water metaphors are common parlance in this model: people included ‘in the swim’ ‘circulate’, as if at a giant cocktail party, down lineages and through social groups via marriages, professional movements and other alliances. ‘Mainstream’ populations flow in time and space, ‘trickling’ or ‘pouring’ into areas, ‘spilling over’ into residential spaces, or ‘draining’ out of them. Society itself is thus imagined as a corporate body in which order or ‘health’ is maintained by the movements and actions of the individuals who share its identity or substance. Communities are kept alive by the agency of their constituent individuals and their processes of production and reproduction, which flow into collective endeavours. People are socially connected by water because they share this ‘essential’ substance, because they are spatially linked by water courses and systems and – crucially – because the characteristics of water provide a metaphorical language for conceptualising social being, knowledge and identity.6 In consequence, everyday language along the Stour drew attention to an important conflation between ideas about physical pollution, water quality and social identity. People expressed intense concern about the prospect of drinking water seen to contain ‘foreign bodies’ of any kind, and had clear ideas about what substances cohered with their own, and what would pollute or disorder their physical integrity. It was plain, in discussing local social issues, that such ideas resonated with their feelings about more abstract invasions of ‘otherness’ – any influx of people not seen as being part of their particular ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991). These are familiar metaphors: discourses about identity (and particularly race) have long employed terms such as ‘purity’ and ‘dilution’ or ‘adulteration’ to express the sameness or difference of groups of people. Concerns about immigration or border disputes regularly describe the other as ‘coming in waves’, ‘flooding in’, ‘invading’ and potentially ‘swamping’ existing communities, raising anxieties about whether ‘the system’ can absorb these newcomers and retain its integrity or ‘health’. The then Conservative Party Leader William Hague said in discussing controversies about asylum seekers, ‘a flow out of control is a flood’ (BBC Radio 4 news, 2 May 2000), and in 2002 the Labour Home Secretary, David Blunkett, made use of a similar metaphor, contentiously describing asylum seekers as ‘swamping’ local communities (Justin Dyer, pers. comm.) McKie notes that this way of discussing immigration was also used by Margaret Thatcher, and he cites Labour MP Diane

forward the idea that blood circulates’ (1986:43). This idea didn’t gain much ground until the eighteenth century, though, and until then Europeans generally imagined physical and metaphorical systems as consisting of ebbs and flows. 6. As Strathern notes (1992:11), social connections – family relationships – are regarded as ‘natural’ and ‘primordial’. This helps to locate the ‘substance’ of identity firmly in the category of ‘nature’.

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Hydrolatry and Hydrology Abbott’s telling response to Blunkett: ‘We are talking about children here, not raw sewage’ (2002:3). Such influxes therefore represent social ‘disorder’. Informants in Dorset, discussing the ‘flow’ of recent incomers to their villages, were concerned that this would affect ‘the character’ or ‘identity’ of their local communities. As illustrated in Chapter 2, an equally emotive issue was that of strangers and access to the land. Farmers regularly described this as an ‘invasion’ of their space, particularly if people who didn’t ‘know the countryside’ wandered uncontrollably off the prescribed paths or, worst of all, left their alien detritus (waste products) behind: Members of the public in the countryside are a form of pollution if you like, insofar as physically they also leave their litter and they trample what they are going through, and they don’t necessarily stay to the footpaths. (INF34)

Concerns about ‘ignorant townies’ ‘trampling’ the land highlight the importance of shared knowledge in perceptions of who can be identified as belonging to a community. Just as water provides a metaphor for social being, its characteristics offer concepts of how knowledge, beliefs, ideas and values circulate around society, are absorbed and exchanged, expressed and transformed. Information is imagined as filling mental space, seeping into consciousness, filtering through, leaking out, flooding and drying up. It may be ephemeral or concrete in form, hot or cold, fresh or recycled, creative or destructive. It also has a moral dimension: it can illuminate or corrupt, be pure, clear and transparent, or muddy, murky and unclear. Perhaps most importantly, though, knowledge is part of the ‘substance’ of identity, and shared knowledge and values are integral to concepts of community. Identity and its perceived integrity or ‘wholeness’ are extremely emotive issues, and the use of images of water and concepts of pollution and disorder to describe social relations raises some interesting questions. If water is so heavily encoded with meanings that frame it as the essence of social being, does where it comes from and whom it is controlled by influence people’s assessments of its quality? And how do these meanings affect people’s responses to ownership and management issues?

Common Currency A final scheme transfer that imbues water with a particularly critical set of meanings is that which uses images of water to articulate concepts of wealth. In Dorset, as elsewhere, people draw on the characteristics of water to describe mental models of economic systems. ‘Life’ in the form of material resources ‘flows’ from one part of the system to another. Money – the symbolic conflation of all resources – becomes

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The Hydrodynamics of Order a ‘cash flow’ that ‘circulates around’, may be ‘pooled’ or ‘poured into’ things or, in a more miserly system, may eventually ‘trickle down’. Resources can ‘flood the market’, new sources of wealth can be ‘tapped’, funds can ‘run dry’. As with other models, the system relies upon constant movement and ‘flow’ if it is not to ‘stagnate’. In this imagined monetary ecology, resources function like water, circulating and sustaining the system in whatever is deemed to constitute a proper distribution or ‘balance’. An economy is described as healthy if it is ‘flowing as it should’. There is a close conceptual tie between wealth and health – an idea that wealth constitutes social vitality and agency. This points to an association that clearly influences people’s willingness to restrict their use of water. Because water provides the key metaphor for the flow of wealth, it signifies wealth and power: unlimited use of water is equated with affluence, while restrictions denote the undesirable opposite, poverty and powerlessness. When we were looking for somewhere to live, we did say that we would prefer an older property so we wouldn’t have a water meter. And the idea of being able to use water completely freely, without having the think about it, was attractive to us. (INF52)

It is no coincidence that one of the first things some people do on ‘winning the pools’ is ‘to spend money like water’ and buy a swimming pool. I’d go somewhere and buy a house with a swimming pool. It wouldn’t bother me about filling that swimming pool up with water. (INF52)

The idea of water as affluence is so familiar it is taken for granted that homes providing a lake or sea view conventionally sell for 25% more than others. Along the Stour ‘panoramic views of the river’ or ‘direct access to the river’ are the most prized. The ultimate luxury is to own or control a water body – a pool, a lake, a section of the river. This taps straight into the most fundamental meanings of water as life itself: nothing denotes social and economic power more than the phallic spout of a fountain, a vast lake, or surging river, and no stately home or government seat is complete without such accoutrements. As Symmes comments: The towering plume of water has become . . . a symbol of the triumph of man’s mastery over nature. (1998:11)

For major riparian landowner on the Stour, although he liked the fountain he and his wife had had constructed in front of the house, an even larger one would have been better:

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Hydrolatry and Hydrology I like it when we switch it on – I like getting up to the sound of running water, I like the sound of it . . . We thought it would look nice . . . Well of course what we would really like is one the size of the one in Geneva, but I’d need to build a mountain, and have a much bigger pond. (INF25)

At the other end of the economic scale, people trying hard to be frugal limited their ‘luxury’ uses of water: Being extremely tight – well frugal – on all the things within the house . . . we didn’t fill up the paddling pool . . . Having to watch [the water] go into the pool is quite upsetting for me . . . Because it’s a luxury . . . it’s not being put to its proper use of drinking water, washing . . . The money and the water are related . . . I think of it, running water, as running money – money running out of a tap. (INF52)

This direct association between water, wealth and social agency is clearly an important factor in understanding the resistance that people have to limiting their water usage. To create a pool or a fountain is not merely to make an attractive object, and to stand in the garden spraying water onto the greenery is not just careless profligacy – these are intensely meaningful and highly ritualised activities, imbued with a host of associations about creating and enjoying life and health. To make productive things happen in a domestic space is a powerful expression of individual or familial agency, and to do so more publicly is an obvious expression of social status. It follows, therefore, that to try to persuade people to restrict their water use is to reduce their flow of life and wealth, and to threaten their health and status. This clearly works against efforts to encourage conservation: There is something in you which kind of goes against it . . . there’s something luxuriant I suppose, about being able to bath and clean regularly, and if you feel limited, it’s a funny relationship . . . the feeling of being clean, cleaned by water, and how much water you can use all seems to tie up. (INF48)

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Private Water

Part IV Owning Water

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–8– Private Life Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over. (Mark Twain)

Given the reality of human needs for water, and its economic importance, it is unsurprising that the ownership of water is intensely contested. However, most resources are privately owned in the UK, so why should the privatisation of water be ‘the worst thing they ever did’ (INF36)? Part of the answer lies in the importance of the meanings that people encode in water, and the way that water imagery is used to visualise the most central issues of human existence. In a range of cosmological schemes water appears as a vital connective substance. It is the movement of water through body, heart and mind, through river, sea and sky, and through time and space that enables each ‘system’ to flow as it should. The opposition to the private ownership of water is therefore based upon a fundamental dissonance – a sense that in ‘disconnecting’ it, privatisation runs counter to the organising principles of a whole array of cosmological schemes, creating impediment and ‘disorder’.

Against Nature In the cosmological schemes described by the inhabitants of the Stour Valley, whether framed in religious or secular terms, water appears as ‘nature herself’: the internal and external essence of life, the fountain of regeneration. Life force is presented as inherently ‘natural’ – intrinsically beyond human control. The idea that water, as a life-giving substance, can be ‘owned’ (i.e. acculturated) challenges fundamental categorisations of nature and culture and, because nature is seen as internal as well as external to the self, the idea of being alienated from it is deeply problematic. In Dorset, people generally described water as something that could not be owned: I think there’s something in us, we feel that water’s there for us: it’s our heritage almost . . . It’s there for us and we shouldn’t have to pay for it like fuel. (Beryl Coward)

– 129 –

Owning Water Similarly, asked ‘who owns water?’ most of the school-children interviewed felt that water belonged to everyone and no-one, suggesting variously that it was owned by ‘God’, ‘the Queen’, ‘nobody’, ‘us’ and (rather poetically) ‘the sky’. Part of this perception relates to the particular qualities of water, its elusiveness and mutability. Unlike land, it cannot be easily contained: in one way or another, it is always ‘on the move’: It’s a hard thing to own really isn’t it, water . . . Water goes around everywhere . . . You can’t really put a claim to water . . . it is moving. You can’t just see a bird in the stream and put a claim on it can you? Because it is going to fly away . . . You could put a stake on a glass of water, because it’s not going to move away, but it will, eventually, with evaporation. (Charlie Smith)

Many people acknowledged that in practice they were paying for water to be treated and delivered, and some accepted that this transformed the water into something else: ‘if it has been treated and it’s piped and it’s the utilities, I mean it’s no different to electricity then’ (Michael Stoate). This suggests that water industry efforts to recategorise water as a commercial ‘product’ of their actions upon it have been partially successful, but this acculturation seems fairly superficial, barely able to subsume the more powerful meanings and the ‘nature’ encoded in water. As the same informant commented, ‘I suppose it’s just a personal feeling, but we are all entitled to it . . . we are entitled to air I suppose’. Because water is as necessary to basic survival as air, people could not accept that this life-giving substance should have been ‘taken away’ and placed into the control of ‘others’. ‘I think it probably shouldn’t be in the hands it’s in, really: I think it’s far too precious’ (Beryl Coward).

Ecology Rules An ‘unnatural’ arrangement, in which water resources are impeded from ‘flowing freely’, also raised concerns about the maintenance of ‘order’ in the wider ecosystem. By enclosing water in a commercial space, privatisation excludes the majority from participating in a collective environmental relationship. Those who see water companies as an exclusive ‘other’ feel that they are unlikely to protect a shared environment. Technological development in the water industry, spurred by tighter legislation and enabled by greater investment, has reduced the most obvious types of pollutants in the rivers and produced generally safer drinking water. Yet many people in the Stour Valley remain firmly convinced that environmental health and water quality have been severely compromised since privatisation.

– 130 –

Private Water This river is much lower than it used to be . . . in the last five, ten years, I’ve been here twenty years, I think it’s dropping . . . it’s very shallow now. (INF12) They [the water company] put crude sewage into the River Stour . . . from the pumping station in Penn . . . I don’t think people realise quite how much our rivers are being polluted. (INF23)

Many people were convinced that commercial values would result in less concern about pollution. The water companies could not be trusted ‘because it’s too easy to get concerned about profit instead of managing and looking after [the environment]’ (Anne Marsh). The money they have now, they should manage to put some aside and build reservoirs . . . so that when there is a shortage it can be taken out as and when required. All they are concerned for now is the shareholders getting X amount for the shares, whereas before, when it was – at least the government had the money back and any profit was recycled back into the system for the good of the community. (Arthur Morris)

Public exclusion from involvement in managing water resources also means that it is easier for people to blame the water companies for ecological problems. Rather than pointing to climate change or to their own water usage, many informants along the Stour felt that river levels had fallen noticeably, because the water industry -‘they’ – were abstracting more. In their comments lies a discernible relationship between the act of privatisation and widespread concerns that water quantity and quality have been compromised, with concomitant ecological effects.

Substantial Loss Many of the feelings expressed about privatisation clearly recognised the empowerment afforded by owning or controlling water resources – and the disempowerment of losing this ownership: I think it should be controlled by the State, because if somebody suddenly decides . . . Look you could fight wars over water: people fought wars over water . . . You can blackmail over water: it’s been done, in Australia, in the States, when they wanted to water their cattle. All you had to do was get control of the bit of water, and you could control everybody and everything. (Fred Hunt)

Because water offers a metaphor of social being, connecting individuals within the larger body of society, the enclosure of water resources into the exclusive control of a small minority represents a basic disenfranchisement, re-creating the class

– 131 –

Owning Water divisions of a more feudal age. There remains, for many people, a close link between the idea of societal membership, suffrage and rights to water: ‘I feel that it is our right to have unlimited use of water’ (Pat Herbert). The undermining of shared identity and ‘community’ has serious implications for the integrity of an envisioned social system. It is therefore entirely logical that, by disconnecting people from even symbolic control and management of water resources, privatisation generated – and continues to generate – feelings of separation and exclusion. I’d want to make sure that they were going to manage [the water] along the lines that it was right and proper. For whose benefit are they doing it – how are we going to monitor their success? I don’t want to give someone masses of power and then they do what they want. They’ve got to be properly sort of controlled; they’ve got to have proper instructions. (Bing Spencer) We have a right to it – like everybody in this country – to the water. You are dealing with a resource which is . . . basically essential to life and therefore it should be everybody’s right to it. (David Solly)

Anxieties about this alienation were highlighted in Dorset in 1999 by the controversial takeover of Wessex Water by the (now notorious) American corporation Enron. Although this generated much debate at a regulatory level, there was little local publicity. However, those who heard about it were outraged by the sell-off and fervently opposed to the idea that ‘their’ water could be taken over by a ‘foreign body’: I do feel that the . . . privatisation in water companies is quite frightening, that they might be all sold off to foreign bodies, and controlled . . . I just find that aspect awful . . . nobody really seemed to have realised very much that that it was happening. I think it’s rather sinister. It’s hugely different [now]. Why would any rich mega-guy sitting in America have any concern? (Karen Wimhurst)

The American takeover thus emphasised the alienation between people and resources created by privatisation, and the fracturing of social cohesion that this implies. People made explicit links between ‘foreign’ control and their distrust of other ‘giant’ outsiders – private corporations whose activities they regarded as being equally unwelcome and potentially harmful: I think this is the trouble . . . people are getting further away from it [resources] . . . I heard one or two people say ‘Oh I don’t like the idea of the Yanks owning our water’ . . . People have lost community areas with hardly noticing that they have lost it . . . I mean if you’ve got a democracy, and people can’t vote something, or have any influence really,

– 132 –

Private Water it seems to take the influence not only away from people, but right outside the country doesn’t it? . . . I think people more and more are feeling – well perhaps they’ve always felt – that they couldn’t influence things very much . . . Heaven knows Monsanto’s done enough with its blooming advertisements hasn’t it – honestly! So you wonder . . . how much influence ordinary people can have. (Elizabeth Kendall)1

Enron collapsed in 2002, amid loud accusations of nefarious dealings, and Wessex Water was sold to a Malaysian company, YTL.2 This was regarded by local water users as even worse, because of the greater linguistic, geographical and cultural ‘distance’ involved. I think it’s absolutely appalling, I really do. That’s one of the big problems of privatising a resource, because you’ve got absolutely no control of what happens after that – it could be sold on, and sold on and sold on. (Sarah Solly)

People’s responses to privatisation make it plain that the water companies are now seen as an ‘other’ group with whom water users have no social connection. Of course, as a former industry manager pointed out, there have been private water suppliers for centuries, and Wessex Water, apart from a brief interlude as a local authority, was held privately for much of its history: I see nothing wrong in [privatisation] because . . . [water supply] had always been private, even down to the manorial estate it was private. (INF44)

However, the early water companies and were located within – and so identified with – smaller and more stable communities that could moderate or guide their activities. The previous private owners of water, the monasteries, the manors and the early water companies, while they may have been resented, were at least ‘local’ and known. All were heavily subject to Church or government efforts to provide for societal needs, and all had some social relationship – however unequal – with water users. With post-war nationalisation, water managers were part of a collectivising State-led endeavour to create a more inclusive society and egalitarian access to resources within a common ‘nation’. Now, however, the privatised water 1. Local protests were echoed by OFWAT and its regional Customer Service Committee, which was further angered by massive payouts to the water company directors when, in June 1999, Enron floated the company on the New York Stock Exchange. However, despite much political discussion about blocking the takeover, Enron (reputedly a generous Labour Party sponsor), proceeded with its plans with little impediment. 2. On top of the takeover by Enron corporation, in August 2002, Colin Skellet, the Chairman and Chief Executive of Wessex Water, was arrested on suspicion of having accepted a £1 million bribe during the sale of Wessex Water to YTL. He was later fully exonerated. (Guardian, 24 August, 2002, p 2.)

– 133 –

Owning Water industry has become largely disconnected from these ties, and people’s responses to the reality that water is now owned by faceless – and thus identity-less – ‘foreigners’ of one sort or another, is clearly another ‘matter of substance’ The research suggests, therefore, that a critical issue is the social and cultural identity of those in control of water, and their relationship (or lack of it) to particular communities. The loss of control over water resources is, for most people, a loss of something that is symbolically integral to their own identity: the substance of their link with society and even with common humanity. If water users cannot identify ‘substantially’ with those responsible for resource management, no amount of reassurance is likely to address this effectively. This problem was perhaps not appreciated by a Conservative government comfortable with the concept of resources being managed an exclusive elite, and which was itself readily able to identify with – or indeed provide from its own ranks – the prospective directors of a privatised industry.

Dammed Economics Money is pouring into the wrong pockets. (INF4)

The use of water imagery to conceptualise wealth and affluence creates deep concern about private ownership. Privatisation is a very transparent enclosure, signalling plainly that wealth – and its related concept of socio-economic health – has been appropriated from ‘the commons’. It’s wrong that water companies should make heaving great profits out of water . . . I think it’s immoral . . . I think all the major services, but particularly water, should not be privatised, they should be government – they should be publicly owned, and if there are any profits then the profits should be ploughed back into the service provided for everybody. Not going into shareholders’ pockets – I really do feel strongly about that . . . You see, this is the loss of control over our – ‘our’ in generic terms – ours in Britain, we are losing control over our resources . . . It’s awful. (David Solly)

Such a loss of control taps directly into the concerns that people have about the distribution of power and resources, challenging their beliefs that there must be some kind of continual and balanced flow of these to maintain collective economic health. By enclosing water resources, privatisation was seen by many as a retrograde step, reinstituting former class hierarchies and differential – and potentially discriminative – access to resources.

– 134 –

Private Water I do object, really, I think to people being able to garner more than a share of something like water. If you can afford it you get more of it . . . It’s like that now isn’t it? If you’ve got the money . . . (INF3)

In the still active farming community along the Stour, some people clearly recognised the relationship between the privatisation of water and earlier enclosures. [Water] sort of – it belongs to everybody, and yes, you have specialists in to keep it OK for us to drink. It’s like the land: I think the land belongs to everybody . . . We are very unfortunate that we weren’t tough enough to say, 400 years ago, ‘You are not having that, that’s mine.’ That’s why all these lords got all this private land that we are not allowed to even walk across even if it has a footpath sign on it . . . It’s dreadful when you go on walks around here – loads of kissing gates that are just being left to go rusty, or have got barbed wire in the middle of them . . . I tend to think of it as belonging to everybody, the land, the water. (Julie Galbally)

As Ward says, the loss of control over water offends basic ideas about human rights ‘to life’: Water is as vital to us as blood, and is thus . . . precious beyond price . . . Knowledge of this explains the outrage we feel on learning that households in England have been deprived of a water supply through non-payment of charges imposed by private companies to which the government has sold a community resource. (1997:viii)3 They put money first . . . they are planning to make a vast amount of money aren’t they? (Fred Hunt)

The privatisation of water therefore remains deeply problematic, appearing to contravene the most powerful meanings encoded in water, and raising the prospect of imbalance, impediment or ‘disorder’ at every level – in the balance between nature and culture, and in ecological, social and economic systems. Hostility to privatisation remains undiminished and distrust of the water companies is, if anything, increasing as they enlarge via mergers, diversifications and foreign takeovers and move towards more competitive, commodifying forms of resource management. I don’t go with this privatisation, the way it’s done, it’s just basically all these fat cats lining their own pockets and everybody else loses out, as far as I can make out. (Sarah Solly)

3. During the course of this research, new legislation was passed making it illegal for water companies to continue to disconnect non-payers, and requiring them to pursue debts conventionally, through the courts (the Water Industry Act [1999]).

– 135 –

Owning Water For the most part, people feel able to do very little about the situation, other than complain to the water companies more often about services, or harangue OFWAT about the level of their water bills. One obvious response was to try to hold onto water by buying shares, hence the vast oversubscription that occurred: ‘Well, I didn’t get any shares, so I was very bitter. Yes, I missed out on that one’ (INF43). In some areas, though, where real pressure has been placed on the relationship by unreliable supplies, this ill-feeling has erupted into vandalism. There are echoes here of earlier protests: for example, the ‘Barbarian’ destruction of Roman aqueducts, the violent riots opposing land enclosures, and the Luddite machine-smashing rebellions against the alienation from the land produced by mechanisation. A water company executive at Bournemouth and West Hampshire Water recalled that during droughts in Yorkshire, ‘the regional water company installed local distribution tanks at various locations . . . and they were vandalised, stolen’ (Mark Burton). There were also reports of people leaving taps running indefinitely in protest, and other expressions of resentment. And just as the appropriation of resources by the first water companies was subverted, there are now modern ‘water stealers’: Cowboy builders and do-it-yourself crooks are connecting homes without telling the water company, leaving them with a complete supply and no bills. Yorkshire Water is looking for up to 1,000 properties which may be linked up to the water supply but are not paying the company for the privilege . . . 220 new households a year are linked up to the supply network without notifying the company, costing it thousands of pounds. (Coleman 1998:16)

Company Culture Water privatisation has resulted in a distinctly adversarial positioning between the industry and ‘the public’, and potentially between water companies and government, which has to choose, in every negotiation, between being complicit in an unpopular enclosure or adopting an oppositional role. This reconfiguration has created some critical changes in the internal culture of the water industry. Water users are no longer symbolic ‘co-managers’ through common ownership: they have been recast as ‘consumers’ and more recently as ‘customers’. The biggest change came when we were instructed to stop calling the general public consumers and call them customers, and there is a whole world of difference suddenly, which has implications. (INF43)

Some water company executives and employees find the adoption of commercial values worrisome. People who worked for the water companies many years ago – 136 –

Private Water spoke of the post-war era with nostalgia, describing how they felt they were providing a special service to ‘the community’. Part of this nostalgia is for a style and scale of management that positioned them in their local communities: Gone are the lovely days when I first started, when yes, I knew exactly what was happening on my little meter patch. In those days, in the 1960s . . . the public, the domestic public, they were all for you then. (INF44)

Certainly, it must have been preferable to have been perceived as benevolent bringers of water, rather than looked upon with deep resentment. It is telling that water users remain sympathetic to the water company employees ‘on the ground’: People generally were very sympathetic to the frontline people, but they weren’t sympathetic to water companies as such. The general public still, I think, don’t like the idea of water being controlled by companies. They never have done, it went right against public opinion. (John Willows)

Privatisation also accelerated the centralisation and mechanisation of services that was already a significant trend. This physically separated water company offices and employees from local communities, emphasising the geographic and social distance between them. In the last few years, for example, Wessex Water has ‘restructured’ considerably, shifting its headquarters to Bath, centralising and automating its billing and monitoring processes. The number of local employees has fallen rapidly in the drive for greater ‘efficiency’: thus at its Holdenhurst sewage works, where in the 1970s over thirty people were employed, there are now only two or three people overseeing the banks of computers that control the massive plant. Each ‘efficiency’ measure has brought merciless redundancies, not only reducing the number of people in contact with water users, but also making brutal alterations to the industry: I went to one meeting, somebody I had worked with all my time, and he hadn’t realised that his name was going to be on the list for redundancy, and he came out, he was in tears, and I thought to myself then, ‘if a company can do that to a man who I have respected for so many years, what is it doing to me? Is it time I went?’ I went home and talked it over with my wife that lunchtime, and came back and handed my notice in. (INF43) After a year of being out of the company, I was still in a position where I would like to have gone back. After eighteen months I didn’t want to go back because I didn’t like what I saw. The culture had just altered . . . there didn’t seem to be the camaraderie within the workplace that there used to be. (INF60)

– 137 –

Owning Water Commercial pressures have changed the relationship between senior management and the workforce, generating a certain amount of confusion for people involved in the industry: The staff who worked for me [before privatisation], they were excellent . . . they would do anything, and stay up any hours for the general public . . . Now, people who were used to providing a service have been charged with running a company. So they have got to run a company, they have got to do company things, and if people don’t like it . . . (INF60)

This suggests that privatisation has emphasised class divisions within the water industry itself. According to a senior manager at Wessex Water, the takeover by the American corporation Enron was commercially advantageous: We’re all for it – we in the company see it as a good opportunity . . . We are struggling to make an impact on our regulated business in profit terms, we need to expand to do that, to gain critical mass . . . If the Americans take us over, then it’s actually quite good . . . We’ll build on them an international water business . . . It gives a lot of opportunity for the likes of our staff – if they are interested in taking the challenge. (Richard Lacey)

However, those less in a position to ‘take the challenge’ and excluded from the share options offered to senior management were dubious about implications for company performance: There’s no staff to manage . . . This slimming down . . . when emergencies come on which aren’t planned, you’ve got very few people to start manning the ship. And therefore blokes just can’t do it . . . The people who are left, who’ve still got to run it, I think they are just getting a bit browned off with the fact that they are always on call . . . It’s all very well to have computer systems, [but] that only shows you what’s going wrong, it doesn’t put it right. (INF60) The state of the company at the moment is downhill, no doubt about it. Go round any of our sites compared to two years ago . . . seeing some of the better people creamed off and not replaced, I think poses a threat to the overall performance. (INF43)

Some former employees clearly felt that the new regimes did not subscribe to the institutional and personal values that had prevailed in earlier days: I am a big supporter of the traditional approach . . . I had an enormous responsibility. I was responsible in my latter years for the quality of the drinking water supplied to nearly a million people, and if any one of those people was ill as a result of my failure, I felt it really badly . . . I have always taken that very seriously. (INF43)

– 138 –

Private Water Thus, even within the industry, there is grassroots discomfort about the values and management style associated with privatisation. A number of the staff interviewed went to considerable lengths to disassociate themselves from the machinations taking place at an executive level: many expressed disquiet about privatisation itself, and quite a few were openly critical about the takeover of Wessex Water and its implications for social and environmental concerns. However, to a great extent the water companies are merely responding to political and economic shifts. The pressure for commercial ‘efficiency’ is partly the result of an increasingly competitive environment. Although cautious with regard to the supply of domestic water, OFWAT has actively encouraged greater competition in the supply of water to businesses, and there are small but committed rightwing interest groups lobbying forcefully for this to be extended into the domestic sphere. Competition is, of course, reliant upon a further commodifying objectification of water, and in this sense, the political pressure for competition is a further pull in an ideological tug-of-water between material aims to enclose and profit from resources, and broader, more complex beliefs and values.4 As well as coming under pressure to maintain a competitive edge, the industry has also been affected by the increasing complexity of the technology needed to treat and manage water. This requires major investment: People assume that we get [water] for free and we just shove it in the pipe and just cream off. They don’t realise that, even on this site, which is relatively simple, the technology involved is very expensive to run. On a larger site – like our site up at Blashford – surface water treatment, it is at a guess roughly three times at least the price of this site to operate, and you are into big money. (John Fisher)

Inevitably, conducting their operations in accord with commercial principles encourages water companies to feel that they do own the water they supply. More complex technical processing – i.e. more investment of human agency – similarly confers a stronger sense of ownership. Modern executives draw careful distinctions between an abstract ‘right to water’ and ‘a right to our water’. Wessex Water used to give local farmers the sewage sludge emerging from their treatment works to use as fertiliser, but now, in accord with new regulations, they have to transform this

4. In 2002 OFWAT conducted some research into public views on competition. Predictably (given the Blair government’s penchant for Thatcherite economic policies), this played into the hands of the pro-competition lobby. Offered carefully prescribed questions about competition in a brief telephone interview, many people said they were in favour of it. This was presented as an affirmation of government policy but, given the widespread feelings about privatisation that have emerged with more in-depth investigation, it seems more likely that water users would welcome anything potentially resulting in lower charges and less profit for the water companies.

– 139 –

Owning Water into expensive dried material and so: ‘we sell it now, we call it Biogran, and we sell it as a fertiliser’ (Geoff Galpin). The adversarial dynamic underlying commercial relationships sometimes emerges in more extreme forms. One of the most emotive issues about privatisation was that of companies disconnecting non-payers (although with the Water Industry Act [1999], this became illegal): Privatisation of water supply brought a new aggressively commercial approach to the poorest of water users. Thousands of households had their water supply cut off . . . The representative of Thames Water told the press in 1992 that ‘We are being too soft, and that is why our disconnections level will rise.’ (Ward 1997:11)

For some of the people now in charge of water supply, frustration about nonpayment of bills justifies a punitive position. Much depends upon whether those withholding payment are deemed ‘anti-social’ and therefore ‘outside’ the community, or whether they can be classified as the ‘deserving poor’. As a former bill collector for Wessex Water put it: There are those who are poor, for want of a better word. We won’t go into why they are poor, because I have certain reservations about some people who are poor . . . When you asked them, ‘is water important?’ ‘Oh, yes, ‘course it is’. Right, ‘Do you go out a lot or smoke a lot or drink a lot? Which do you think is more important?’ . . . Obviously you have to speak to the person to see their attitude, because it’s a lot to do with attitude . . . There are those who blatantly don’t want to pay because they think it comes down free, those are the ones I’m talking about . . . They are wrong . . . you can get nothing for nowt these days, that’s a fact of life . . . To me there is a line where you are going to stop, and people need to know that . . . because there are some . . . who take you for a mug straight away. (INF44)

Or as a manager at Bournemouth and West Hampshire Water commented: We’ve only cut people off where it appears to be where they don’t want to pay . . . I think we’d have to look at the individual case . . . I think at the end of the day they will obviously have to make a contribution to the water supply . . . It would be unfair for a customer perhaps to have a supply where they are not contributing . . . They have the option for bottled water don’t they? They can go out and buy from another source, or if it’s – if they are a special needs case, then perhaps the local authority has a responsibility to ensure that they have a water supply. (INF22)

Though the threat of disconnection has now receded, it is clearly an issue that could resurface in a different political context. A decade of privatisation has brought irreversible changes to the way in which such issues are assessed on both sides, For example, in 1999 OFWAT demanded financial compensation for ‘customers’ – 140 –

Private Water forced to boil their water because of failures in quality. Water users themselves have become considerably less sympathetic to problems in supply, similarly framing the relationship with the industry in more reductive commercial terms: It’s [become] more like the electricity and the gas, you know, ‘I pay for this, and I want my supply of it NOW!’ and I think that before, it was almost this old English attitude, ‘Oh, the water board, you know, and the trains – it’s just part of England, it’s part of its makeup’ and you expect things to go wrong a bit. I feel it’s changed, people’s attitudes changed towards it. (INF52)

In Dorset, people clearly saw the Enron takeover of Wessex Water as a further move away from a more benign and complex relationship: To me it’s like an uncaring attitude. They won’t be – they’ll sound very interested, and have all this, you know, American-speak ‘All Ah wanna do is please you’, and all that sort of rubbish, and I don’t think it will wash with English people, I don’t think it will work . . . It’s just the way that everything’s been privatised, we get treated in a way that we are not . . . [Before] if there was something going wrong, you’d phone up Bob down the road because he works for the water board, and Bob would say ‘Oh no, that’s all right love, I’ll come round and sort it out.’ Now you have a helpline number and you must phone this number, you know, and you get talked to by this machine, and it will say press one, press two . . . and you have to go back to nought to find out what the menu was again . . . I think in a way, people would rather have that sort of old fuddy-duddy attitude . . . Maybe it’s different in bigger cities. Perhaps this is a village attitude, a rural thing. (INF52)

It appears that both water users and many water industry employees would prefer a fuller social relationship to underpin their interactions, but the industry is heavily constrained by political and economic realities, and to some degree a prisoner of its own material development.

Industry Issues A further influence on the dynamics of this relationship is that the water industry has its own engagement with water. Being in physical control of resources, its interaction with water is continual and immediate, intimate, yet managerial and technical. A sketch of this interaction demonstrates why – though some employees may have doubts – the industry in general feels a keen sense of ownership. Although a number of interviewees in the Stour Valley suggested cynically that the only issue for their local water companies appeared to be generating ever larger profits for their shareholders, most conceded that the industry carries a considerable responsibility in supplying a large population with its most essential resource. – 141 –

Owning Water In reality, ‘the issues’ for water companies are complex: as well as maintaining profitability and financial stability and negotiating a sometimes tense relationship with regulatory agencies, they must also manage an ageing and increasingly unreliable infrastructure and an often intractable or elusive natural element. Each water company has a specific mix of financial and practical opportunities and limitations, and particular environmental and social pressures to which it is subjected. In broad terms, though, the most immediate issues for each water company are the operational challenges involved in maintaining and improving the infrastructure and ensuring the required amount and quality of supplies. The industry’s engagement with water is therefore dominated by technical issues and the material culture that manifests its control of water. Pumping stations and treatment plants stand along the Stour like outposts of ownership, physically removing water from the land and transforming it into a ‘water supply’.5 These mesh with an active network of abstraction, supply and (in the case of Wessex Water) disposal. Industrial terminology about ‘the system’ reveals a neat homologue of circulation and movement, but although it imaginatively echoes human and ecosystemic processes, it is an engineering model in which the material culture – a series of pumps and conduits – is essentially a giant machine embedded in and under the physical landscape to ‘capture’ natural resources and convert them into a substance suitable for human use. The more complex this network becomes, the greater the water companies’ control, enabling them to move water around from one part of the landscape to another. ‘Zones of demand’ connect with a network of supply points, valves, booster pumps, service storage and directional flows. As one engineer explained: The idea is to network your whole distribution system; you divide it up into zones . . . Then you go out and take pressures around your system, and then what you would map is your whole system, to find where you had weaknesses of not being able to get water into a given place. Therefore you would have to possibly either increase the size of main, or put a new main in . . . You can’t develop new sources, so what you’ve got to do, if you’ve got a deficit somewhere, you’ve got to be able to get your surpluses to where your deficits are. (John Willows)

5. Wessex Water, for example, has sources near the headwaters of the Stour, at Penselwood, and other abstraction sites down the river at Okeford Fitzpaine, Blandford, Sturminster Marshall, Shapwick and near the coast at Corfe Mullen, where a major aquifer feeds the reservoir which supplies Poole. It has experimental reed bed sewage works at Marnhull, and a large conventional sewage plant at Holdenhurst, which deals with the sewage from Bournemouth (whose population is about 140,000, rising to 180,000 in the summer). Bournemouth and West Hampshire Water (which is a water supply company only) draws four-fifths of its water from the Stour and the Avon rivers and so has a number of sites along the Stour, for example at Wimborne and Longham.

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Private Water Maps of this network reveal a highly functional and reductive vision: composed entirely of industrial technology, they present water as units to be directed from place to place in a measured material flow. The Stour itself is invisible, appearing only in the familiar names of the villages along its course. There is no human element, other than in these names and implicitly in the ‘demand zones’, and no sense of the wider ecosystem from which the resources are drawn: it is a ‘working’ map. For most company employees, contact with water resources comes via highly specialised engineering activities or the various filtration and chemical stages of processing that produce drinking water and treat sewage. Many water company executives still regard this as their proper focus, with wider environmental or social issues seen as the responsibility of others: ‘it is the responsibility of the EA to manage the resource’ (Mark Burton). Another major concern for the water industry is encouraging the ‘right’ level of water use. There are conflicting demands: with rising domestic water usage, companies either have to invest heavily in new water storage or treatment technologies, or persuade water users to accept serious environmental degradation. On the other hand, major conservation efforts could produce a massive drop in profits (as happened with the plunge in commercial water usage). As a senior Wessex Water executive pointed out, higher tariffs for ‘luxury’ water uses (sprinklers and swimming pools) might encourage more water conservation, but could wipe out a significant amount of company profitability. It is therefore not surprising that water companies are ambivalent about encouraging conservation unless they anticipate real problems in keeping up with demand. Efforts to keep water usage at the most advantageous levels intersects with another new pressure on the privatised utilities, which is the management of company image and relations with government agencies, NGOs, the people to whom they supply water, and their own shareholders. This requires them to be all things to all people: they need to be seen as a lean and efficient profit-making machine to their shareholders. Water users require unlimited, cheap and reliable water supplies, as well as demanding environmental and social responsibility. Environmental and conservation groups threaten profitability by pushing for water conservation and more sustainable management. Government agencies demand, on the one hand, lower prices for water and, on the other, greater environmental concern. So public relations issues for water companies are complex, sometimes producing an odd mixture of secrecy and defensiveness, coupled with intense performative efforts to emphasise particular aspects of company activity. Thus Wessex Water makes great efforts to publicise wildlife conservation on its riparian wetlands, while privately arguing with OFWAT for a longer time span for phasing in environmental improvements.

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Owning Water Like other water companies in the UK, Wessex Water’s public relations efforts take a variety of forms: media publicity about environmental improvements; independent advisory panels on environmental issues; customer surveys; public information leaflets about services; and faster responses to customer complaints (other than those concerned with rising water bills6). Each water company now produces a veritable forest of public information leaflets: ‘explaining’ water quality, or offering information on fluoride, chlorine, nitrates, pesticides, taste and odour, iron, and so forth. Detailed reports about financial assets and costs, services and procedures are illustrated with photographs of expensive infrastructural developments and leading-edge technical processes. Social responsibility is demonstrated via company involvement in WaterAid projects in the developing world.7 Companies also meet a new statutory duty to report on their environmental activities with glossy publications in which images of kingfishers, swans and orchids sit alongside ‘heritage’ water supply sites, maps of river walks, and photographs of people engaged in recreational activities. The industry has become increasingly involved in local wildlife conservation. For example, Water UK, in partnership with the Wildlife Trusts and the Environment Agency, initiated an Otter and Rivers Project in 1998 to lead a UK Species Action Plan (SAP) for otters. This has proven popular, drawing in numerous volunteers to build otter holts and improve wetland areas. A map of a river walk in Bournemouth and West Hampshire Water’s 1997 Environmental Review simply depicts the river itself, with its treatment plant at Knapp Mill described as a ‘historical site’ and what have become standard components of many such publications: a flower, a bird, a fish and an angler. The map is primarily intended to guide ramblers around a river walk to a fishery in Christchurch harbour. The only technical reference, the treatment works at Knapp Mill, is thus integrated into the historical, aesthetic, ecological and social aspects of the river. There have been improvements in access to reservoirs, new opportunities for watersports: bird-watching and ‘wildlife walks’, and sponsored training weekends for sailors and windsurfers. Sponsorship itself has become a common public relations measure, often linked with environmental activities and establishing partnerships between water companies and local conservation groups or schools. One of the most astute ‘image management’ efforts in Dorset has been Wessex Water’s museum at Sutton Poyntz. Depicting the history of water supply, and exhibiting lovingly renovated machinery of past times, it recalls the arduous

6. Between April and June 1999 complaints about billing and charging constituted over twothirds of all complaints to water companies in Dorset (OFWAT Wessex Customer Service Committee 1999b). 7. WaterAid is a major charitable organisation committed to improving water supply in the developing world. It is supported by Water UK.

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Private Water difficulties encountered in providing clean water supplies and implicitly presents contemporary efforts as a continuation of this struggle. The museum has proved very popular. I get . . . industrial archaeology groups from the Hampshire area and Gloucester, Devon, Somerset – all these little industrial groups come in . . . If we say I’ve had 1400 people a year through here and it’s been going on for ten years, that’s 14,000 people and I haven’t had one adverse comment on ‘why is my money being spent on this’. They are complimentary. They say ‘this is interesting, this is good, I like this.’ (John Willows)

The water industry’s external representational forms are thus much more focused upon the aesthetic qualities of water and its social and spiritual meanings. They depict a benign and holistic relationship between water companies and ‘local’ communities. There is a sharp contrast with the company’s ‘internal’ maps, which describe water resources in primarily economic and technical terms: a product to be moved around and sold in units. It could be argued that this contrasting visual material simply reflects the external face and internal realities of the water companies, but this would ignore the recursive effects of such self-representation. Under pressure to ameliorate an adversarial relationship with water users, companies have necessarily broadened their involvement in local issues. Wessex Water now works more closely with the Environment Agency, conservation organisations and other community groups, sponsoring local schools and youth clubs, creating wildlife reserves and fisheries and collaborating with local councils in recycling programmes. In doing so, it has become involved in new kinds of engagement with the river: We work very closely with the EA, we work with English Nature, and I sit on the Dorset Heritage Coastline Forum, to ensure that we play our part in the wider ecology of the area. (Richard Lacey)

Whether embarked upon as mere image massage or in a genuine attempt to reestablish more positive relationships with communities, these environmental and social activities may have some impact on corporate culture. A representative of English Nature suggested that sustained pressure on the water companies has had some effects: Providing the regulator, and that’s the Environment Agency, is sufficiently powerful or argues sufficiently well that this work needs to be done, then I get the impression that Wessex [Water] are almost effectively bound to do it . . . The situation has changed: I think the water companies have become very much aware now of their public image . . . In the past . . . in some instances, that was green ‘window dressing’, but I see now in water companies – some water companies – it goes much deeper than that . . . Wessex

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Owning Water Water have Jonathon Porritt8 as an adviser on how to run their business to be more green . . . They have actually now got, within their corporate structure, a fairly powerful committee working I think direct to the Chairman or the Chief Executive, over the way they actually run their business. (Douglas Kite)

The institutional culture of the privatised water companies is neither monolithic nor immune to pressures for reform. Against the ‘top-down’ pressures for competition, profitability and ‘efficiency’, some deeper internal doubts and the grassroots influence of local conservation and community organisations are pushing the water industry to re-engage with its social environment. It is perhaps too early to say whether this is merely a grudging and performative response, or real reform, but actions engender values, and if the water companies continue to be involved in and identify with this kind of interaction, it is more likely that industry culture will reflect broader evaluations of water.

8. Jonathon Porritt is a well-known environmental writer and activist in the UK.

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Governing Water

–9– Governing Water Regulating Water Water is not only the most contested but also the most regulated resource in the UK. The shift in ownership represented by privatisation was meant to be counterbalanced by some ongoing public control of water resources via government bodies: OFWAT, the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI), the Environment Agency and (at a wider community level) the European Union. All are empowered by detailed legislation – Water Acts, Environment Acts, Directives, and so forth – to require annual reports from the water companies; to limit charges; to issue abstraction licences; to prosecute polluters; to monitor the activities of the industry; and to evaluate water quality. In each instance punitive measures are available to deal with transgressions by water companies or other water users. Such formal and explicit legislation is generally the product of large-scale, complex societies in which ‘top-down’ mechanisms of control promulgate dominant cultural values. In this sense, the regulatory systems of a society constitute its particular representation of order, providing an ‘ideal’ model of social and economic relations. Legislation about water has long taproots into earlier concepts of social morality. The laws empowering OFWAT to control water charges, and the more recent legislation forbidding water companies to disconnect households, bear the traces of many previous efforts to advance societal health and protect people’s rights to resources. For example, Victorian (or early Church) concern for ‘the poor’ is echoed in some of the 1999 Water Industry Act provisions, which, as the Secretary of State advised OFWAT, would ‘provide protection for vulnerable households on measured charges – the cost of which would be met by water customers as a whole’ (OFWAT 1999c:11). In the Holy Trinity of UK regulators the major role is taken by OFWAT, whose responsibility is to ensure that everyone has access to water resources in physical and economic terms. In this sense, OFWAT’s raison d’être is to uphold people’s rights to be benefit from the capillary flow of societal resources, and to exert power on their collective behalf. In practice this entails balancing the needs of the industry with those of water users. OFWAT can demand particular directions in water management, for example requiring infrastructural improvements. Crucially, it has the final say on water charges, set in regular (five-yearly) price reviews. This power – 147 –

Owning Water is exerted mainly via direct negotiation with the water industry, but some takes place through the regional and national WaterVoice committees. The challenge for OFWAT is to discern the genuine financial and technical requirements of the industry, and to gauge the needs of water users and their priorities in terms of water quality, costs and environmental management. However, as the history of water regulation demonstrates, this assessment is heavily subject to the political ideology dominant at the time and the weight given to the interests of particular groups. Just as privatisation gave a free rein to profit-making, the assertion of rights to water and the demand for lower charges under a Labour government reflected a particular political context. However, there is little resemblance between the New Labour government and the post-war Labour Party that was so committed to nationalisation. Under New Labour’s auspices OFWAT issued information leaflets, stressing its representative role and advising people on issues such as ‘how to make a complaint’ but the language in these is revealing. Defining water users as ‘customers’ and presenting water supply as a simple economic and technical service, it positions OFWAT as a consumer organisation, there to make sure that people get ‘value for money’: Protecting the interests of water customers . . . OFWAT . . . is responsible for making sure that the water and sewerage companies in England and Wales give you a good quality, efficient service at a fair price. (OFWAT 1999e:1–2)

This suggests some ideological alignment with the privatisation of water resources and their representation as a commercial product. It also points to a problem that characterises OFWAT’s and other government departments’ interactions with water users. As a centralised State bureaucracy, OFWAT has very little day-to-day involvement in the communities it is designed to protect. Focused on analysing fiscal or technical arguments, it generally discusses water issues via the most reductive ‘common currency’: the idiom of money. Though social issues surface like awkward bits of flotsam in this cash flow of discussion, they are generally subsumed by it. In many respects this merely illustrates the difficulties of administering large-scale centralised governance. An inevitable reliance upon reductive forms – rather than an articulation of complex social issues – can be seen equally in other central government agencies. However, such a reductive discourse doesn’t engage with people’s deeper concerns about water or attend to the environmental issues related to water resource management. OFWAT has been notably slow to encompass these, although in recent years it has moved slowly (and reluctantly) towards accepting a greater responsibility for environmental protection.1 Relations with the Environment 1. Thus in planning the 1999 Periodic Review, the Chairman of the OFWAT National Consumer Council stated: ‘Water companies should maintain the momentum of environmental improvements but face the challenge of reducing levels of bills. There is not a choice to be made between higher

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Governing Water Agency remain distant, and in OFWAT’s activities, environmental concerns are rarely regarded sympathetically. Although their remit is increasingly constrained, some issues are dealt with by OFWAT’s regional Customer Service Committees (CSCs). These consist of unelected volunteers and OFWAT-funded Chairpersons. Public representatives on these panels tend to be ‘the great and the good’: company executives with economic or legal expertise, ex-civil servants or engineers.2 Each committee also has a regional manager and some support staff. With a role to represent water users, the CSCs originally operated under the umbrella of the former OFWAT National Consumer Council (ONCC). In 2002, though, the ONCC and its committees achieved greater independence, becoming ‘WaterVoice’ (with the regional committees renamed WaterVoice Thames, WaterVoice South-East, and so forth). With a florescence of shiny publications, this move was presented as an achievement of healthy ‘independence’ from government.3 The change could, however, equally well be interpreted as a disempowerment and marginalisation of the committees and their coordinating body. Whatever the purpose, it created a further separation between OFWAT and water users, and the reframing of WaterVoice more explicitly as a ‘consumer organisation’ represents a further concretisation of a particular ideological stance. Regional meetings of the CSCs/WaterVoice committees are illustrative of the relationship between the regulators, the industry and ‘the public’. In Dorset, meetings generally consisted of the CSC volunteers and OFWAT staff, water company representatives (usually senior executives), a Drinking Water Inspectorate officer and sometimes a representative from the Environment Agency. Occasionally local conservationists or journalists attended, and – even more rarely – one or two lay members of the public (the latter usually because they had a major problem with one of the water companies). Meetings were quite formal: members of the public could attend as observers, but were asked to table questions beforehand, rather than joining in the debates.

environmental standards or lower bills; customers have a right to expect a top class, efficient and tightly regulated water industry to deliver both’ (see ONCC [now WaterVoice] web-site: http:// www.ofwat.gov.uk/aptrix/ofwat/publish.nsf/content/navigation-watervoice-homepage). 2. The committees advertise in local newspapers for volunteers, who are then interviewed by the Chairperson and support staff. Selection seems to be based on a combination of a wish to gather people with useful expertise and an effort to create a group that is representative of the population within the region. The former criterion seems more readily achievable than the latter. Although I would not define myself as either great or remotely good, I was a member of the Thames CSC for a couple of years until 2002, and attended the Wessex region CSC meetings while conducting research in Dorset between 1997 and 2000. 3. This does, of course, raise the rather disturbing question as to why one group of pubic representatives should require such distance from another group of – supposedly – public representatives.

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Owning Water WaterVoice meetings consider the water company accounts, their reports on water quality (and the DWI’s monitoring), and assess the current availability of water supplies. Most of the items on the agenda are economic, technical and legal issues. Discussions develop from one meeting to the next, and while this is necessary if co-management of any sort is to take place, it would require considerable dedication (and spare time) for any member of the public to gain sufficient understanding to have a meaningful involvement in the process. So although the door may be open to public consultation, the complexities of the issues are such that few step through it. The other major remit of the regional committees is to examine the types and numbers of complaints from water users. Some individual complaints are considered, and if they reach a regional meeting they tend to generate prompt action. For example, at one meeting in Dorset, it took a Wessex Water executive one phone call to sort out a complaint that had been at an impasse for several months, and in Bournemouth, where some customers had detected a taint in the water, Bournemouth and West Hampshire Water Company were quick to respond with a customer survey before the next meeting. In the late 1990s these incidents seemed like minor business, to be dealt with quickly so that meetings could focus on more substantive issues about pricing and regulation. However, with the ONCC’s shift, as WaterVoice, to a more ‘independent’ relationship with OFWAT, a subtext appeared to be that it would leave the more complex negotiations with the water industry to OFWAT, and give its attention primarily to complaint processing. In becoming detached from the powerful regulatory body, it seems that ‘WaterVoice’ became rather less audible. Periodic Reviews are thus largely a dance between OFWAT (and to a lesser degree other government departments) and the water industry, with ‘the public’ sitting very much on the sidelines. As Cooper et al. have pointed out, such exercises rapidly become ritualised and performative: [There are] two separate review processes operating concurrently – a covert dialogue between the regulators and the firms in the industry and an overt dialogue taking place in the public arena . . . The unfolding of each review is so similar it can be likened to a film script which is constantly re-enacted in all such industries . . . The review [is] a legitimating vehicle for the regulator and the regulated who . . . exist in a symbiotic relationship. (1999:1)

In this performative polka there is much fancy footwork by well-trained water company executives, and a certain amount of cosiness in their contact with government officials. It is plain at meetings that OFWAT officials and DWI experts know the water company executives well: they are on first name terms, greet each other with warmth, and clearly have long-term working relationships. That is not to

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Governing Water suggest there is no tension in these interactions: clearly the pricing issue is always a contentious matter, as are demands for closer regulation. Occasionally tempers fray and first name familiarity gives way to more steely interchanges. For example, the Dorset CSC was most unhappy about the Enron takeover of Wessex Water and at a meeting in Shaftesbury (in 1999) frosty comments were made about the lack of transparency in Wessex Water’s financial arrangements with its new parent company: ‘the existing presentation . . . hides the real increases to ordinary shareholders’ (OFWAT Wessex Customer Service Committee 1999a:1). As noted, the relationship between the industry and government regulators warms and cools with the prevailing political climate. In the first Price Review under a Labour government (in 1999), the Director General’s insistence on price reductions brought loud protests from the water industry that such demands would create huge job losses and threaten its ability to meet environmental and quality targets. A Wessex Water executive accused the government of vote buying: ‘It’s probably politically driven that OFWAT want to see a one-off price reduction’ (INF28). Many companies threatened to appeal to the Competition Commission, although in the event only two companies did so.4 In a meeting of the Wessex CSC, Bristol Water said that it ‘would have to remove all the ‘frills’ from its service’, and would now struggle to meet requirements for the replacement of lead pipes. Its executives complained that the regulations regarding ‘vulnerable’ customers would ‘place a huge administrative burden on the company’ and announced 100 redundancies. Bournemouth and West Hampshire Water stated that the new price limits would leave ‘little flexibility in the system for discretionary expenditure’ and reported plans for a 10–12% reduction in its workforce. Wessex Water insisted that it would have to ‘struggle to do anything outside what was included in the price limits’ and argued that OFWAT’s actions could be ‘considered as anti-competitive’. The local CSC, in turn, criticised Wessex Water for again failing to provide important financial information to the committee, expressed disappointment in the company’s negative publicity about the regulatory process, and criticised its market research that – without actually offering this as an option – had managed to conclude that the public was not in favour of a price cut. Despite this ritual squealing, all water companies continued to report healthy profits, and in 2002 a Thames CSC member posed the following question to the Director General: Now that the results . . . following the last price review are being reported, it would appear that the protests of the companies about the dangerously unreasonable outcome of PRO3 [the last price review] were at best disingenuous and at worst deliberately misleading. Do you have plans for measures to force them to present realistic and honest strategic plans for 2005/2010? (Nicola Walton) 4. Sutton and East Surrey Water and Mid-Kent Water.

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Owning Water These kinds of wrangles were doubtless inevitable in the first review to demand any reduction in water charges, but it would take a far greater political sea change to rock the boat more seriously. For the most part, engaged in continual discussions, the relationship between OFWAT and the water industry often seems much closer than that between OFWAT and ‘the public’. Along the Stour, though older people had generally heard of OFWAT, and knew that it was ‘the regulatory body on water charges’ or ‘some kind of ombudsman thing’, few could define the issues that it is empowered to deal with and almost none knew of the existence of the regional committees and their public meetings.5 Many people claimed to feel as alienated from their own government as they did from the companies now managing water resources. Rather than identifying with OFWAT as their representative, they described the government as being ‘hand in glove with big business’. The regulators and the industry were commonly lumped together as an amorphous ‘they’, and it was generally assumed that government agencies would represent self-serving political interests rather than those of the local or wider communities: [OFWAT] they’d be putting it forward from their point of view . . . I suppose they are doing a job of sorts, but . . . every man’s got his price too. (INF13)

Although some people suggested that the only solution was re-nationalisation, they were dubious that restoring the control of water resources to a highly centralised government would have much local effect. In any case, despite the 2001 Glas Cymru experiment in Wales (in which a failing water company was transformed into a not-for-profit semi-publicly owned corporation), OFWAT blocked other proposals for mutualisation. For example, the regulator prevented Yorkshire Water from mutualising on the grounds that it was merely trying to unload unprofitable infrastructural assets onto the public while retaining the profitable operational side of the company, and it went to some lengths to state its opposition to any kind of formal profit sharing between water companies and the public. The regulator argued that higher profits now would mean lower water charges later, and that it was important not to blunt incentives. It appears that the centralisation which followed post-war reforms, and the subsequent long Conservative reassertion of privatised ownership, have eroded the ability of local communities to identify either with their supposed representatives or with the water companies. The handover of water resources to Enron was a final straw for some:

5. OFWAT and the ONCC’s research, conducted in 2001, observed that ‘two thirds of customers were unable to name, unprompted, any organization protecting the interests of water customers . . . less than one in ten were aware of ONCC or the Customer Service Committees’ (ONCC 2001:iii).

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Governing Water Our water supplies belonged to us the citizens until privatised . . . The privatised company had its first duty to its shareholders and not to us . . . who in the past four years have seen our bill increase by something in the order of 50 per cent. Now we are in the hands of an American company which must owe its first duty to American shareholders . . . One would have thought that a strong government would have stepped in to forbid this deal . . . Every neighbour, passer-by and friend I speak to is alarmed by this latest sell-off of our public utilities, but none of us feel that the Government has the interest of us, the taxpayers, at heart. (Sid Blanche, letter to the Western Gazette, 8 July 1999)

Minding the Quality Water users have a rather different relationship with the other major water regulator in the UK, the Drinking Water Inspectorate. Like OFWAT, the DWI is called upon to balance risks and costs in its assessment of water quality, but it is not involved in debates about access and rights to resources. Its major task is to check that water supplies meet legal standards designed to protect public health. It also has to keep a watchful eye upon emerging medical evidence that might require new standards, and consider whether the health risks justify the costs of initiating changes. With major improvements in water treatment technology and stricter legislation, water quality in the UK improved considerably in the latter half of the twentieth century. Drinking water is now tested for nearly sixty different things, including temperature, pH, colour, turbidity, odour, taste, alkalinity and hardness; bacteria from sewage; nitrates; a range of organic and inorganic chemicals; industrial effluents and pesticides. Apart from taste and odour,6 all of these tests are quantitative, with precise parameters, and, according to the DWI: In 1998 the water companies in England and Wales carried out approximately 2.8 million tests on drinking water samples of which 99.78% passed. This is better than in 1997 and a considerable improvement on 1992. (1999:3)7

Although this is reassuring, it does not acknowledge that the legislation limiting the amounts of substances permitted in water is the product of a lengthy and complex process of negotiation between different interest groups. The agreed parameters sometimes appear to be more closely related to what is historically relevant or achievable than what might otherwise be deemed desirable. It might be more 6. Though tested only qualitatively, any significant taste or odour automatically requires investigation. 7. According to the DWI, the number of tests failing to meet water standards fell from 50,476 in 1992 to 6,244 in 1998, or to put it another way around, the percentage of compliance rose from 98.7% to 99.78% (DWI 1999:4). It has since remained at about this level.

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Owning Water accurate to say that water quality has changed: emerging from the taps with sparkling clarity, it certainly looks a great deal better than it did a hundred years ago. Gone are the black sludge, the sewage and the virulent biological organisms carrying waterborne diseases. In these respects, water quality certainly has improved beyond recognition. However, such obvious problems have been replaced by a much more subtle set of pollutants: the complex chemical waste products of a sophisticated industrial economy and an increasingly medicated society. While industrial pollution has decreased with the demise of the manufacturing industry,8 scientists are only just beginning to examine the potential health and environmental effects of the substances now commonly found in drinking water, and the new chemicals continually joining this list. A further problem is presented by the fact that tests are generally designed to test one-to-one relationships between pollutants and health or ecological effects, and do not consider their cumulative or combined effects. Controversies about chlorine and fluoride have resurfaced at regular intervals, intensifying in the last few years with emergent information about long-term health effects. Despite its vaunted prevention of tooth decay, fluoride has been reported as causing cancer, osteoporosis, hyperactive behaviour and impaired intellect, leading opponents of this ‘enforced medication’ to argue that the claimed dental benefits are ‘trivial by comparison’ (Brindle 1999:7). There are also increasing concerns about chlorine and the risk of bowel, kidney or bladder cancer. Recent Norwegian research establishing links between chlorine use and spina bifida and stillbirths prompted the UK government to commission another independent study and sparked a replay of earlier debates:9 British water industry experts have not dismissed the findings, but said that the safety benefits of purification outweigh the risks . . . Dr John Marshall, of the Pure Water Association . . . said ‘It shows we should be paying more attention to the chemicals we put in drinking water and be looking for other alternatives to chlorination. A number of safe non-toxic options exist, such as treating water with the gas ozone or ultra violet.’ (Thornton and Halle 2000:18)

Despite these ‘unknowns’, the DWI, OFWAT and the water industry are invariably reassuring about water quality. In the regulatory arena the DWI appears as a specialised and rather distant group of ‘experts’. With a primarily scientific remit, it gains

8. According to the Environment Agency, emissions of lead, benzene and particulates from large industrial sites have more than halved in the last decade, and big reductions in other pollutants have been made at individual sites (EA 1999c). 9. A Norwegian study of 141,000 births over three years found a 14% increased risk of birth defects in areas with chlorinated water (Thornton and Halle 2000:18).

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Governing Water the authority and assumptions of probity imputed to scientists and researchers in general. We are a team of professionals with a wide range of experience and expert knowledge in all aspects of water supply. This includes chemistry, microbiology and engineering. On health matters we get advice from the Government’s Chief Medical Officer. (DWI 1998b:2)

The inhabitants of the Stour Valley found the DWI’s purpose easy to grasp and expressed a certain amount of faith in its impartiality. Their expectation was that it would protect them from pollutants that might find their way into water courses. Working within a scientific paradigm, the DWI is mainly concerned with measuring the presence of substances in the water defined as problematic by medical evidence and legislation, rather than attempting to ensure that water is not overly adulterated or acculturated in its treatment. Nevertheless, its activities do intersect with ideas about balance between nature and culture in water, and with wider concepts of purity. Despite the rumbling doubts, or perhaps because of them, public concerns about these issues give the DWI particular status: as a defender of water ‘purity’ against pollution, it protects the core meanings encoded in water – its ability to contain and to generate ‘life’ and ‘health’. Given the close conceptual tie between material and spiritual health in water, the DWI has a symbolically sacred duty, in which it upholds a collective moral order. The DWI’s reportage of whether water can be deemed pure and clean – however pragmatically framed – carries considerable weight, and it is revealing (and rather charming) to see that in its public information leaflets the Inspectorate (1998b) chooses to define its workforce angelically, as the ‘guardians of drinking water quality’.

Feeling the Width In a much broader sense, the Environment Agency carries similar responsibilities: its legislative task is to protect the ‘balance’ and ‘health’ of the environment as a whole.10 With this holistic remit the issues that the EA confronts are commensurately diverse, but its major challenges in relation to water resources are to prevent over-abstraction and pollution. It is now closely involved in dealing with low river flows and the loss of wetland areas in the summer, and with the widespread flooding now occurring with alarming regularity in the winter. 10. The Environment Agency is empowered mainly by the Environment Act 1995, but also draws on a number of more specific pieces of legislation: for example, the Water Resources Act 1991; the Land Drainage Act 1991; the Control of Pollution Act 1989; the Salmon and Freshwater Fisheries Act 1975. It also administers over twenty-five EU Directives, and is affected by a further seventy. (EA 1997a:2)

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Owning Water Water management forms a large proportion of the EA’s responsibilities. It monitors and measures rainfall, river flows and aquifer levels, licenses abstraction, inspects discharges to water courses, punishes polluters and promotes demand management. It has an equally large set of responsibilities for wildlife monitoring, habitat protection, flood defences, wetland management, education, legislative enforcement, fisheries and so forth. (EA 1998:3–4)

Charged with maintaining the integrity of an entire ecosystem, the EA has a role that is clearly protective of ‘nature’ rather than ‘culture’. This positioning is crucial in defining its relationship to other resource managers. In essence, it is perceptually aligned with aspects of ‘the system’ generally categorised as wild, subversive, emotional and feminine. As with other environmental organisations, this can only set it at odds with the patriarchal institutions whose purpose is to impose cultural order upon nature. This comes through in the profile of its staff: many EA employees are somewhat different in their interests and politics from those in other government agencies. Engineers, hydrologists, biologists, researchers, inspectors and bailiffs are both a powerful epistemic community and a semi-localised group with agency and real ‘hands on’ input into how water resources are managed. Some of them point to this de facto ownership and control as a motivation for their choice of career, framing it in terms of ‘doing something useful’ or ‘taking care of things’. Despite its official position, therefore, the Environment Agency is often seen as somehow ‘outside’ more central government institutions. Efforts have been made to remould it: for example, the 1995 Environment Act required the agency to make suitably ‘scientific’ ‘cost–benefit analyses’ in exercising its statutory powers. Such efforts have had limited success: the complex factors that comprise environmental issues cannot be readily quantified or compressed into reductive representational forms. Similarly, there have been major efforts to enlarge and centralise the operations of the EA. In 1996 it was reorganised and expanded to take over the responsibilities of the National Rivers Authority (NRA), the Inspectorate of Pollution and the Waste Regulation Authority. This was problematic, creating a huge and cumbersome central body whose activities remained ineluctably local and multifarious. Subsequently, the Agency made prodigious efforts to undo some of this centralisation and strengthen its local involvement. Returning to the principles of Local Agenda 21,11 it began to coordinate its activities within particular river catchments and, in Dorset at least, appears to have emerged from a period of disarray: We’ve noticed a very positive change in the EA in the last couple of years . . . We didn’t used to have a lot to do with them when they were the NRA. They didn’t have staff to visit

11. Local Agenda 21, emerging from a major ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio in 1992, defined a broad social and environmental agenda and underlined the need to situate activities locally.

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Governing Water sites or come to meetings – now they do have well-qualified and helpful staff. (Clare Freeman)

The ‘hands on’ nature of the EA’s activities seems to have enabled it to establish a productive working relationship with many community and non-governmental organisations. Now that the close-grained communication between millers and watermen has long gone, the EA is physically responsible for managing the river, and its employees are conscious of the historical importance of this role: [Millowners] can’t just willy-nilly open the hatches and close hatches . . . They’ve got to inform us and say, for example, ‘I want to lower this bit of water . . . so I can do a bit of rendering on the brickwork’ . . . One of us will have a look at it . . . A lot of people have gone off the land and off the rivers now. The mills have gone, and the days of the river keepers have gone, and all the management with regards to the water meadows – it was a work of art doing those little water meadows. (David Jones)

The EA is by far the most ‘visible’ government department in water resource management. EA vehicles and uniformed staff can be seen regularly along the Stour, demonstrably taking care of the river. The Environment Agency are pretty hot on [policing chemical pollution], because they have obviously been doing a lot of work the River Stour . . . It does need to be watched very closely, because a lot of industries . . . use the water. (Sue Jackson)

Crucially, it makes prodigious efforts to enlist ‘the public’ in this endeavour, for example distributing leaflets inviting recreational water users to adopt a role that supports its own endeavours to protect water resources: You too can be a pollution detective. If you notice pollution of a river or stream, please telephone the Environment Agency Emergency Hotline . . . where a 24-hour river watch is available to take your call. (EA 1997c:7)

Such immediate and local involvement sets up the potential for local water users to co-identify with the agency’s staff, whose remit is already sympathetic to their concerns and desires to ‘reconnect’ with nature. The EA therefore enjoys a level of popular support that bolsters its ideologically subversive political position. This creates some conflict with other agencies. The impression at CSC meetings is that the EA is seen as a rather tiresome relation, awkward to include, inclined to ‘muddy the issues’, and invariably demanding of expenditure. At times the agency’s participation appears to be tolerated mainly as a sop to the persistent environmental concerns of the general populace. It is severely marginalised in negotiations between OFWAT and the water industry: WaterVoice meetings regularly take place – 157 –

Owning Water without any representation from the EA at all, or its representatives find that their input is undermined. At the Thames CSC some members of the committee demonstrated entrenched opposition to the concerns of the EA, and it is plain that the relationship between OFWAT and the EA has been very strained in the past. Even with OFWAT’s new remit to include environmental issues, real collaboration with the EA seems a long way off. A major problem in water regulation is that the aims of OFWAT, the DWI, the EA and the EU bodies are more contradictory than complementary. The DWI’s central concern is to maintain medically safe water quality and minimise risks to human health. However, this is more readily achieved through aquifer or upriver abstraction, rather than later-stage treatment, so it is difficult for the DWI to support the EA’s efforts to reduce pressure on the ecosystems by discouraging upriver abstraction and insisting on downriver treatment. The EA is also party to the mandatory leakage targets imposed on water companies, and has supported legislation demanding higher standards for sewage treatment and discharges into water courses. Meanwhile OFWAT’s goal is to minimise costs to water users (and political costs to the central government), which leads it to sympathise with the water companies’ desire to forgo expensive infrastructural improvements. As a Wessex Water representative put it: The water quality regulations have been altered and are being altered again, and it doesn’t take much. For example, the [EU] Lead Directive, when that’s enforced – if it is enforced – could cost the company a considerable sum of money. (John Fisher)

Despite the costs, EA officials argue that EU Directives have been the major cause of recent environmental improvements in the UK, but the ONCC (now WaterVoice) and the regional committees seem more inclined to support the water industry in protests about the ‘unnecessary costs’: We expect decisions at European level to strike a sensible balance between environmental and public health considerations on one hand and customers’ interests in relation to higher bills and affordability on the other. (ONCC 1999:17)

Like many environmental organisations, the EA is equivocal about reductions in water prices, since this is deemed unlikely to permit investment in better infrastructure or rein in the rising usage levels that drive over-abstraction. Its support for high charges, however, is contingent upon this income actually being spent of environmental protection. 12 12. Although the water companies are eager to assert that price rises are needed for ‘environmental improvements’, their interpretation of these is somewhat different from that of the EA. For example, Wessex Water’s description of ‘environmental improvements’ includes the replacement of lead pipes, which is part of its required upgrading of the system.

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Governing Water Thus the EA seems unlikely to achieve a mutually supportive role either with centralised government agencies or with a privatised industry, although the water industry has been keen to present a more ‘positive’ working relationship. As one executive put it: We have a robust relationship, in that they are effectively the gamekeeper and we are the poacher, but we have consents for all of our works and standards . . . And if we do breach those limits then we can and will be prosecuted for them, but . . . we have a very good working relationship. I am certainly on first name terms with my opposite number in the Environment Agency, we meet once every couple of months and chew over issues. (Richard Lacey)

For some people along the Stour this cordiality is sufficient reason to assume that the EA is complicit in an unwelcome echelon of power: I feel very bitter about the Environment Agency . . . All the people who have left Wessex Water and then went to the National Rivers Authority they then went to the EA . . . The actual overall thing has just changed its clothing two or three times. Although you are dealing with the same people, they are all under a different hat. (John Freeman)

The EA undoubtedly struggles with the tension between the pressure to act as a central ‘manager’ of resources and to deal with more complex local realities. Its authority is based on legislative standards and scientific and engineering expertise, and its many biologists, chemists and hydrologists engage with water in material terms. Their professional artefacts are designed to measure, monitor and manipulate water, and their maps, leaflets and Local Plans are similarly focused on ecological events rather than qualitative or abstract issues. As one local officer said: The Agency’s got its LA21 [Local Agenda 21] responsibilities, and we basically deal with one of the three pillars – we just deal with the environmental bit. We have these fine words that we will consider the other bits, but our social elements are limited . . . We don’t historically engage with the communities that much . . . We’ve not historically tapped into the social and the economic planks of LA21. (Neil Kermode)

However, with a large area office in Blandford, mid-way along the Stour, the EA is a meaningful presence in the river valley, and its Local Plans are beginning to be more holistic. Working with conservation and community organisations, and sometimes sponsoring their activities, it has created Area Consultation Groups that are essential in assisting us in building relationships with local communities . . . We need to work in partnership with local authorities, industry, farmers, environmental groups and other interested organisations to resolve the issues identified and protect the Stour catchment. (EA 1998:2–3)

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Owning Water Though much more varied than the OFWAT regional committees, these and other public consultation meetings still tend to be composed of ‘interest groups’ and the few individuals who feel that they have a role in managing the environment, or who are already familiar with the staff from the EA: [Meetings] have a habit of being attended by other organisations who want to put their two-pennorth in, and from what I’ve seen there are small numbers of people who are interested locals . . . [There are] local councils, the district councils, the parish councils, CPRE [Council for the Protection of Rural England], RSPB [Royal Society for the Protection of Birds], a lot of those established organisations. We’ll also get the pressure group side of things, the Friends of the Earth and local single issue groups. There’ll be notable worthies turning up, and often they are major landowners who have got – frequently – an intimate knowledge of the river and are the sort of people we deal with on a routine basis anyway. So they’ll come along to give us the benefit of their opinions. (Neil Kermode)

Consultations are therefore dominated by groups with professional involvement, an economic stake or a particular interest in environmental and water resource issues. So the EA shares – though to a lesser degree – the problem experienced by OFWAT and the DWI: its primary interactions are with other government bodies, industries or farmers, and this inevitably creates – or at least suggests – an exclusive dialogue between resource managers. People who simply live in the Valley are less motivated to attend such meetings. As Neil Kermode says: ‘whether we are engaging with those people or not I think is a matter of conjecture’. It is a challenging task to reconcile local social and ecological issues with national economic and political policies. While struggling to deal with the real complexities of environmental management and its unquantifiable elements, the EA has, simultaneously, to present itself as a ‘scientific’, objective agency and produce suitably quantitative and reductive reports to make its case in the political arena. This tension illustrates the difficulties of reconciling centralised forms of governance with local social and political engagement. There are 9000 of us in the Agency and 16 million people out there, and we are not going to do much – we only aid and influence those people who can really make a difference . . . We can’t be everywhere at once. (Neil Kermode)

Nevertheless, the local engagement of the EA and its broader remit does mean that its relationship with water users is generally positive. Most of the informants in the Dorset study said that it wouldn’t occur to them to contact OFWAT or the DWI or go to a regional CSC meeting unless they had a very specific complaint about water supplies, but quite a few suggested that they might turn to the Environment Agency: – 160 –

Governing Water The Environment Agency are supposed to police most of these things. I suppose they do, within certain constraints, do a reasonable job. (Mike Ladle)

Tellingly, the informants most willing to work with the Environment Agency were those who had had direct contact with agency staff in the past. They recognised them as local people, and were therefore more confident of their ability to contribute to the community along the Stour. They were, in other words, people with whom it was possible to have a social relationship, and who could therefore be trusted to take care of the community’s local water resources. For the same reason a number said that if they were concerned about water or about the river, their first thought would be to approach a local person: their MP, a conservation organisation or the local Council.

Local Governance I think the local Council should take care of their sections [of the river], but they can’t really have any influence on it at all. If the farmers decide to do it, they are going to dump something in and hope no-one will know about it, the Council won’t be able to do anything. (James Conduit)

Local government bodies used to be primarily responsible for water resources management. Although most of these powers have been centralised in the last two decades, there is necessarily some local governance of water, which enables communities to lobby for change on specific issues. For example, County Council members have, in the past, asked the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) and the Country Landowners Association to back them in persuading the EA to designate Dorset’s river valleys as Environmentally Sensitive Areas (Dawe 1992:7). Local government institutions also provide crucial linkages between industry, farming and national agencies. County and District Councils retain responsibilities for planning, environmental health issues, weed control, some erosion and flood defence matters, as well as some minor environmental issues (litter, noise, air pollution and land contamination), all of which mesh with the more influential activities of the EA and the other regulatory agencies. Local Councils maintain important centres of knowledge, such as the Dorset Environmental Records Centre, and specialised records about land tenure and local rights of way. Thus they are practically and legislatively involved in many minor disputes over access to resources. Local Councils in Dorset still have some direct managerial engagements with water resources too: for example, employing officers to clear river walks and manage common woodland and parks. However, their funds for this are now extremely limited, and they focus mainly on issuing educational materials about

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Owning Water plants and wildlife and guides to local recreational activities. They also have an important role in coordinating and publicising the activities of community groups. One of the most successful local government ventures was the establishment of the Stour Valley Project, funded jointly by the District and County Councils in the late 1990s. Based at Sturminster Newton, the project invited representatives from all of the parishes involved and from all of the different groups using the river and anybody else who had expressed a specific interest to be there . . . Because people met face to face, we were able to break down some of the barriers and it was a very good, friendly atmosphere for people to come up with ideas . . . Everyone just pulled together, and it worked. (Clare Freeman)

The project employs two full-time Rangers and some young people doing ‘work experience’ to organise educational and recreational events along the river for schools and groups composed of local inhabitants and visitors. The Rangers take these groups on guided walks along the river, or facilitate local events with experts on bats, history, butterflies, trees or mills. The project also initiates activities that engage people directly in small-scale environmental management, such as tree planting, pond clearance, path improvements and wildlife surveys. Its representational materials, like those of many environmental groups, are therefore a mixture of practical, educational and aesthetic, affective interactions with place. [There are] so many ideas from local people anyway, that we are just helping . . . hand holding to build their confidence, or just helping find a grant, or just helping on the technical advice and practical skills. (Clare Freeman)

As well as coordinating events with community groups, the Stour Valley Project also cooperates with the Environment Agency in small works, such as the construction of fishing platforms along the river. Like many similar endeavours, the project explicitly focuses on wildlife and conservation issues, but the involvement that it creates has had many subtle social effects, emphasising collective participation in a social as well as physical environment. This is greatly enabled by its focus on water, and on the river, which enables people to visualise their spatial and symbolic interconnections and define common interests: We really do focus in on the river: we’ve found that it has transformed people’s perception of our work . . . As soon as we go in saying we are the Stour Valley Project . . . everyone knows what a river and river valley is like, so we have immediately got them on our side because people can understand a river’s catchment. A lot of people associate with their village areas, but one lovely thing about a river is people obviously feel united with villages and towns upstream or downstream from them because the river links it all . . . People feel as though it’s a big unit. (Clare Freeman)

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Governing Water In developing local networks, the Rangers also find themselves acting as mediators in conflicts over resource use: We’re often brought in as a sort of diplomat to resolve conflicts within the countryside . . . User groups, they have these awful perceptions of each other . . . You know, ramblers feel that anglers want to keep the riverbank to themselves; anglers don’t want any ramblers along because they are going to disturb them and make a lot of noise. Our job is to prove that the countryside is for everybody, as long as people are responsible, and just respect each other. There aren’t very many user groups that there isn’t space for. (Clare Freeman)

Through these activities the Stour Valley Project has been able to create an important set of contacts between highly localised groups and the various layers of government and industry that manage water resources from loftier heights. Its facilitation of a cooperative network of environmental groups and local community endeavours enables water users up and down the river to have some input into commercial and centralised government control of water resources. However, while this may be productive at a local level, enabling people to feel that they are participating to some degree, this input impinges only minimally on the major debates. With a highly centralised government, the mechanisms enabling local representation to move upwards are weak. There is a crucial gap between local engagements with water resources and the issues dealt with at a ‘top-down’ government level. At the centre, where the vital questions about water are debated, ‘the public’ is primarily a spectator. OFWAT and the water industry meet, apparently as opponents, but it seems that their tug of war is more of a symbiotic tie. The Environment Agency attempts to intercede from time to time, but is shoved none too gently aside, while the high priests at the DWI pour libations and make occasional pronouncements, The public, sitting uncomfortably on the sidelines, has a few protesters who throw bottled water at the performance, but it is largely acquiescent, confining itself to muttering about the behaviour of the actors and the price of the drinks.

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Part V Managing Water

–10 – Cultivating Water Industrial Water Although most water users remain peripheral to debates, there are four major groups along the Stour who physically engage with and manage water resources at a local level: local industries, farmers, environmental or conservation groups and recreational water users. These have varying degrees of control over water resources: some are empowered by direct ownership or use of resources, others by their expertise or by their political activities. Most types of control – even direct ownership – are partial, and under continual negotiation. It is a real network of very closely woven groups of people interested for various reasons, but at the same time it doesn’t stay the same all the time, it’s all gradually changing and shifting over the years. (Peter Loosmore)

In this shifting equation, the water managing groups can be broadly divided into those who use water to manufacture or cultivate commercial products, and those whose aim is to maintain ‘natural’ water, sometimes for commercial recreational purposes, but more usually for social, spiritual or aesthetic forms of engagement. This chapter considers their interactions with water resources and with other water users. With the decline of the manufacturing industries, non-domestic water use in the UK has fallen, but it still represents about a third of the total amount of water used. The Stour Valley contains various small industries that depend on the river. Some are direct descendants of the original mills, and a handful still use water power, but most simply use the valley’s water in their various processes of production. Near the head of the river are several dairies and cheese makers, watercress growers and fish farmers. Further downriver there is a chemical factory in Gillingham, breweries in Gillingham and Blandford and, close to the estuary, some light industry in Poole and Christchurch. Most require an ample supply of water, and for some the quality of this supply is critical too. The meanings of water flow through all the activities of these industries. Although most no longer use water wheels, water is still a major ‘driver’ of their production of wealth and their ability to act upon the world. It is often the major constituent of – 167 –

Managing Water the products that define their public identity, and many – particularly the brewers and organic producers – base their self-representations on the ‘natural’ unadulterated qualities of the water they draw into their processes of production. These processes are generally circular, taking a loop out of the river’s flow via abstraction, use and discharge. In this sense the water provides a material and symbolic flow between each group of actors and its environment. It is also a movement between nature and culture: water is brought under control, acculturated/cultivated as part of an industrial product, and then released ‘back to nature’. In the upper reaches of the Stour there is increasing anxiety about the availability of water for industrial purposes. For example, at a food mill in Bourton, falling water levels have meant that its dependence on one of the largest water wheels in Europe has been superseded by electrical power, although at one stage it had five water wheels and 500 employees. Near Milton Abbas there is one of the few working water mills remaining in Dorset, Cann Mill, where organic corn and other crops are milled using a combination of water power and electricity. Such small businesses are highly vulnerable to over-abstraction by the water companies: Soon after my father came here the local water company set up a pumping station just upstream and almost left us dry, and we had to take them to court and get them overruled because we had a right to the water here. (Michael Stoate)

Wyke Farms, near Stour Head, is both a large cheese factory, and a pig farm.1 It abstracts water from its own borehole, and used to draw almost a million gallons a week. As one dairyman explained: A milk dairy requires enormous volumes of water . . . for every litre of milk it needs a litre of water to process it . . . It’s vast quantities because of the washing down. (Nigel Pooley)

With no viable option to use mains water, the company is worried about the falling water tables. It has already had to invest in a second borehole and an evaporator allowing it to recycle some of the water used, cutting its abstraction to about 700,000 gallons a week. Water is a very big concern to us . . . We know from our own experience here that the water levels, tables are dropping, and the dry summer, last summer, we were right on the limit. (Nigel Pooley)

At the final stage of the production cycle lies the discharge of waste water into larger systems of regeneration. Companies have to deal with ever more demanding

1. This is an efficient symbiosis, since the pigs eat leftover whey from cheese production.

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Cultivating Water environmental standards, and, in this litigious era, any detrimental health effects from their activities have serious implications for their own survival. Most are aware of growing public concern about environmental care, and a greater willingness to prosecute polluters.2 Each company also has to assess whether simply meeting minimal legislative requirements will provide the public image – and selfimage – to which it aspires. Companies vary in their approach to water issues, but the majority of those interviewed along the Stour expressed a general willingness to keep moving towards better environmental protection if the need for this could be made plain. It just depends whether the proof was there that [stricter legislation] was required. Obviously if it was required you have to go along with that don’t you . . . But if it’s for conservation, fine, yeah. If we have to do that to conserve, then that’s what we have to do. (Nigel Pooley)

Waste discharges are particularly challenging for producers such as Wyke Farms. Dairy effluent can create serious problems for aquatic life if discharged in quantity, and as most of the water the factory uses is heated for washing, temperature is also a potential problem:3 Everything’s cleaned in place every day . . . milk tankers, storage silos . . . The big ones hold 40,000 gallons of milk . . . you have to completely spray and cover all the sides and give it masses of water and caustic soda and things, and then rinse it all off again. (Nigel Pooley)

Discharges have to be monitored constantly, with monthly checks by the EA to ensure that the company is meeting regulatory limits on temperature, bacteriological quality, coliforms, E. coli and other organisms: They come in and sample . . . If occasionally we get a bad . . . discharge to the river . . . a result which is above the consent, they just come back and resample, and providing it’s dead OK, they just go away and not say anything. (Nigel Pooley)

The application of science to industrial production gives a particular emphasis to these engagements with the river. In such reductive terms, water appears as a material substance, vulnerable to physical pollution. This is very much a chemical 2. In 1996, for example, in a case brought by the NRA under the Water Resources Act 1991, the Hall and Woodhouse Brewery was fined £8240 for an incident affecting the Stour (Blackmore Vale Magazine 1996). 3. It is illegal to discharge water above certain temperatures, as this produces a number of stresses to aquatic ecosystems.

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Managing Water language of fluoranthene, benzopyrene, dibromochloromethane, haloforms, trichloroethene and other unpronounceables, and an economic language about costs and benefits. However, under the surface of this pragmatic engagement, water appears as a cleansing agent through which industries maintain an orderly and moral relationship with their social and physical environment. The strict regulations governing their activities create a specific demand for ‘purity’, and since it is a ‘sin’ to pollute the river, punishable with major fines and deep social disapproval, there is an interesting coherence between these issues and more abstract ideas about moral and spiritual purity. Even within the context of their balance sheets, industrial users employ images of water to talk about ‘growth’, ‘generating wealth’, ‘being productive’ and the ‘flow’ of resources, demonstrating the conceptual relationships between ideas about water as a generative substance and their economic activities as a productive – and thus reproductive – aspect of cultural life.

Industrial Relations Despite the generally positive view that industries have of their own activities, and the wider acknowledgement that these provide employment and generate wealth, other water users remain uneasy about industrial acculturation of water and distrustful of its effects. There is persistent anxiety about ‘unknown’ chemicals with equally ‘unknown’ effects emerging from such activities. Sherman Chemicals – that’s a big American firm really – moving up from Poole, one of the biggest chemical firms in the West, it’s establishing itself here. They bought acres of riverside land. I don’t know what they are making . . . (Elizabeth Kendall)

The idea that ‘foreign bodies’ will emit dangerous substances appears powerfully in this discourse: Some of these chemical companies – what they actually dump as well – that worries people, because eventually it must deteriorate, and whatever’s inside has got to come out, eventually that finds its way into the water. (Beryl Coward)

As with the water companies, social and spatial relations between water users and the owners and controllers of industry have become more distant over time. Industrial water use generally occurs within enclosed spaces, and many companies are now owned by foreign conglomerates. Predictably – as with the water companies – evaluations of their activities are highly coloured by the extent to which they are seen as local or ‘other’. There is a common perception that some industries lack moral probity in their use of water resources: ‘I would like to have control of my water. I don’t trust the chemical companies’ (INF59). Such concerns also relate – 170 –

Cultivating Water closely to the meanings encoded in industrial products: their perceived benevolence or malignance, or the relative ‘naturalness’ of the substances involved. For example, despite the fact that animal fats can create severe water quality problems, only one informant expressed anxieties about the local dairy farms, whose organic products epitomise nurturing, but many commented on the potential effects of chemical discharges. Things like our brewery over there, I am sure they must use chemicals in some of the beers that they make, and I am sure some of that must get into our river water. (Colin Coward)

Like many UK rivers, the Stour has experienced some serious pollution incidents, and these have clearly stayed in people’s minds: ‘Dead fish and that sort of thing, that’s a very emotive thing, for people to have going on in their village’ (Clare Freeman). Thus relations between many water users and industry are somewhat wary, and there is little dialogue between them on resource management issues. Industries are also implicated in tensions about physical access to the riverside: Nearly every one of their plans have wanted to take buildings and concrete right up to the river edge. This is a problem: I can think of several places where development has taken over and where traditionally children used to play by the river in Gillingham, and can’t get down to it now, and where people would sort of walk along beside it and [now] they can’t. (Elizabeth Kendall)

Some of the larger industries, in particular the chemical companies, have made efforts to win over local residents. The American firm Sherman Chemicals, for example, has constructed a new riverside walk, planted trees and created an otter holt so, as the same informant put it: ‘they are quite public image-minded’. However, like the recreational and aesthetic opportunities offered by regional water companies, this is not a successful substitute for a closer social relationship and shared management of resources. People remain anxious about the effects of industrial activity on water resources and its potential to contaminate their drinking water with alien substances. Chemicals is a huge frightening umbrella . . . The potential for a major pollution incident is much greater with the chemical factory or chemical depot. (INF25)

Farming the Valley Of all the industries in the Stour Valley, agriculture is the most reliant upon large amounts of water and, at a material level, farmers are greatly empowered by the – 171 –

Managing Water fact that they physically hold the land, have licences to abstract water and exert control over their own use and management of water. As the ‘Countryside Stewardship Scheme’ suggests, run by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), it is farmers – the self-styled ‘Guardians of the Land’ – who truly hold Christian ‘dominion’ over nature. The most powerful meanings encoded in water permeate all farming activities: water is the ‘lifeblood’ of agricultural products, and these – like water – are ‘essentials’ that flow between and link the human body with the material environment. Farming is a symbolic societal garden in which water appears as the collective substance of production and reproduction, the creator of health and energy. Like the hydrological cycle (and the hydro-theological cycle), it is a circular process of generation, action/use and disposal, followed by regeneration. As in other orderly systems, agri-culture relies on a balance between nature and culture, and is vulnerable to disorder and pollution. All of these meanings come through in discourses about farming, which are heavily concerned with the ‘health’ and the physical and moral ‘purity’ and ‘integrity’ of its products and processes. Farming in Dorset, as in the rest of the UK, has undergone radical changes in the last century. A wartime need for rapid increases in production provided a huge impetus towards industrialisation in agriculture. My father was encouraged left, right and centre and we were given all sorts of grants . . . We were under pressure . . . to help feed the nation . . . They got 22 or 23 hundredweight to the acre . . . Now if we don’t get nearly three tonne, we’ve got a poor crop. It’s quite incredible. (Ron Harris)

As noted in Chapter 2, the mechanisation and redundancies that came with industrialisation left the land managed by a handful of owners and managers, hastening the social and spatial separation between farming and the wider population and severing interdependencies even within the industry. [Farmers] tend to be sort of pretty much working on their own . . . especially when you compare this country to European countries . . . [where] they have far more co-ops. (Karen Eppey)

Industrialisation also vastly increased chemical usage, with significant effects on water resources. In the second half of the twentieth century, nitrate fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides were sprayed onto crops in ever greater amounts, massively increasing yields or carrying capacity for grazing stock.4

4. ‘Carrying capacity’ refers to the density of livestock supportable on a given area of land.

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Cultivating Water They don’t rotate – my father, one field would perhaps lay fallow for a year and then it would be a root crop, and then you’d go back to your wheat . . . You didn’t get the diseases . . . Now there’s all these chemicals . . . it goes down and pollutes the rivers too, doesn’t it, ultimately. (INF13)

The technical nature of modern farming and the economic and scientific models accompanying industrialised resource use have encouraged the idea that these activities are somehow separate and self-contained. This compartmentalisation is illustrated by recent experiments in the production of genetically modified (GM) crops, whose proponents insist that these can be grown in hermetic isolation from their surroundings, and by organisations such as the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG), which provides advice on creating wildlife ‘corridors’ and the ‘targeting and control’ of seeds and chemicals.5 I am fundamentally against organic farming . . . I think there’s actually a happy medium which I think we are getting towards, which is a much stricter control of chemicals which are available, much better training of the people who control their use . . . It’s just an economic thing. In the old days they just sort of slapped it on by the bag-full because it was relatively cheap and corn was relatively dear. Now that it’s reversing I think people are being much more judicious in their use . . . it’s a much better way of doing it than by regulation . . . It’s much better to carry the agricultural industry with you, and get them to control it, because after all, it’s their finger of the button. (INF25)

With ‘wildlife’ assigned to corridors and special habitats while the remainder of the land is made ‘productive’, it is perhaps inevitable that many farmers will see much of the landscape as an outdoor factory in which ‘rivers are dirty places anyway’ (INF25). As one NFU representative explained, this excludes a more holistic vision of environmental management: I think to a large extent they don’t look after the river – they don’t see it as one of their job descriptions . . . They don’t see river management as one of the disciplines that they need . . . They are not experts in the flora or fauna or the wildlife or any of those sorts of things. (INF34)

Some of the farmers interviewed felt that ‘nature will sort itself out’ (INF19). Like industrial visions of water, this presents ‘nature’ as something outside economic activities, with ‘natural’ water resources temporarily acculturated for processes of production, and then released. The movement of water through space is thus

5. With its glossy booklets funded by the Fertiliser Manufacturer’s Association and Monsanto (‘working with the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group for a better environment’), it seems unlikely to offer a more critical perspective.

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Managing Water critical: pumped from the borehole or river, the water comes under the aegis of the farmers’ (or industrial) control, and is then put back ‘outside’ it, into a river which – flowing away from their controlled space – is not seen as part of their responsibility. The effects of this are well documented (see Harvey 1997, Ward 1997), and Harvey’s passionate indictment suggests that ‘the destruction of the British countryside’ has been largely for the advantage of ‘a small coterie of landowners’: The countryside has been reconstructed in the sole interests of intensive agriculture . . . Dramatic changes have been taking place on Britain’s farmland, changes that reveal farmers to be anything but the good custodians we like to think them. The numbers of a wide range of wildlife species have fallen dramatically . . . Birds that were once an everyday part of the farming scene are now in steep decline. Wildflowers, too, are disappearing from our countryside . . . They are the victims of the sprays, the fertilisers, the giant machines and the monocultures; of the sheer relentless pressure to maximise output from every hedge bank and field corner. (Harvey 1997:2)

The environmental movement’s vociferous critique has put farmers under pressure to accept greater responsibility for their effects upon the ecosystem, and increasing numbers of farmers in the Stour Valley are ‘going organic’, either in response to these concerns or at least because of the public’s willingness to pay more for ‘natural’ foods: ‘It’s a financial thing again . . . organic is a value-added product, so . . .’ (Nigel Pooley).6 Other powerful land and resources managers have – for various reasons of their own – added their support to this change. As noted, the National Trust encourages its tenants to farm organically, and Wessex Water – finding that this was more ‘cost-effective’ for its own operations – insisted that its tenant farmers reduce the pollution of water sources: Wessex owns about three and half thousand acres around those spring zones, where we control the farming: farmers are tenanted farmers, and only farm the way we say, to minimise the risk . . . We will control farming to stop some of the pollutants getting in there if we can. (Richard Lacey)

Despite these pressures, farmers confront some difficult practical issues in their use and management of water. They are less able than many manufacturing industries to cut their water use, install recycling plants, or cope with polluted water which, rather than flowing controllably through a single discharge pipe, is diffused across acres of pasture and arable land, trickling into myriad small drains and water courses. Although involved in schemes to reduce and ‘target’ their use of fertilisers 6. Although only just over 2% of farmers in Dorset are currently registered as organic, conversion is increasing rapidly. Noting a growth rate of 25% every ten years, the Soil Association predicts that by 2010, 30% of agriculture in Europe will be organic (Soil Association 1999:1).

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Cultivating Water and pesticides, many regard these as essential. Dairy farming also produces large amounts of slurry, and although farmers have been regulated into containing it more effectively (and now have better technology for doing so), this is clearly fallible. Slurry is quite a problem here in the Blackmore Vale, in that there’s a large number of cows on a small area . . . There are some times when you see the land drains from some of the fields where slurry’s been put – they aren’t exactly running pure water! (INF32)

Slurry spills can be quite devastating to an aquatic ecosystem: We had a pollution – about eight, nine year ago – and it was a very bad one that one . . . you could walk across the river with the dead fish. There were thousands of them . . . Slurry: obviously they traced it and the farmer got fined pretty heavily . . . but you still lose those years of fish. You replace them, but that stock you replace them with, they are all the same year . . . whereas the fish that have been killed have gone from about 1970 – they are various age stages . . . A carp’ll live about fifty years. (Arthur Morris)

Farmers along the Stour claim that their use of pesticides and nitrates had become much more judicious: Farmers don’t use so much fertiliser as they did ten years ago . . . I think there’s not the push for so much production . . . Nitrates in the water – I wouldn’t say it’s an issue. Not round here . . . There’s not the pollutants going in the river, not farm effluent, and what have you, as there was years ago. (Barry Cooper)

Nevertheless, the Environment Agency notes that although fertiliser use fell between 1986 and 1993, it increased in 1997 (EA 1999b:16), and there are regular reports that in Dorset, as elsewhere, water quality has suffered from the impact of rural land usage.7 The EA has recorded ‘nitrate levels in excess of the EC Nitrates Directives’ and diffuse inputs of nutrients and pesticides to ‘important conservation sites’ (EA 1997a:11), and water companies abstracting supplies (and measuring nitrate content) confirm the suspicion that a lot of fertiliser is still finding its way into water courses. At the southern end of the river, where Bournemouth and West Hampshire Water draws its supplies, ‘We have certainly noticed an increasing trend in nitrates on the Stour’ (Mark Burton). 7. Harvey notes that in England more than 100 Sites of Special Scientific Interest are reported to be subject to eutrophication [nutrient enrichment producing algae and excessive plant growth], including both lake and river sites . . . countless other areas are suffering, though the pollution goes largely unnoticed . . . The group claiming to be the natural custodian of the countryside has for decades been using it as a sink for misapplied chemical wastes (1997:150)

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Managing Water While adding to the pollution in the rivers, farmers have also been abstracting much more water from them as a shift to the production of thirsty arable crops has led to massive increases in irrigation. Some farmers continue to insist that the major cause of low river flows is water company abstractions, but other water users along the Stour, who see farmers making very visible use of water, are disinclined to accept this. So many people now abstract water, and therefore you reduce the flow of the river. This river now today is about six inches less than it used to be in my younger days, this time of the year . . . It’s been reduced by a few million gallons a day by the abstraction . . . Because the farmer says ‘Right, I’ve got a licence to abstract a million gallons of water a day or a week or a month, I guess there’s no harm in two million.’ Therefore your water levels have gone down. (Arthur Morris)

Similarly, older inhabitants observed that many species familiar to them from their youth have become rare, and were critical of contemporary agricultural practices: We think about there being less wildlife around now and it all needs to be protected . . . The main problem is it’s the farming systems that have reduced wildlife to such a low level. (INF47)

In general, people living along the Stour have become very disenchanted with the farming industry, and it is worth examining this dynamic. It is relevant because anxieties about agricultural practices are closely tied to concerns about pollution, and so exert a powerful influence upon evaluations of water quality and concerns about water resource ownership and management. In addition, there are major similarities to the relationship between water users and the privatised water industry (which is caused by similar political and socio-economic developments). Much of the impetus for agricultural development came from a wartime need for self-sufficiency, and – echoing some of the feelings expressed by water company employees – farmers now comment mournfully that they have gone from being seen as heroes to being vilified as exploiters and polluters.

Down on the Farm They are all commercial farmers . . . They will produce whatever the market demands, and they will do it as profitably as they can . . . They see themselves as businessmen not farmers. (INF21) I know quite a few farmers, and they all seem to have this attitude ‘if we own the land we’ll do what we want with it’. (INF15)

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Cultivating Water Having become increasingly large-scale, isolated and anxious to keep people off the land, the farming industry now finds that it receives little trust or sympathy from the wider community. Unlike other local industries, it provides little employment and, with the decline in the agricultural sector, it is more often presented as a drain upon the economy than as a provider of wealth. At the same time it has been dragged through the mud of one food scare after another, with the foot and mouth crisis providing chilling images of industrial farming practices as a source of modern ‘plagues’. As a result, despite the Stour Valley’s long and illustrious history as an agricultural community (this is, after all, Hardy’s Dorset),8 there is a sense of betrayal on both sides: Most of the farming community is governed by their pocket . . . BSE9 . . . they don’t give a damn how many people they kill with this horrible thing what’s been brought about mainly by greed, sadly . . . and money . . . The older ones used to care – I think it’s the younger generation sadly, I think it’s all money, it’s profit motivation. (INF33)

The use of water on farms, even with limited public access, is visible and omnipresent, and many people interviewed in the Stour Valley were plainly of the opinion that this is detrimental to the local ecology. They repeatedly expressed concern about the farmers’ use of pesticides and fertilisers, and some were keenly aware of the controversies about the heavy use of nitrates and their effects on human health (‘blue babies’) and on the health of water resources. Drawing on conceptual models of systemic flow and balance, many commented that this ‘clogs up’ the flow of the ecosystem: A lot of the weed growth [in the river], in my opinion, has been caused through greed originally. Years ago when the farmers used to cut the hay or the silage, they used to cut one field and that was it . . . But now they want two cuts so the consequence is – the ground will not have enough nutrients for two crops year after year – therefore they dose it with various nitrates and fertilisers, the rain gets onto the fertiliser, washes it in the river – explosion of weed. (INF36)

The BSE crisis that dogged the 1990s and the foot and mouth epidemic10 that followed created grave doubts about farmers’ stewardship and the scientific community’s ability to predict or prevent such problems. Similar anxieties are evident 8. Marnhull, at the centre of the Blackmore Vale, provided the (fictionalised) setting for Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 9. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as ‘mad cow disease’, is a progressive and eventually fatal neurological disease, transmissible to humans, in whom it is known as Creutzfeldt– Jakob disease (CJD). 10. Foot and mouth disease is a highly contagious disease affecting sheep and cattle, as well as other ruminants. Although they recover, it is debilitating and renders the meat from the animals unsaleable. An outbreak in the UK in 2001 was devastating to the farming and tourist industries.

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Managing Water in controversies over GM crops. Like the BSE problem (caused by feeding meat proteins to herbivores), biotechnology is seen as an ‘unnatural’ contamination of a ‘proper’ order that risks ‘exposing us all to the unpredictable and potentially dangerous consequences’ (Soil Association 1998).11 The prospect of further disorder in a system already perceived to be heavily under pressure has been deeply felt. The ‘Keep Britain Farming’ campaign reported that GM food was ‘top of the anti-agenda’ and ‘most people simply don’t want it’. Though a few farmers in Dorset embarked on trials of GM products because ‘it is a necessary evil’, some backed out, fearing that the crops would get out of control, or because ‘there could be a huge chain reaction that we’re not aware of yet’ (Craig 1998:99). We are more and more in the hands of the chemists aren’t we . . . the things they talk about in food now, [genetic] developments in food, which I think is dreadful . . . It’s not natural. (Tom Suttle)

Some interest groups argue that much public concern about these issues is generated by ‘media hype’: ‘a lot of it stems from the media publicising it and making great play of something like that – they know that people almost like to be frightened, don’t they’ (INF3). However, the persistence with which similar concerns recur in one issue after another suggests a deeper problem. The Dorset research reveals a broad pattern in which the majority of people have been steadily distanced not only from farming, but also from participation in resource management. They feel disempowered and unable to protect the integrity of the physical environment, or their food and water. They understand, even if this is rarely articulated, that this is also a political issue about power and choice, and the Soil Association (1998) picks up on this underlying issue, describing the new biotechnology as part of a ‘new dictatorship of genetically modified foods’ in the hands of ‘the large agrochemical companies’. It is evident that people feel subject to the commercial agenda of groups whom they fundamentally distrust. Harvey puts it bluntly: We have abandoned our countryside to the grubbers and sprayers, the exploiters and the profiteers. We have allowed them to assault our landscapes, wage war on our wildlife and abuse our farm livestock. They have poisoned our soils and dumped millions of tons of soil and silt into the rivers. They have demolished nine-tenths of our wildlife assets.

11. Greenpeace is equally against this kind of manipulation of nature: Once released in the environment, the plants produced by genetic engineering can never be recalled or contained . . . We could be releasing biological pollutants into the environment that are even more damaging than chemical pollutants. (1998: 3–4)

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Cultivating Water Now, finally, they have corrupted the purity of our food. None of this could have happened but for exclusion, the exclusion of people from the countryside and the decision-making that affects it. In failing to exercise our ‘right to roam’ we have given the despoilers of our island the ‘right to ruin’. (1997:165)

It is noticeable that the farming industry, like the water companies and local industries, has recently embraced public relations in an effort win back the support of the wider population. Its representations follow a similar pattern, emphasising farmers’ efforts to protect wildlife (as long as it stays in its place); stressing their productive role; and – like the water museum at Sutton Poyntz – leaning heavily on imagery from an earlier era, now depicted as a rural idyll. ‘Yesterday’s Farming’ events are staged, celebrating ‘farming as ’twere in Grandad’s time’ (Nash 1998b:97) and demonstrating ancient farming methods and crafts. These events sometimes include church services in which prayers are offered regarding ‘the farming problems of today’ (Nash 1998b:97). However, other water users along the Stour are well aware that farming is inescapably not ‘as ’twere in Grandad’s time’.

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–11– Back to Nature I always think it’s a good idea to have a few of these green movements to keep an eye on whether they are doing it properly or not. (Mike Ladle)

Green Water Kept off the land with ‘no trespassing’ signs, the only way in which most people can participate even minimally in local resource management is through membership in environmental and conservation groups. These are the ‘grassroots’ that sustain the power of the Environment Agency and push for greater environmental concern in other government bodies. The moral high ground of conservation and environmental care offers empowerment and access to ‘protected’ spaces for many people who would otherwise be excluded from participation in resource control. Conservation work also allows people to express values and forms of environmental interaction that implicitly critique and offer an alternative to commercial resource management, representing an ideological counterpoint. In the management of water resources, as with other ecological issues, the environmental movement has traditionally been a vociferous defender of ‘nature’ in the face of what it perceives as an excessive imposition of culture or ‘man’s dominion’. However, over time it has become increasingly heterogenous: some parts of it have retained their radical perspective, but many of its concerns have been adopted by – some might say appropriated by – organisations more closely aligned with the centres of power. The array of groups in Dorset nicely illustrates these developments. With a large middle class and many wealthy retirees, Dorset has a particularly extensive range of conservation groups, with strong representation from the National Trust, the Countryside Agency and English Nature in the conservative upper reaches of the Stour, and further south (where the population is younger, more liberal and more urban), greater support for groups like the Soil Association, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and specialised organisations such as Surfers Against Sewage. There are some highly influential county organisations – the Dorset Wildlife Trust and the Dorset Conservation Volunteers – local government

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Managing Water initiatives like the Stour Valley Project, and numerous small community groups – for example the Gillingham Action for Nature Group. As noted previously, the Stour Valley was also chosen as the base for the innovative arts and environment group, Common Ground, and its Confluence project. Many of these groups are local in their activities, although some are more ‘virtual’ epistemic communities of people with particular knowledge or expertise. There is wide diversity in the ideological positions and values of the conservation groups, and even within them. Some, drawing on the original tenets of the environmental movement and its concern to redress the balance with nature, see the status quo and its commodification of resources as the major cause of social and ecological problems; others are clearly ‘insiders’, socially or economically linked to the institutions currently controlling resources, and have no desire to challenge the status quo beyond encouraging more concern about wildlife or ‘heritage’. According to their political ideologies, the environmental and conservation groups in Dorset therefore either position themselves as critics of government and industry, and agitate about the social and economic aspects of environmental issues, or avoid the more difficult socio-political issues and focus on ‘ecological’ matters, which enables them to work in alignment with established institutions and use the mechanisms of government to validate their role in the resource management process. A common theme in all, though, is that involvement in these groups appears to be an attempt to regain lost collectivity in environmental care and management, and to reconstruct ideas of ‘community’ and shared identity. The adoption of ‘environmentalism’ by mainstream resource managers has tended to focus debates on reductive scientific analyses of ecological issues. This narrower approach now dominates the legislation emerging from the European Union and from State governments. It has also become the major language of representation in many groups, conferring the authority of ‘science’ upon their activities. Meanwhile discourses more concerned with social or ethical issues have remained the province of ‘alternative’ organisations. The management of the river therefore flows through complex and sometimes rocky negotiations between environmental groups and those in legislative or physical control of water resources. Their relative influence depends upon several factors: their level of physical ‘ownership’ and involvement; their knowledge or expertise; their socio-economic status within the community; and their ability to disseminate information and gain popular support. The most powerful conservation groups operate at a national as well as local level, and are (or have close ties to) substantial landowners. The National Trust holdings in the area include Stour Head, Kingston Lacey and, at the other end of the valley, Brownsea Island. Though reluctant to enter an explicit political debate, the Trust has made some uncontroversial moves: as well as pressing its tenant – 182 –

Back to Nature farmers to reduce their chemical use, it has begun to tackle issues such as water conservation. Any building projects have for several years incorporated as much waste water management as possible, putting greywater1 back through the systems and generally trying. (John Turner)

Its greatest influence on environmental issues, however, is perhaps elliptical. By maintaining places like Stour Head, and creating opportunities for people to engage with the most powerful meanings of water, it contributes to the valorisation of affective concerns for the environment.

English in Nature An appreciation of the centrality of nature is also present (though increasingly subsumed by managerial discourses) in the activities of English Nature, which owns a number of wildlife reserves and SSSIs in Dorset. Its very name underlines the powerful linkage between concepts of nature and social identity, conflating ‘natural’ being with ‘Englishness’ (see Lowenthal 1991). It also draws attention to the way that environmental care articulates processes of social inclusion (or exclusion). Like the National Trust, English Nature remains largely middle class and Caucasian. As one employee put it: We are supposed to be an equal opportunity employer, but given the nature of our work, I mean it’s mostly rural areas; it’s incredibly difficult . . . We are an organisation of, what, 500 people, and I can’t actually think of anybody that comes from a non-white background. (INF47)

This points to a wider issue that ‘the countryside’ in general is often still seen as the province of particular groups – those with the ‘right’ understandings of it: English Nature does not support the Right to Roam, because it is going to put major pressures on some very delicate habitats. (INF47) Countryside access seemed to me to be white, ageing and middle class, and in lots of places where you did see access taking place, there were BMWs – the kind of cars where you could socially tell the kind of people that we were attracting. (INF7)

Apart from the radical ‘alternative’ organisations, the membership of many conservation and environmental groups does seem to be largely composed of people 1. Greywater is water that has been used for washing – i.e. from showers and baths, and possibly from washing machines and dishwashers.

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Managing Water with the education, income and confidence to feel that they have a stake in collective resources and sufficient status and ‘belonging’ to have a role in resource management. Conservation holidays are open to everybody . . . If you want to go on a conservation working holiday then fine – you sign up, send your cash off to pay for your accommodation and your food, and that’s it. But they don’t get ethnic minorities on them. (INF46)

English Nature is closely involved with a network of local landowners, to whom it also provides advice and expertise. This is particularly crucial in managing water resources and wetland areas, as the organisation’s wetlands specialist explained: It matters a heck of a lot what is going on on the surrounding land . . . wetland systems aren’t defined by ownership boundaries, so what the farmer downstream or upstream is doing can have a profound impact . . . What we do is tend to pick out catchment areas or subcatchments and basically sell very hard to all the farmers in that subcatchment area the benefits of environmental support schemes, because we know that unless we actually get a very high proportion of the land within that subcatchment area into an environmental support scheme, if you just get a few patches of land in, it is not really going to give you much benefit. (Douglas Kite)

The organisation is also involved in the selection of river SSSIs, each of which is prioritised according to the ‘the amount of plant species it supports, the amount of animal species’ (Douglas Kite). Dorset’s river SSSIs, as Douglas Kite pointed out, entail negotiation with numerous riparian landowners: They are often very concerned about the implications of having an SSSI river going through their landholding. The implications are that there is a list of operations that they must consult us on before they are undertaken, which may damage the wildlife interest.2

Thus both the National Trust and English Nature are ‘insider’ groups, who not only own land and water resources, but also have considerable influence upon other resource owners. English Nature uses its financial resources to sponsor local groups, for example, supporting the activities of the Dorset Trust for Nature Conservation in managing the Kimmeridge Bay marine wildlife reserve near Corfe Castle. From a different perspective, the Soil Association also has some direct

2. Issues of concern to English Nature regarding river SSSIs include the level of grazing on the land; the discharge of materials into the river; the cutting of weeds; and – an issue of increasing importance – abstraction and its effects on water levels.

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Back to Nature influence on local landowners. It encourages organic farming, providing certification and professional advice to farmers, and campaigns for ‘safe, healthy food, a unpolluted countryside and a sustainable farming policy in Britain and worldwide’ (Soil Association 1999:1). Other national groups work from more of an ‘outsider’ position and, rather than involving themselves in the physical management of resources, disseminate information and educational materials, promoting varying degrees of radicalism. For example, the Green Party combines a concern for the degradation of the environment with a commitment to the idea of socially equitable communities. As a political party, it employs the representational forms in keeping with this identity, publishing policy documents and engaging in political debates. Its critiques of current water resource management, albeit more focused on ecological than social issues, have been effective at times: for example, a report on The State of Britain’s Beaches in 1990 publicised the severe pollution of the coastline and added considerably to the pressure upon the water and sewage companies to invest in more effective treatment technology. Unconstrained by the need to fit into the mainstream political process (and ideologically committed to challenging many aspects of it), large organisations such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have a more visceral approach, focusing attention on the most controversial environmental issues and publicising these with emotive imagery illustrating, for example, the results of pollution and drought. Their membership is typically young, liberal or left-wing, and includes people in the lower income brackets, although even in these more radical groups middle-class education and confidence is well represented. As well as railing against environmental degradation, the discourses of these groups contain lively debates about moral and social issues, demanding both a general reduction in resource consumption and more equitable resource distribution. Their input to water resource management consists largely of critiques of the appropriation of resources, the profiteering of the water industry, and the environmental problems created by industry and farming, which in their view is compounded by inadequate legislation and enforcement. In Dorset these organisations participate in educative local events such as the Great Green Gathering, an annual fair that combines recreation with ‘a very deep underlying green message . . . and suggested methods of how to combat the many perils threatening our planet’ (Nash 1998a:53).3 Such events forge crucial links between national and local groups and have done much to popularise environmental activism. For example, when it first took place in 1995, the Great Green Gathering was regarded with deep suspicion and attracted a large police presence. 3. For example, in 1998, the Great Green Gathering featured a wind pump for water, designed by the Intermediate Technology Development Group.

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Managing Water By 1998 a reporter noted that ‘times have changed and the police were said to be asking for double shifts – and asking could they bring their families too’ (Nash 1998a:53). Though there are local groups in Dorset, such as Surfers Against Sewage, and a few low-key Pagan organisations, whose ideology coheres with the more radical views within the environmental movement, on the whole, Dorset’s smaller environmental or conservation groups reflect its Conservative and older-than-average demography. Some are supported by the local aristocracy: for example, one of the most active groups is the Dorset Wildlife Trust (DWT),4 whose patron is the Honourable Mrs Charlotte Townshend, the owner of the Melbury Estate and much else besides. The DWT runs craft fairs and concerts (at Melbury House), and manages a number of small wildlife reserves in the county. It has a subsidiary Dorset Otter Group, funded by Water UK and the national Wildlife Trusts. Like other otter groups, this has elicited considerable local support, and there is also a popular junior wing, called Wildlife Watch, which has initiated activities such as ‘Water Volewatch’. Groups such as the DWT are influential at a local level, gaining from having wealthy and well-connected patrons or being able to persuade famous people to support them. For example, the actor Edward Fox sometimes lends his name and presence to Dorset Wildlife Trust events, and a new charity in neighbouring Somerset, the Westcountry Rivers Trust, persuaded the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes to help launch their endeavours to protect the ‘beauty and ecological integrity of over 4000 kilometres of rivers and streams’ (Dorset Evening Echo, 6 June 1995:16). One of the most active local groups is the Dorset Countryside Volunteers (DCV), an independent organisation that has been running for nearly thirty years. The DCV undertakes small-scale management tasks, often at the request of the local County Council, the Wildlife Trusts, the RSPB or the National Trust. These include building dry stone walls and fences, hedgelaying, planting and coppicing woodland, and improving access to many places by working on paths, stiles and gates. The DCV’s motivation is typical of small conservation groups: The satisfaction of doing something in the countryside, and also the fact that you are benefiting the wildlife. It’s not just people that I do it for. It’s the benefit to the wildlife, and there are so many areas under threat now with housing and factories and development as a whole . . . We are working for nature. (Brian Thompson)

4. County Wildlife Trusts are linked at a national level by the Wildlife Trusts office. The Wildlife Trusts have over 2300 nature reserves covering over 80,000 hectares, of which 995 are SSSI. Many of these are river or wetland sites (Water UK and the Wildlife Trusts 1999:2).

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Back to Nature Its demographic profile – ‘pretty much educated, middle class’ (INF47) – is also typical of local ‘conservation’ NGOs. Like other such groups, the DCV avoids overt involvement in political issues or environmental activism, although it only does projects where there is public access to the site involved: We keep out of it. We stay neutral . . . because we are working for landowners, because we are working for the local authority, and we are working for the various Wildlife Trusts . . . Everybody is entitled to their own views on it, but as far as the group is concerned, we remain strictly neutral. We have to be . . . we maintain a relationship with everybody. (Brian Thompson)

A lot of the DVC’s tasks are related to water resource management: the group does pond renovation, river bank clearance, and recently began restoring water meadows. Thus weekend volunteers, with relative economic security and leisure time, are now taking up the tasks that at one time provided employment for a rural workforce. Often undertaking projects at the behest of the County Council, they also enable the local government to have an input into water resource management that would otherwise be beyond its means.

Local Agenda Along with the county-wide organisations there are many small community conservation groups representing the smallest local unit of collective resource management. These are often specialised or focused on specific sites, and some have arisen in response to immediate threats to their local environment. For example, in July 1999, Gillingham residents formed a group to oppose plans to develop Bowridge Hill. Under the headline ‘Vole Patrol is Called to Arms’ the local newspaper recorded their efforts to prevent the town losing ‘an important piece of its environmental heritage’ (Fricker 1999:1). Gillingham is also the location of the Gillingham Action for Nature Group, which ‘works to conserve and enhance Gillingham’s wildlife by organising practical work, meetings and talks, and manages the Withy Wood Nature Reserve’ (Stour Valley Project 1998:8). In addition, the Gillingham Three Rivers Project pressurises local industries to make room for more riverside walks, tree planting and wildlife protection. The group exhibited a large map at the annual agricultural show, and later at the local library, inviting the public to mark on it the features they wanted to see along the confluence of the Stour and its tributaries (the Shreen and Lodden) in Gillingham. Many towns and villages have had one-off conservation projects (some initiated for the millennium), which have usually involved tree planting and the creation of ponds and meadows. For example, one group asked a local farmer to donate land for an oak wood: – 187 –

Managing Water It was suggested that [in] areas that had originally been the Royal Forest . . . it would be a good idea to bring back some more oak trees. One of the farmers responded to this, and ten acres were set aside, and then there was a community planting . . . There is still sort of community involvement with the schools. We decided we’d have a wildflower meadow, which is moderately successful, not an easy thing to do. The pond is hugely successful really. The contractor dug that out and the children had a wonderful time planting edge plants and they go down there pond dipping. There are dipping platforms which the Dorset County Council Countryside team put in there . . . it’s a lovely area to walk down to. (Elizabeth Kendall)

Together with the county organisations, these local groups represent contemporary forms of public engagement in environmental care: composed of people with diverse politics and varying degrees of expertise they work hard to influence those with more control over resources, and often provide the labour for the management of their local environment. Sometimes they persuade local government bodies, the Environment Agency or local industries to provide funds or advice. This close-grained engagement is one of the most important ways for people who are otherwise uninvolved to participate physically or intellectually in water management. It is a peripheral role, usually focused on wildlife, recreation and aesthetics, and removed from the real economic and physical control of the resources. However, while it may only be a pale reflection of earlier models of common ownership, or the kind of collective water management that characterised rural communities in the nineteenth century, it is involvement nevertheless, and it confers a sense of possession and governance. Unsurprisingly, it was the members of conservation groups in Dorset who were most deeply opposed to privatisation and the enclosure of water that this represents. Participation in conservation activities also means that they are well informed about the various environmental issues relating to water resources. Being focused on the social, spiritual and aesthetic aspects of water, they also tend to be extremely concerned about water quality, and critical about current farming practices and the effects of over-abstraction and pollution. Farmers, in turn, are inclined to resent a critique that challenges their management of the land. As one put it: ‘there are certain persons . . . that try to rule the roost’ (INF37). Local environmentalists note the unwillingness of some farmers to engage in discussions: There’s a fair gap in understanding of the terminology between the traditional farming type and somebody like the Woodland Trust, for instance, or the Wildlife Societies, or the Nature Reserve or the other groups that are now increasingly coming to prominence and buying bits of land to look after in their own ways. There’s quite a gap between them. (INF34)

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Back to Nature Environmental and conservation groups are willing to admit that the overuse of water resources is the product of changing patterns not just in farming but also in domestic usage: Domestic consumers are using more water though such appliances as power showers, and farmers are planting more crops which require increased irrigation. (DWT 1996:5)

A number of environmental organisations have supported government and water industry efforts to encourage the population to cut back on its use of water. However, they remain distrustful of the industry’s commitment to environmental issues: I have a little bit of a problem with the privatisation [of water], because it’s in their interests to sell as much of the resource as possible . . . It is cheaper to develop a new water resource – with its environmental impacts – rather than putting in place infrastructure or water-saving devices that reduce the amount that people actually use. (INF47)

Environmental organisations have directed their energies towards two major goals: gaining input to the political arena so that they can apply pressure to government and industry, and providing a flow of educative material to encourage greater environmental concern in the population as a whole. Many recognise that this is equally a political and social agenda, hinging upon access to land and water resources and the reinvolvement of a democratic majority in localised ownership and management of resources at a local level. Conservation has to start local – you can’t do it by sort of preaching nationally or anything like that. (Clare Freeman)

There is some urgency in this ‘grassroots’ desire to regain a position in which local communities are reintegrated to resource management. As Worster notes: The unprecedented environmental destructiveness of our time is largely the result of those ‘big organizations’ Samuel Huntingdon defined as necessary and inevitable. Whatever they may accomplish in the manufacture of wealth, they are innately antiecological. Immense, centralized institutions, with complicated hierarchies, they tend to impose their outlook and their demands on nature, as they do on the individual and the small human community, and they do so with great destructiveness. They are too insulated from the results of their actions to learn, to adjust, to harmonize. That is another way of saying that a social condition of diffused power is more likely to be ecologically sensitive and preserving. (1985:332)

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Managing Water

Re-creating Knowledge As well as challenging the enclosure of common land and resources, participating in conservation activities along the Stour enables people to regain some of the close-grained knowledge about their local environment that would have been shared by the ‘watermen’ and women who managed local water resources in past centuries. There is considerable overlap between this re-creation of highly localised knowledge and the knowledge gained via simpler forms of recreation. Many kinds of conservation are perceived as recreational, and even the ‘just for fun’ activities described in Chapter 6 often involve special knowledges and responsibilities, or at least bring environmental changes and concerns to the fore. Thus canoeists certainly notice when rivers dwindle into sluggish shallows, and such activities also tend to raise concerns about pollution, since most can be relied on to provide opportunities for unplanned swallowing of river or sea water: The Stour’s fairly good upstream. There’s a couple of rivers which I know are supposed to be very bad, and if you ever drink any of those rivers I suppose [you should] go to the doctor really, to make sure. We know if we’ve been on a canoe trip and you’re feeling ill to tell the doctor you are a canoeist. (Charlie Smith)

Angling involves a very close reading of the river, projecting the mind into an underwater world full of snags and weeds, currents and slack waters. Of all the people who use the Stour recreationally, it is probably the local anglers who know it best: Me and my mate, I suppose we know every inch of it, our own stretch from Cutt Mill down the Shillingstone, we’ve fished it so many times. (Arthur Morris) We know every bend: I know every bump in the river below the surface, never mind on top . . . If you fish the river, you know where there’s deep holes and what have you, like a road round your house or your town. (Tom Suttle)

Anglers also have a very keen sense of the Stour as a stream of life inhabited not only by fish, but also by a whole aquatic food chain: It’s a bit like the sort of thing, the activity you might have seen, on the Serengeti with zebras and lions and so on, but it’s all going on down there. (Mike Ladle)

With such close observation, it is unsurprising that many feel passionately that this busy and orderly ‘life stream’ should not be disordered by excessive abstraction or pollution. They believe they have an important role to play in the management of water resources. Fishing club records – which often go back for at least fifty years

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Back to Nature – provide a useful indicator of the ecological state of the river, and have led to accusations that farmers have polluted the Stour by using fertilisers irresponsibly: They haven’t been putting it [fertiliser] on by the ton – they’ve been putting it on by the hundred ton . . . just to improve the green grass . . . [It] has all been leached into the river . . . Wherever there’s been heavy loads of nitrate, that’s the section of the river you see very very few young fish . . . It’s observation over the years, that places that have been heavily farmed are the places where the fish are fewest . . . The return from matches is a very firm survey of the fish that are in the river. (INF10)

Most fishing clubs also do maintenance tasks along the riverbanks: We had many a day’s work . . . we used to cut back trees and all that kind of thing. What really ‘amuses’ us now is that we do all this work on the river, manual work, year in year out, but every year there’s awards given to people who look after the river, and never has any angling association ever been given any award. Farmers . . . they get the awards . . . People who look down from above on the river . . . don’t see what is obvious – that the angling associations are really the most important people to look after the river, because they spend more time, they are more concentrated, and they’ve got, well, a personal interest in it. (INF10)

Riverside walks also gather knowledge, generate environmental concern and enable people to locate identity in place. Like boaters, walkers are disturbed by obvious visual pollution or low water levels, and comment frequently about difficulties in access, litter, development near the river, intensive land usage and noise pollution. A reading of the river from a walking perspective is an immersion in ecological and cultural details, creating a mental map of access points, picnic sites, pubs or other sources of refreshment, and the physical obstacles (old stiles, overgrowths of nettles, barbed wire, electric fences) that are common discouragements to ramblers. Walking provides access to resources and a sense of, if not ownership, at least belonging, and it positions water resources in a wider cultural landscape. As a Ranger put it, people join walks and conservation activities for several reasons: Interacting with other people . . . going for a walk in a group, rather than just by themselves, [and for] increased knowledge . . . Often we do get regulars . . . They like to feel as though they are building up the jigsaw of different areas . . . They get into it and it is just increased identity with it, they feel inspired to do a little bit more, be it the practical tasks or the walks. Sometimes . . . when you see them again, they’ve taken their auntie off to see one of the mills or something like that. So it’s either the wildlife, the history or something of the river that is inspiring them to go and do that specific visit, to tie it into the wider picture. (Clare Freeman)

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Managing Water For many people, excluded from direct ownership of resources, recreation may be their only contact with water resources outside the domestic sphere. However, apart from rare visits to water treatment plants, or an awareness that the local reservoir is also an aspect of water supply technology, recreational interactions with water are largely detached from the realities of how water ‘out there’ finds its way to the domestic tap, taking place in physical contexts that are – at least perceptually – separate from everyday uses of water. The river [a generation ago] was a far greater part of their lives than it is for many people now. (Clare Freeman)

This compartmentalisation is manifested materially: public access to water is now closely prescribed and organised. People are encouraged to swim in municipal pools rather than the river; reservoirs are masked as ‘wildlife havens’; mills have become museums, and rivers are divided into tightly controlled fishing sites and waymarked walks. Water supply and commercial abstraction takes place elsewhere. Nowadays there’s a notice banning people from swimming in the river, even down by the mill . . . There used to be a bathing island down here you see. That’s where I used to go . . . during the war and before. There used to be haymaking in the field along by the river, you used to go and have a dip . . . if you were hot in the summertime. (Tom Fox)

One of the most noticeable differences between local conservation or recreational groups and the government, water industry and farming groups is that of gender. The groups directly in control of water resources are very male-dominated, most particularly in terms of who actually owns, makes decisions about or acts upon water. In the local groups, although the anglers are almost all men, most groups have more of a gender balance, although it would appear, again, that there are more men ‘acting upon’ the river than merely ‘appreciating’ it. Thus the DCV has mainly men building weirs and clearing riverbanks, while walking and painting groups are more likely to be composed of women. It seems, therefore, that women have the least part in looking after or controlling water resources directly, and in terms of real ownership of water they are almost invisible. However, there remains one place where their water management is crucial: in the domestic sphere they are – as they have always been – the major users and managers of water.

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Watering the House and Garden

Part VI Contraflows

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–12– Watering the House and Garden The house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress. (Sir Edward Coke)

Domestic Space We love water on the place, and streams. Our last house had a stream in the garden, which was wonderful. (David Solly)

Most of the water usage in the UK – as in other industrialised countries – takes place within the domestic sphere, and it is here that levels of use are rising so intractably and unsustainably.1 This chapter considers water in a domestic context, and points to some of the relationships between changes in the wider cultural landscape, rising patterns of usage, and concerns about water quality. It is apparent from the ethnographic context that, over time, the increasing fragmentation of the social and physical landscape in the UK has had a major effect upon what is meant by ‘domestic space’. The political, religious and economic institutions that once bound local communities have weakened or centralised away from them, leaving an unbridgeable gap between individuals or families and the vast anonymity of the State or ‘the industry’. A massive increase in mobility has made it difficult for communities to coalesce around long-term social relationships. Even rural Dorset villages now have a turnover of population that ensures a much greater degree of social and spatial self-containment than existed previously, and many of their inhabitants spoke wistfully about the loss of ‘community’. When you see these places on the continent, where the women all go and do their washing like that, in a sort of central place where the water is . . . My husband says the modern way of life has created a lot of the loneliness that people experience, simply because we have everything piped into our house now – everything comes to us. We have

1. By 2004–5 water delivered to household customers is projected to increase by 133 million litres per day (or about 1.6%). This overall increase results from around 0.7 million new households in the same period (an increase of about 3.5%) (OFWAT 1999b:122).

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Contraflows no reason to go out, and if you . . . haven’t got to go out, so you don’t. So you become very isolated. (Sue Jackson)

An inevitable corollary of this loss has been a shift to a combination of abstract and individuated forms of social identity. This is very apparent along the Stour, where it seemed that people’s social identity was constructed on very disparate scales. Some pointed to ‘national’ identity that was ‘English’ in its nature, but most drew upon their work sphere, which, as the major focus of their agency and labour, provided a social role and status. Alternatively they saw as central their individual or family identity. What many described as tenuous, ‘weak’ or ‘lost’ was an extended local community, and with it a localised form of collective identity. It appears that this is the scale of social being most disrupted by demographic mobility. The fragmentation of the social landscape has been manifested in real terms as the commons have been enclosed, removing the virtual and material collective spaces that used to connect family dwellings in villages and neighbourhoods. With access to land and resources held by a tiny percentage of the population, and increasingly controlled in a variety of ways, the only physical space in which the majority of people can now enact individual agency or express a personal (rather than professional) identity is within their own households. Most spend their working lives indoors. Even when they move into the wider landscape – for example, to walk, to fish, to sail or canoe on the river – they are there as visitors and their activities are tightly constrained. Apart from the remaining rights of way, which still stubbornly breach boundaries, ‘the countryside’ is increasingly divided into industrial, private and prescribed recreational spaces. With former collective space held exclusively by agencies, companies and individuals with whom only a minority maintain social relationships, there is literally no ‘space’ for an imagined community (see Anderson 1991, Rykwert 1976). Although people may envision their homes within a particular street, neighbourhood or village, for the majority, living in increasingly anonymous urban neighbourhoods, the most dominant image of ‘home’ is that which is physically contained within the bounds of the familial house and garden. In most residential contexts, whether urban or rural, the inhabitants are now rarely – or only minimally – involved in the maintenance of the public spaces between dwellings. They have little or no control over these areas: instead, public spaces have become the responsibility of bureaucratic institutions located elsewhere, and are managed and used freely by strangers. Thus, although in theory shared collectively, public space has become a kind of no-man’s land, a social terra nullius. I think we are very isolated. We don’t do things enough with other people, do we? You tend to get on with your own thing. I don’t think we are linked. (David Solly)

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Watering the House and Garden

Material Disconnection The separation of domestic space from wider landscapes is concretised in the material culture that carries water invisibly to individuated homes. There is nothing remaining in this arrangement to indicate the relationship between the flow of piped water and external social, economic or environmental events. Homes are supplied, billed and sometimes metered individually, without reference to where the water has come from, and few people are sufficiently involved in the management of the landscape to see the environmental degradation that results from overuse of water resources. There is thus a crucial material and perceptual disconnection between domestic water use and its ecological consequences. [People] discuss water bills, yeah, too high, and hosepipe bans and stuff like that, but . . . I don’t think many people bother round here . . . It doesn’t occur to them . . . half of them probably don’t even know where it [their water supply] comes from. As far as they are concerned, you turn on the tap and there it is. (James Conduit)

The form of the material culture is also critical: in general, it is designed to encourage a vision of infinite supplies. People may know that their water comes from far away, but its travels through the vast network of pipes are invisible: it simply appears, gushing from the tap, as if from a spring hidden beneath the house. Any sudden halt to the supply seems counterintuitive and rather shocking. Water pipes gurgle and hum inside the house, suggesting that it is always there, waiting to get out. Indeed, people are well aware that it is only by physically closing the tap that water can be prevented from pouring into the home and flooding it. When the technology fails – when culture ceases to tame nature – its destructive potential is rapidly made evident. Thus the form of the material culture used to supply water presents it as an unlimited resource, providing a visual message that is fundamentally at odds with suppliers’ protestations that water resources are finite. At one time . . . you had to fetch the water, or pump it, so you were more conscious of how much you were using, and the effects of it . . . We seem to be cushioned from a lot of this now . . . You put on a tap, or put on the hose, and people don’t really think about it very much now. (INF12)

Without the arduous carrying of water, a view of the limited depth of the well, or the need to pump it by hand, there is nothing in the physical use of water to counteract this experience. Notably, it is those who remember this kind of effort who are still most inclined to limit their use of water, suggesting an important (and predictable) relationship between habituative physical ‘training’ and patterns of use:

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Contraflows My mum used to carry every bucket into the cottage . . . For cooking, washing, everything . . . You don’t waste water . . . Even in those days we used to [re]use dirty water . . . for aphids and little horribles on cabbages and plants, and plants seem to like it as well. (Fred Hunt) We just had a pump at the farmhouse, a handpump. So we used to pump the water up into the top, into a tank, and if you wanted it for a kettle or something, you pumped it and it come out the tap. [You] wouldn’t leave the tap running. We only had one tap in the house. (Barry Cooper)

These recollections highlight how recent ‘unlimited’ water supply is for some. One of the simple reasons for rising domestic use is the reality that water using technology in the home has been transformed. The 1951 census noted that 22% of the households in Dorset still had no piped water,2 27% were without exclusive use of a toilet and 41% had no built-in bathing facilities. By 1991 almost all had running water, and only 1.5% lacked or had to share a bathroom or inside toilet. In the twenty-first century most UK households have one or more water using appliances – washing machines and dishwashers – and cars.3 Usage has gone up an awful lot . . . When I married so many years ago, who had a washing machine? Who had showers? Or even baths? (Beryl Coward)

Ironically, water supply technology was initially designed to suggest precisely the unlimited, potentially profligate use of resources that water companies and conservationists are now so eager to discourage. When it was invented, this was the meaning it was meant to convey: here was a wonderful spouting spring brought right into the home, representing the height of luxury, privileged access to resources, an endless supply of ‘wealth’. As the historical accounts showed (see Chapter 2) such symbolic and practical affluence remained the province of the rich for a long time. Then, as piped water supplies reached the majority, it was only the very poorest members of society who were excluded from access to such wealth. Goubert notes that ‘when Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, there was not a single bathroom in the whole of Buckingham Palace, (1986:241), but by 1882 Eardley Bailey Denton was writing: It is now generally acknowledged that a dwelling cannot be considered as complete without a bathroom, and that its adoption should not be limited to the superior mansions 2. In the 1950s the proportion of houses without piped water supplies was much higher in rural areas (13–27%) and lower in most urban areas (less than 3%). Dorset retained a stronger than average focus on rural life: in the remainder of England and Wales, the average percentage of houses without their own water supply was only 17% (Census 1951). 3. Waterfacts 1997 indicated that water consumption increased from 254 litres per capita per day to 343 between 1980 and 1995 (Water Services Association 1997:63).

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Watering the House and Garden of the wealthy, but that all classes of our population should . . . benefit by the comfort, cleanliness and healthfulness afforded by both hot and cold baths. (In Barty-King 1992:135)

This historical experience has left an important legacy of ideas and values that present a major obstacle to the conservation of water. As the contemporary ethnographic data demonstrate, the powerful associations between water, wealth and social potency, and the meaning of ‘unlimited access’, have changed remarkably little. Even now, consistently, people associate plentiful supplies of water and the ability to hold and contain it in some form with affluence, while limitations on access to water carry unavoidable connotations of poverty and deprivation.

Wasting Away The perceptual disconnections that water supply technology introduced between domestic usage and environmental effects are repeated in the material culture that organises the disposal of waste water and sewage. Just as people quickly became accustomed to water magically emerging from the tap, they grew to depend upon sanitary systems that made waste vanish, to be carried far away in a vast subterranean system, out of the body, out of the house, and out of mind, with the effects emerging ‘somewhere else’. Most people in the UK now take water and sewage disposal very much for granted and, because there has been a vast increase in the use of water for cleaning, households also produce much more waste water. Many people in the Stour Valley reported that their patterns of use have shifted steadily in this direction: they shower or bath daily now, whereas once a week was considered sufficient only a generation or two ago. Most have appliances such as washing machines and dishwashers, and make frequent use of them. If I put my washing machine on today, I am going to use, I think it is in excess of 20 gallons of water. If I had a family I’d have my machine going maybe several times a day . . . Children wear clean clothes every day now. None of my grandson’s clothes will be looked at and put on tomorrow . . . [Before] we changed our clothes once a week, when we had a bath! (Vera Brown)

This confirms other research on water usage patterns4 that suggests that people in the UK have followed a trend that began in the USA, and has permeated much of 4. The various managing agencies have charted a steady rise in usage levels (see EA 1997b, OFWAT 1998, Water Services Association 1997). The Environment Agency also notes that the highest levels of per capita use are clustered in the most urbanized areas of the UK, but ‘we believe that there is scope for additional household efficiency over the next 25 years’ (2001:59).

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Contraflows Europe, to varying degrees. In the space of two generations the population as a whole has become radically cleaner, striving to achieve increasingly sanitised bodies, domestic environments and clothing, soaping away all trace of body odour, washing clothes after a single use, and scrubbing household surfaces with toxic cleansing substances. This vastly increases levels of water (and energy) usage, and pours ecologically harmful chemicals into the system. One of the major problems now confronting water managers is the difficulty of removing washing chemicals from wastewater: Phosphates are becoming a big issue now because there’s basically far too high a level of phosphates in most washing powders, and people wash things much more than they did, with a lot more water than they did, all of which ends up through the waste water system, and the sewage works, into the rivers . . . From April 1999, there will be a new EU directive to strip phosphates out of phosphate-sensitive areas, and that will involve the company [Wessex Water] in several hundred million pounds worth of expenditure. (Richard Lacey)

There are some obvious causal factors. In part, these changing practices arise from a greater appreciation of the relationship between health and hygiene. Waterborne diseases – typhoid and polio – and the dark days of stinking urban water courses are not so far away. The idea of limiting the flow of water into and out of the home is consequently an anathema. The technology itself also promotes its own use: once people have invested in water-using appliances, these offer unlimited access to cleanness with very little effort. Labour-saving washing machines (for clothes and crockery) use and dispose of water and cleansing agents invisibly, with only their advantages made visible. Every use of the ‘power shower’ or bath affords a seductive sensory pleasure. Hosing down the car is easier and more effective than lugging buckets of water. However, there are subtler issues entangled in modern anxieties about cleanliness. ‘Sanitising’ practices and their material culture ought to be considered as an expression of increasingly fragmentary and individuated social and spatial organisation. Earlier chapters explored ideas about health and the way in which people conceptualise their own physical well-being and that of the wider environment in terms of ‘wholeness’ and integrity. They are alarmed by the sense that their food and water, and the environment itself, is contaminated and disordered. People are mad about health and hygiene. Why? . . . I think that there’s so much publicity going on, all these health, food scares and one thing or another, and it all builds up. (Tom Fox)

Health, it seems, is perceived as something which can be breached by ‘otherness’ in various forms, with fears of ingesting polluted water into the bodily ‘system’ – 200 –

Watering the House and Garden conceptually related to the ‘invasion’ represented by the influx of strangers into private spaces. These homologous concepts are particularly relevant in a domestic space imagined as an extension of the familial body, and in this set of associations it is possible to see some of the deepest roots of modern concerns about cleanliness. If personal or familial identity is largely confined to household space, then ‘otherness’ begins at the front door. The identity of the self – or the other – is fundamentally expressed in smell, and smells are problematic. For instance, Howes notes Gell’s comment that smells are not controllable, because they escape from their objects: Smells are . . . always ‘out of place’, forever emerging from things, that is, crossing boundaries. The fact that smells are formless, that they so resist all attempts at classification or articulation, is what accounts for their so often being taboo, and for the anxiety which they provoke. (Howes 1991:141)

The successful containment of smell – and thus the maintenance of boundaries – appears to have become much more important with demographic mobility and shifts towards urban lifestyles which have forced strangers into closer contact, generating concerns about boundary transgression and contamination. It reflects the social and spatial isolation of modern households within public spaces that, though theoretically belonging to all, feel increasingly as if they belong to no-one. Unlike the ‘shared substance’ of longstanding communities in rural areas, this more alienated way of life requires precise boundaries that are clearly threatened by untamed odours emanating from ‘the other’. As Illich comments, cultural anxieties about smell increased dramatically in twentieth-century Europe, when new ties developed between perceptions of social class, water and cleanliness: One could move into the better classes only by getting rid of body smell and making sure than no odor attached to one’s home. Water became a detergent of smell . . . The new individual . . . expects everyone else to stay within the bounds of his or her own skin. He learns to be ashamed when his aura is noticed . . . Shame at being smelled, embarrassment at coming from a smelly environment, and a new proneness to be offended by smell – all taken together place the citizen in a new kind of space. (1986:59–61)

It seems that mobile populations, in which people are surrounded by strangers, do have a greater need to define boundaries. Thus the demographic movements that accompanied the Industrial Revolution probably contributed to Victorian anxieties about human sexuality and the exchange of ‘fluids’, and increasing revulsion for the body and its natural processes. These concerns are nicely illustrated by the contemporary importance of ‘grunge’ – the aggressive presentation of smell – as a political statement. Because smells appropriate space, and can therefore be immensely threatening, ‘grunge’ is a – 201 –

Contraflows challenge to societal values about what constitutes ‘orderly’ social behaviour. Some of the more radical environmental groups assert that ‘grunge is good’ – that adherence to very high levels of cleanliness is not a moral good, but is merely ‘unnatural’. This attaches to a whole discourse about reducing resource use, living ‘with’ rather than in opposition to ‘nature’, and restoring ‘community’. But in reality, in contemporary Britain, it requires considerable political commitment (and the support of a valued – and presumably same-smelling – peer group) to reject the intense pressures to conform to more conventional ideas about physical cleanliness. Images about cleanliness are so ubiquitous that it is easy to forget how recently this obsession has emerged, flowering only in a post-war era of demographic mobility. The endless television advertisements for soaps and other cleansing agents are, in effect, a vision of order. A clean and ‘uncontaminated’ house provides a sense of physical and moral integrity and keeps ‘otherness’ at bay; clean clothes provide the necessary armour for public contact with strangers, and a clean body contains personal smell and identity within the envelope of the skin. The themes are extremely consistent: in a perfect world, homes are dust-, dirt- and odour-free, gleaming with polished surfaces and plentiful light; clothes and teeth are ‘whiter than white’, and hair and skin ‘shine’ or ‘glow’ with health and vitality. These images tightly conflate ideas about health, morality, cleanliness and vitality, and the only antidote to the converse – death, immorality, dust and dirt – is water. An underlying issue of mortality is embedded in these concerns. Many odours are caused by the emanation of waste matter and decay – the ‘dead matter’ that, as noted in Chapter 3, generates deep revulsion. It has been mooted that societies in which identity – and thus lifespan – are seen as more individual than collective appear to exhibit a heightened fear of mortality. This is a logical outcome of a loss of a sense of collective spiritual and social continuity, and may have several effects on patterns of water use. On the one hand, it may contribute to a more extreme rejection of other people’s ‘dead matter’ (i.e. contact with any form of excretion – sweat, odour or other ‘waste’ matters) and a greater concern about cleanliness; on the other, it could be expected to raise the importance of being able to accumulate or make unlimited use of a substance encoded with ‘life’ and ‘regeneration’. These are compelling reasons for the use of more and more water. Even people who are very conscious of the need to save water – well-informed environmentalists, or those who can ill afford rising bills – find it extremely difficult to make more than minor compromises on water use. Those achieving the lowest levels of domestic usage in the Stour Valley had gone to great lengths to reject conventional norms in other ways: these were the ‘alternative’ communities committed to a way of life which attaches greater value to environmental health. We all damage the environment, and it’s so easy to damage it these days . . . It’s so easy to think ‘Oh I can’t be bothered to pay extra for environmentally friendly products’, or

– 202 –

Watering the House and Garden ‘I’ll just use the washing machine instead of hand washing’ and that sort of stuff, and we’ve all got lives to lead. But . . . I do feel I should be doing something, you know . . . taking personal responsibility by lifestyle . . . Maybe just by doing something like that, you can show other people that there are alternative ways of doing things. I don’t know if it has any effect at all . . . It’s the minimum anyway. I think at the moment I’m sort of just trying to do the least damage possible . . . I just get so frustrated by it all. It just builds up, and you just think ‘Oh for goodness sake, it’s important!’ (INF30)

In a few households people were trying to save water for economic or environmental reasons and, following practices from countries with very limited water supplies, were not flushing the toilet with each use. This was workable with immediate ‘same substance’ family: because ‘it’s usually just the four of us that know’ (INF52), but because of anxieties about waste and odour it created some very difficult social questions about whether visitors would realise that this was a positive ‘water saving’ measure, or would perceive it, embarrassingly, as ‘dirty’ habits. It also raised awkward issues about what to then do elsewhere. One woman described how it was feasible to continue the practice in her own parents’ home, but not in the house of her mother-in-law, and how it had to be explained to children that it was unacceptable in public facilities. If they go into the public toilet. T— comes out (I take him with me into the ladies) and I ask him ‘Did you flush the toilet?’ ‘No we’re not meant to.’ I say, ‘Oh . . . you must flush the toilet here.’ Because somebody else is going to use it straight afterwards and that does seem a bad habit not to flush it . . . They always flush the toilet when they go anywhere else . . . I don’t at my parents, because they have just changed to being on a water meter and talked to us about it and wondered if it would be a good idea . . . So I don’t worry about it, but Dad does – he always says to the children, ‘Have you flushed the toilet and washed your hands?’ He doesn’t like it if it’s not flushed. I wouldn’t do [this] at my husband’s parents’ house. I suppose it’s politeness really . . . I think probably an older person would feel more embarrassed about it. (INF52)

The same informant noted that much depends on whether people know why her family doesn’t flush the toilet: I feel I have to explain myself to people: ‘we’re on a water meter’ . . . If they [the visitors] hadn’t said anything, and they hadn’t flushed the toilet, I would think of it as being a bit unhygienic, but if they’d said to me ‘oh yes, we’re on a meter as well’, and they hadn’t flushed the toilet, I’d think ‘that’s good’. But I don’t know if I’d do the same. If I went to their house and we’d discussed meters, and then if I went to the toilet, would I flush? I’d have to stand there and think about it! ‘Should I flush the toilet’, or by flushing the toilet would they immediately assume, as I do, that they’d just had their bowels open and so they’ve got to flush the toilet.

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Contraflows Clearly people have very different feelings about confronting other people with their waste substances in public spaces and in the intimacy of their own home, which, as Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995) have pointed out is symbolic of the family ‘body’.5 One or two families, in an attempt to conserve water, did manage to resist the desire to get rid of waste products immediately: I made sure that we didn’t use the tap for cleaning teeth . . . We bought two water butts, not just one . . . We didn’t buy a hosepipe, because we thought if we had it there, we would use it . . . We don’t have baths that often – we do tend to use showers . . . So we changed our lifestyle a lot. (Julie Galbally)

However, such efforts were exceptional. Most people acknowledged that they could and perhaps should do more to conserve water – ‘I think we have a responsibility in how we use our end of the water’ (Pat Herbert) – but, despite these good intentions, confined themselves to minimal changes, and saw little scope for changing their habits more radically: We try to be conscious of not running the taps, and . . . in the summer, I tend to take the washing up water out [to the garden] and chuck it over wherever I think might do with it. (Elizabeth Kendall) Although we are conscious that we waste more water than we should . . . we haven’t done anything much about it, which is probably typical of an awful lot of people. But we do to a certain extent recycle it: we’ve got a reasonable sized garden and so a lot of the water that we save we tend to pour out onto the garden, the plants and so on, especially in times of dry summer periods. But otherwise we are a very ordinary household I think; we tend to use far more water than we really need. (INF35)

Watering Cans and Can’ts Although much has been written about the political and economic impact of the enclosure and alienation of land and resources, there has been little investigation of the way that continual shrinkage in ‘identifiable’ home space affects people’s resource use. It is apparent that a widespread retreat into more individuated spaces and identities has led to sanitising practices that use of vast amounts of water. There are other aspects of social and spatial individuation that encourage increasing levels of use. With the loss of the commons, and the erasure of local forms of 5. Csikzentmihályi and Rochberg-Halton (1981), in examining the symbolic meanings of domestic spaces, similarly described the home as the shell of the self, though, as Moore (1994) has pointed out, houses have multiple meanings.

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Watering the House and Garden community, the home and particularly garden space have become the major focus of individual and familial self-expression. People have a fundamental need to project themselves into their environments, and in the twenty-first century, opportunities for doing this in concrete and visible ways can be elusive. As Caplan (1997) points out, in a mobile social context, identity is increasingly dependent upon ‘lifestyle’ choices rather than place or role. The domestic space – however temporary – is often the only arena that provides an opportunity for self-realisation in a tangible, material form, and because water is the ‘essence’ of social identity, it is also a substance through which identity and agency can be expressed and an interaction with the environment maintained. Various writers (e.g. Carrier 1995, Miller 1998, Tilley 1999) have observed that within the domestic space people appropriate alienated objects, refashion them, endow them with meaning and incorporate them into their identity. Writers on gardens (e.g. Crouch and Ward 1988, Francis and Hestor 1990, Strathern 1992) have taken these ideas outdoors to consider the meanings encoded in gardens and gardening. Similarly Garner (2002), writing about forests, describes trees as ‘semiactants’ in social life, integrated into the exchange of cultural meaning. Clearly the garden is a major site of creative expression6 and one that, as Garner points out (pers. comm.), provides a visible indication of environmental values and ‘moral’ behaviour. Like the farm as a source of societal regeneration, the garden is a basis for individual or familial agency. In the records kept by water suppliers, it is domestic garden watering that creates the highest peaks in levels of use: Our water output suddenly leaps in the summer . . . It’s not so much the impact of increased demand due to more population from holiday makers – it has to be a part, but not the major part – it appears to be garden watering, because we only have to have a slight shower and the demand drops right off. (Mark Burton)

Such apparent ‘profligacy’ leads many water companies and politicians to see public concern about environmental issues as superficial – confined to token gestures such as recycling glass and paper, or spending the occasional weekend building otter holts. They point to the ‘wasteful’ use of water in the garden to support the contention that environmental issues are a low priority. As a Wessex Water executive put it: You can see some gross wastage . . . people irrigating lawns and gardens and all this sort of thing, in the height of a summer’s day, when 80% of what they are putting on goes straight back off as evapotranspiration. (Richard Lacey) 6. There are at least 15 million gardens in the UK, and over 10 million people who describe themselves as gardening ‘enthusiasts’ (see Gilbert 1991, Hoyles 1991).

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Contraflows However, water is as meaningful and just as essential – both literally and metaphorically – to the garden as it is to the human body, as a life force, and as the substance of regeneration. In effect, gardening allows people to engage with and manipulate the plants and water that are symbolically the major generative aspects of their environments. One of the running jokes about the deluge of gardening programmes on British television in recent years is that ‘gardening is about sex’. More often than not this leads to commentaries about celebrity gardener Charlie Dimmock’s unfettered breasts, or Alan Titchmarsh’s (reputed) sex appeal, but the subtext of the shows that depict gardening as an aesthetic/erotic pleasure is an acknowledgement of the relationship between horticultural and social fecundity. In this sense, gardening really is about sex: not so much in terms of its lusty televisual protagonists, but because of the powerful homologues between human and environmental generation and – critically – social regeneration.7 To plant things, fertilise them, water them and enable them to grow is a basic expression of potency and a metaphorical transcendence of mortality. To act upon and reform the landscape is to mark it with human agency. Water in the garden – the spouting champagne fizz of fountains and the pond seething with contained life – epitomises these images: Source of life isn’t it – I suppose that’s the only reason quite a few people have it in their gardens nowadays. (James Conduit)

This is of course an age-old relationship in which the garden provides, in miniature, an echo of larger engagements with place: [B]eneath the commonplace is a long, rich, and significant history of associations . . . The designation of the suburban yard as a cure for the afflictions of city life marks the greensward as a remnant of an old pastoral dream . . . (Schama 1996:14, 16)

In this sense, modern domestic gardening emulates the wealthy landowners who used water to express their power and agency. Just as in the 1700s Henry Hoare directed the rising Stour into his holy grotto, today, on the banks of the river, an aristocratic landowner installs a magnificent fountain in front of his manorial residence (and longs for a column of water ‘the size of the one in Geneva’); wellheeled incomers buy and restore old mills; a farmer bulldozes soil to make a lake to gaze upon in his retirement; and fishing clubs buy land so that they can have lakes full of flickering chub and bream. Such grand opportunities are not available to the majority, whose experience of such manifestations is generally dependent upon an entry ticket. They may play 7. Strathern (1992) notes that there is a longstanding relationship between an obsession with gardening and modern concerns about kinship and individuation.

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Watering the House and Garden with ‘public’ water recreationally, or achieve a small measure of control through conservation activities, but control and creative expression of an equivalent kind – direct water ownership – only happens in their own garden. In essence, the primary echo of Stour Head on the domestic front is the water feature, the fountain and the sprinkler: I like sitting out in the courtyard and looking out over the pool, and listening to the trickling water there . . . waterfalls and fountains I have always found very attractive. (Edward Jacson)

Statements of social identity have little value without an audience. Gardens are semi-external space, often visually, audially and sometimes physically accessible to neighbours or passers-by. They provide an opportunity to make a performative statement within what remains of local social communities. They also mediate complex relationships between neighbours, offering a social and spatial basis for interaction. Plants and water move between gardens, emphasising the permeability of the garden fence. Thus the garden is the major space in – and through – which most people demonstrate neighbourly relations and attempt to balance respective needs for creative self-expression. Its importance is highlighted by the extreme conflicts that can arise when negotiations between neighbours fail. Most of the time, however, gardening offers a relatively benign way of connecting with a particular social context and, with the lending of tools, the giving of advice, the proffering of cuttings and seedlings, provides a readily acceptable way of initiating exchange and managing proximity. It is notable that communities attempting to ‘reconstruct’ themselves often facilitate this process with ‘Open Garden’ days, or local bazaars in which plants feature heavily. The garden is therefore revealed as both a public statement of personal identity and agency, and a primary physical space through which individuals and families can engage with their immediate social context. Within this space, water plays a vital role as the primary symbol of social and spiritual generation, as the manifestation of social being, as a metaphor of affluence and potency. Although water companies – and indeed some environmentalists – may regard the garden sprinkler as mere wasteful profligacy, at a symbolic level it is a veritable fountain of social meanings, all of which are vitally important to people largely excluded from acting upon the landscape in any other way. Imagine a British bank manager in his suburban garden, sprinkling water in a joyful ejaculatory homologue over his favourite plants; or a tired parent contemplating the numinous depths of the garden pond. Already disenfranchised, excluded from collective agency by the privatisation of water resources – and still sore about it – how likely are they to listen to the entreaties of those who have appropriated control of the water demanding that they cut their water usage and let – 207 –

Contraflows the garden wither? Apart from producing children – a much more problematic form of immortality – this burgeoning greenery and these sparkling streams of water may be the only way they have to (re)generate their own bit of nature. Domestic users are therefore impervious to efforts to conserve water. Although demand-side management for energy resources suggests that collective community programmes are most effective in encouraging efficient usage,8 it is precisely this level of social organisation that has been most disrupted. In the home, water supply technology encourages visions of an unlimited resource, and yet the spatial isolation in which people live makes reliable access to this seem uncertain. Meanwhile the absence of opportunities to integrate identity and agency at a local level creates a complex set of pressures to sanitise the body and the house with as much water as possible. In an individuated social space, vague wishes to be communityspirited or ecologically friendly are readily subsumed by much more powerful desires to express familial or individual agency, affluence, life and fertility through the control and liberal use of water in the house and garden. People therefore experience a tension between their domestic usage and their dependence upon – and responsibilities for – wider environmental, social and economic realities. In essence, this is a classic conflict between individual and societal needs, played out through the connective medium of water.

Quality and Control You tend to worry . . . you tend to think about the unpleasant things that are probably in there, but you have to realise at the end of the day there is not a great deal you can do about it. (Mike Ladle)

Although they may be able to exert some control over levels of water use within the home, one thing that domestic users cannot control is its quality. They are increasingly anxious about the water coming out of their taps. Although suppliers argue that doubts about its quality are unwarranted, many water users are aware of scientific questions about the parameters tested by the DWI, and, as noted, have deep concerns about farming and industry practices. They are inclined to suspect that water quality has been compromised by ‘unknown’ pollutants and with increasing cynicism, to reject the reassuring statements issued by both the water industry and the government.

8. Some of the most successful programmes to persuade householders in the UK to reduce their levels of resource use were made in the mid-1990s to encourage energy efficiency. These were situated at a local level, using local people to provide advice, and offering prizes to communities achieving the most energy savings.

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Watering the House and Garden The DWI’s 1998 Omnibus survey (DWI 1998a) found that 73% of people assumed that their tapwater was safe to drink, but 79% felt that improving its cleanliness and safety was a priority, suggesting a significant gap between what is acceptable and might be deemed desirable. A further indicator of nagging concerns about water quality is the steady growth in the percentage of people choosing not to drink water direct from the tap. More than a quarter of the population is now sufficiently distrustful of British drinking water that they go to the considerable expense and trouble9 of buying bottled spring water or filtering or boiling tap water. In the Stour Valley, domestic water users applied various criteria to evaluations of water quality. These were mainly a mixture of assessments of the water’s readily discernible qualities – its taste, smell and appearance – combined with information from the media, regulatory agencies and water companies. People certainly noticed if the water left visible deposits of any kind. You always think you’ve got to have it clean to make you clean haven’t you . . . If it was something that stuck on you after the shower, well you’d say ‘that’s dirty’. (INF13)

Their ideas about water treatment were vague, often extrapolated from the kinds of filtration available domestically: It doesn’t taste like nice water, and it’s very hard – you have to scrub the kettle out every week and descale the washing machine with tablets . . . I’ve often thought about taking a sample of ours, and taking it up to be analysed to see what’s in there . . . To tell the truth, I’d rather not know . . . It goes to a purifying plant and it’s supposed to be purified and purified, over charcoal and through . . . But how many bits are left, and how much charcoal is still flowing through it – you know. Once when I lived up the top [of Blandford] there was a lot of trouble with the water, and we were having wriggly things coming out of the tap! . . . They said there was a problem somewhere, but they never told us really what. [It should be] clean . . . crystal clear, purified. If it tasted totally disgusting . . . if it had bits in it . . . I couldn’t drink it if it smelled. (Pat Herbert) The taste I suppose, that would be the obvious thing, and . . . it’s got to be clean-looking hasn’t it . . . I wouldn’t drink dirty water . . . The chemical things, I am not very keen on hearing that things have got high elements with chemicals in them. I think the first thing that would alarm me would be the taste and the colour – if it comes out of the tap brown I don’t go near it. (Dorothy Cooper)

9. The differential between the costs of bottled and tap water is enormous: at the time of writing, £1 would buy approximately 200 gallons of Wessex Water’s supply. Buying water filters or using energy for boiling water also represents a considerable cost increase, and all these options entail far more effort than merely turning on the tap.

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Contraflows It tastes all right here [in Gillingham]. I drink quite a bit of water and I’m not really worried about it . . . I think people look at it, they like it to look clear, regardless of what you might see under a microscope . . . and they don’t want any sort of funny smell or metallic taste with it . . . you do hear these frightening things . . . (Elizabeth Kendall)

In general, people realised that their ability to evaluate water quality was very limited. There was widespread concern about ‘modern chemicals’ and ‘invisible’ or ‘hidden’ substances that might be much more harmful than anything that could be readily discovered. We are probably getting into far dirtier water than we did years ago, but we can’t see it! (Beryl Coward)

Many also expressed concern about the chemicals used to disinfect water. The early opposition to chlorine, and the similarly fierce resistance to the fluoridation of water in the 1970s, demonstrates the anxiety created when there is a contradiction between practical health measures and the meanings encoded in water. At the heart of these objections is a perception that ‘chemicals’ such as chlorine and fluoride are aligned with the pesticides and other frightening pollutants that ‘kill’ living water. As noted in Chapter 7, a number of people along the Stour had taken note of the extensive publicity about contraceptive hormones – oestrogens – in the water. In some parts of the UK these have apparently caused sex changes in various aquatic species and are suspected of affecting human fertility. Though Dorset’s water is less subject to this problem, being largely abstracted from aquifers, this issue touches upon a number of sensitivities. Firstly, it reminds people that their drinking water contains other people’s waste products. Secondly, in affecting fertility and reproductive ability, it runs directly against the meaning of water as a source of life and (re)generation. Similar anxieties are raised by a greater awareness of sewage or ‘dead matter’ pollution in general. In such a popular tourist area, communities in the Stour Valley are well informed about the problems relating to waste flowing into coastal waters,10 and expressed deep disgust about this. Media stories about water problems appear to make an impression: several people referred to long ago newspaper articles, including a ‘Which?’ report in 1990 claiming that some Wessex Water users were receiving water containing unacceptable levels of pesticides and aluminium (Walton 1990:2). People had also noted

10. Ward (1997) notes that Britain pumps 300 million gallons of sewage into the sea every day, although the disposal of actual sewage sludge at sea was banned in 1998. The amount of sewage sludge in the South West is predicted to double in the next six years. In 1996/7 Wessex Water and South West Water sent 84% of their sludge to agricultural land (EA 1999b:16).

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Watering the House and Garden more recent stories about pesticides and chlorine, and many commented on the health effects that they believed were related to chemicals in the water: The additives, you do wonder, I mean I can always tell when they have added the chlorine to the water – I can taste it . . . We don’t drink it. I don’t drink a lot of water anyway. I don’t think that should be added at all. It’s like the fluoride – I don’t like all these additives, I don’t like it in food . . . nobody really knows [what they do to you] . . . I would say it has an awful lot to do with things like headaches, and other muscular aches and pains . . . There’s been more childhood cancer-related diseases like leukaemia than ever before. In fact cancer is beginning to now become so prevalent . . . It’s just getting worse and worse and worse . . . either drinking or eating: I think it’s the additives that’s doing it. (Pat Herbert)

Water companies have often accused journalists of ‘scare mongering’ about health issues and environmental effects, and a local biochemist pointed out that although tap water does contain various pollutants, bottled water has sometimes been found to have higher levels of bacteria. A Wessex Water representative suggested that people’s concerns are unnecessary: Drinking water quality . . . it’s something which I personally get quite cross about, because I think it’s total media hype that that’s happened . . . People are paying 70, 80 pence, a pound a litre for bottled water in supermarkets! I see old age pensioners struggling home with these five litre cans of water – which are heavy – 50 lbs . . . And the stuff that’s coming out their tap is super, it really is. It’s a total misconception. (Richard Lacey)

However, as another Wessex Water representative pointed out, chlorination is the mainstay of water treatment in the UK, and alternative treatments are expensive. Weighed on the balance sheet, it appears that some human cost is acceptable: There is a conceivable risk that for some people, they might be developing cancers because of the chlorination by-products, but you balance that against the lives saved by chlorination, and you think well, it has to be. (INF43)

Both water companies in Dorset admit that with more intensive farming, pesticides have also become a serious problem: Pesticides have been a problem to us . . . There has been quite an increase in maize cultivation in all of our catchment. Unfortunately there is one particular herbicide called atrozine that is, I think, even now, still the only approved herbicide that can be used on maize, so we have picked up quite high levels of atrozine coming through . . . We have had to install a pesticide removal plant . . . There are two issues regarding atrozine really: there is the immediate short-term spike that takes us above the EC limit for

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Contraflows pesticides, which is the one that we have to act on, but there is also a background diffuse pollution of atrozine, because it is fairly persistent. (INF22)

The Environment Agency notes that ‘there are about 450 different pesticide ingredients currently approved for use in England and Wales’ (EA 1999b:16), and a research scientist examining the effects of pesticides in Dorset’s rivers felt that water users had real cause for concern: I think they are right to be concerned . . . There are so many different ones of these things. We looked at three different sorts . . . but when you are looking at those three, you think ‘Well, there’s probably another three thousand in there – we don’t even know what they are, or how to analyse them or anything like that.’ (INF3)

Domestic water users are thus confronted with a steady stream of stories about different problems created by invisible chemicals in the water, and an equally diverse array of views from ‘the experts’ about the potential effects of these. Such debates form an important background to their evaluations, and doubtless contribute to a general unease about their drinking water. Certainly many people in the Stour Valley were firmly of the opinion that water quality has deteriorated considerably in recent years. A number of the older inhabitants reported that in their youth they would not only swim in the river, but also drank from it without hesitation. We used to bathe in these little streams then, and in the Stour particularly. I suppose my parents weren’t concerned about pollution or anything in those days . . . If we were thirsty we would [drink from it], in those days, yeah. (Ron Harris)

Few people are willing to swim in the river now, and none would dream of drinking water from it: Oh no, no. I wouldn’t let the children either. I don’t think that’s very wise. (Sue Jackson) I stopped when I started hearing weird stories about people who had unexplained rashes and illnesses after swimming in the Stour . . . When you see the scum on the water, it sort of puts you off a bit. (Sue Degan)

Thus there are some discernible factors that contribute to rising anxieties about water quality. Scientific discourses, environmental debates and new legislation have drawn attention to persistent problems with water pollution and raised awareness of ‘hidden’ pollutants. There is emergent information about potential long-term health effects and widespread media coverage of ‘scares’ relating to water and food. The shift to recreational use of water resources has encouraged greater sensitivity about the environment. – 212 –

Watering the House and Garden However, though doubtless contributory, these factors do not fully account for the sharp decline in the level of confidence that many people have in their drinking water quality. The relationship between water pollution and health problems has at times been much more immediate than it is now, and earlier levels of water pollution were a great deal more obvious, and yet, not long ago, people swam in the river and even drank water from it without a qualm. Now, presented with water that – in regulatory terms – is almost perfect, they view it with deep distrust, preferring instead to spend several hundred times as much to buy bottled spring water.

A Certain Quality of Life They say it’s been through a person eight times – a rather revolting thought. (Tom Suttle)

The lack of confidence in water quality that informants in Dorset expressed has to be situated alongside the powerful meanings encoded in water and the sociocultural context through which these meanings flow. The most central themes of meaning – water as the essence of life, as the substance of social and spiritual being, as a matter of life and death – are clearly integral to assessments of its quality. A vital issue is the meaning of water as a connective substance, which flows between individuals and their social and physical environment, and the concerns engendered about the quantity and quality of this flow. With other resources, people have a measure of choice as to whether they take part in this exchange, although issues relating to ‘essential’ and meaningful foods do demonstrate similar dynamics. For example, parallels to anxieties about water can readily be found in recent milk, egg and beef ‘scares’. However, with water there is little choice: people can try to sanitise and fortify their bodies and domestic space, but they cannot sever this connection. Water usage brings it home to them that, even as they focus their social life on individual or familial centres, they are linked to wider systems of supply as inescapably as they depend on wider societal and ecological spheres. What has become critical under these circumstances is the extent to which they can control or affect this interaction, and whether they can apply their own criteria of quality. These criteria are directly reflective of the meaning of water: for the water users along the river, perfect water is entirely ‘natural’ and unacculturated; it is spiritually, morally, socially and physically ‘pure’ and uncontaminated by ‘otherness’ – either human or chemical – and it is full of life. The concept of ‘living water’ remains as strong in secular terms as it was in the Church. People often made direct links between the extent to which water appears to be ‘alive’ and its presumed quality. Thus, water that has been chemically treated,

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Contraflows although maybe ‘safer’ in some respects, is considered to be ‘dead’, while some people are positively reassured by the presence of live fish or shrimp in water, or even midge larvae, as indicators of drinking water quality. You drink it out of the tap . . . because you know it’s chlorinated and filtered and so on, and people have been drinking it for lifetimes and not croaked. But that would apply to a lot of less salubrious sort of forms of water . . . I’ve often sort of made a crack that I’d rather see the midge larvae alive in the water than dead . . . If it was to come out of the tap they’d probably be dead. (Mike Ladle)

Moving water – regardless of its actual quality – is invariably assumed to be better than still water. This reflects an awareness that standing water tends to stagnate, but is also conceptually linked to ideas about how blood and water circulate through the body and how water enlivens the environment. Thus many water users, knowing they will only get supplies that have been ‘sitting’ in a pipe somewhere further down the line, still run the tap before drinking from it. I read an article about water coming out of a spiral pipe . . . the idea is that this would invigorate the water in such a way that it would be as if it was fresh spring water. I find that sort of idea very interesting. Because we are, whatever we are, 90% water or whatever – 80% or something . . . Water is obviously critical to us, but we are talking about quality, how do you increase the quality? Well, first of all we have spring water. (Bing Spencer)

Spring water, leaping directly (and without any interference) from ‘holy’ or at least ‘healthy’ wells, represents all of the right meanings: alive and energised by ‘Mother Earth’, unadulterated, spiritually and morally pure, it is 100% natural. Even artificially created ‘springs’ such as the grotto at Stour Head are assumed to have these kinds of qualities: I would like to think it would be [safe], coming out of the earth like that . . . We used to have a spring on the farm and it was beautiful. (Beryl Coward)

Even when it has obvious flavours, or indeed smells, spring water is seen as containing ‘positive’ natural substances and minerals which are ‘life giving’ or cleansing: Spa water contains sulphates and all the rest of it, but particularly Epsom salts . . . which is purgative, and if you clear out the bowels, you usually reckon with human beings that you’ve done well. (Tom Suttle) Water has a health quality . . . a lot of alternative medicine therapists do use water therapies of different kinds don’t they, and people have found them helpful. (Elizabeth Kendall)

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Watering the House and Garden Most people assume that ‘sparkling’ water is the most ‘alive’. In the past, water companies attempted to enhance this visual quality by adding aluminium sulphate to the water. This bizarre practice produced the peculiar horror of Camelford in 1988: a miscalculation led to a poisonous ‘overdose’ from which many people are still suffering long-term health effects.11 Over a decade later, water users living in the Stour Valley mentioned this event, linking it to their distrust of the supply companies. I worry a lot about the water . . . I don’t know whether we are hearing more now because there’s . . . OFWAT and all the rest of them . . . or whether it always went on. When you heard like, with Camelford and places like that, it is worrying isn’t it. (Beryl Coward)

Some informants no longer drank water straight from the tap at all: [The water suppliers at Camelford] poisoned a whole population, and they are still paying compensation to this very day, because some people have lasting effects from it . . . I’ve got less confidence now . . . When I didn’t have that knowledge I didn’t mind drinking water . . . I barely drink raw water . . . Turned into coffee, it has obviously been sterilised by the boiling process . . . but that wouldn’t necessarily save me from the Camelford thing. (Rodney Legg)

The ‘vitality’ of water also connects to its meaning as the substance of social being. Historical progressions towards larger scale and more fragmented social and economic forms seem to have had major effects. Water users are now faced with water which emerges from ‘the other’ in social, physical and geographic terms, and which is increasingly distanced from ‘nature’ through the imposition of ever more sophisticated treatments that, though they may have improved its safety, have had a less positive effect on its symbolic ‘health’. The Dorset study suggests that people’s evaluations of the quality of drinking water rely heavily upon the character and relative closeness of their social and political relationships with water suppliers and the other agencies responsible for managing and policing water resources. Those who aligned themselves with ‘the authorities’ or ‘the experts’ were comparatively unworried about quality and actually preferred to know that their water had been treated: 11. A truck driver accidentally dumped 20 tonnes of aluminium sulphate into the wrong tank at the Camelford treatment works in Cornwall. Twenty thousand households were affected, and people reported various health effects, ranging from mouth ulcers to vomiting and rashes. Several years after the incident over 400 people were still suffering from the effects of the poisoning, such as memory loss, and a study of fifty-five victims in 1999 suggested considerable damage to their brain functions. In 1991 the South West Water Authority was fined £10,000, and three years later paid damages ranging from £700 to £10,000 to nearly 150 people. It took until 2001 for the government to approve an expert investigation, but it refused to make a full public inquiry.

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Contraflows I just feel I’d rather somebody who knows about water sort it before I drank it. (Dorothy Cooper)

However, most informants were highly dubious about government agencies and the water industry: It is that unknown thing, and . . . a certain element of not trusting the relevant authorities. (Clare Freeman) I don’t trust the water that comes out of the Wessex pipe. (INF59)

This is obviously entangled in the issues surrounding privatisation and the feelings that people have about the ‘social substance’ being appropriated from their communities. Water companies are firmly cast as a venal and untrustworthy ‘other’, with the deepest anxiety created when companies are taken over by foreign corporations. The distance of this relationship is underlined by the formality and anonymity that characterises interactions between ‘the public’ and organisations managing resources. Without face-to-face contact, these provide no opportunity for constructing secure social relationships that might lead to greater levels of trust. This was emphasised along the Stour as people spoke more warmly about the water company engineers or EA staff whose work provides public contact than of the ‘fat cat’ managers and ‘bureaucrats’ whom they never met. It was also noticeable that water company employees whose roles involved public contact expressed much greater concern about ‘service’ and ‘taking care of things’ than those in executive positions, suggesting that this is a two-way street: contact engenders feelings of obligation, while the distance provided by managerial roles may encourage a less sympathetic vision of ‘the public’ (see Herzfeld, 1992). The breakdown in this relationship appears to be further exacerbated by exclusion from physical access to water resources, and the growing social divisions between most of the population and the supposed ‘guardians of the countryside’. On the one hand, water is now managed by an ‘untrustworthy’ centralised government and privatised industry, and, on the other, the environment through which it passes is similarly controlled by farmers and industries that the majority of domestic users cannot identify with and do not trust. ‘They’, in the view of the majority of informants, are engaged in ‘unnatural’ activities, and their perceived lack of concern for environmental health supports a common belief that water resources are continually being poisoned in one way or another: They continue polluting it with nitrates and sewage and God knows what have you, spraying . . . What the hell good is water if it is poisonous? (INF33)

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Watering the House and Garden

Bottling Out I don’t trust people as much as I used to . . . I actually drink more water out of a bottle than I would out of a tap. (Julie Galbally)

The ethnography suggests that modern anxieties about water quality reflect cultural rather than practical problems. Despite some remaining questions about ‘unknown’ pollutants, water quality may be fine, but at a symbolic level it has been steadily compromised by changes in ownership and management that conflict fundamentally with its core meanings. Over the last century, the substance that stands for social and spiritual connection has been ‘disconnected’. This is clearly a recipe for deep distrust in water quality, and the undermining of confidence in the substance most essential to life offers a stark illustration of the stresses created by large-scale forms of social organisation. A logical outcome is that people attempt to allay their anxieties by buying bottled water. This is the ultimate artefact of social alienation: an individual container of water which, drawn directly from the earth, circumvents the risk of any connection with a wider social or physical environment. Although now purchased by all but the lowest income groups, bottled water retains an image of exclusivity. Just as food and consumption practices are also a markers of elite classes or groups (see Lupton 1996), Blatter and Ingram write that bottled water has been ‘re-imagined as an indicator of taste and lifestyle’ (2001:43). People sense intuitively that it is a form of ‘individuation in practice’: I think it’s a bit of a snooty thing, the bottled water. (INF14)

As a ‘safe’ alternative, it is understandable that the greatest use of bottled water will be made by people travelling to ‘foreign parts’, and many people in Dorset commented that they never ‘drink the local water’ even when visiting countries whose water supply systems are as sophisticated as those in the UK. They may be willing to experiment with local food, but it seems that in order to preserve their sense of identity in a strange place, and prevent the ingress of ‘otherness’, they buy bottled water for the duration of their time abroad. Talking about drinking water quality, if you go abroad, if you go to the rest of the EEC, you don’t drink the water do you? (Nigel Pooley)

Carrying this logic further, it is also predictable that within the UK the highest uses of bottled water will be in urban areas, which have the greatest population mobility, and will be lowest in more stable rural areas where people still share common water resources.

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Contraflows A couple of generations ago, people living in small-scale communities blithely drank water that by modern standards was sometimes fairly fetid and disgusting. Today, though domestic supplies are generally clear and tasteless, the recipients are filled with anxiety about what the water might contain. A telling contrast is provided by a report about a community in West Dorset. Tenants of the manor in the village of Rampisham had shared a local water source for hundreds of years when, in 1992, the District Council health officials declared it to be in contravention of EU bacteriological standards, and demanded that the landlord install a chlorination system. According to the local newspaper, the community rose in revolt: Villagers packed a public inquiry . . . to fight for the freedom to drink the water from an underground source which has served their community for hundreds of years . . . Farmer Peter Thomas . . . told the inquiry: ‘Nobody suffers any ill effects whatsoever. If anyone is concerned, they can always boil the water . . . We like to think we have the freedom of choice, and we don’t want chemicals in our water.’ (Dorset Evening Echo 1992:2)

With a collectively held local source, people appeared perfectly willing to accept water quality in direct contravention of ‘scientific’ safety standards. They firmly rejected the opinion of outsiders in recommending otherwise, and were willing to fight to retain control of their well and prevent anyone from putting ‘foreign’ chemicals in it. Such a combination of community cohesion and localised water is rare though: as noted previously, over a quarter of the population in the UK now regards bottled water as the safest option offering the qualities and, most importantly, the meanings desired in water. Its sparkling clarity promises pure and moral ‘life’, ‘unadulterated’ by otherness, bringing only ‘natural’ substances into the body. It represents health, vitality and regeneration in a way that ‘unnaturally’ treated and adulterated tap water no longer can. Another newspaper story about a successful venture on a Dorset farm illustrates perfectly the way in which these qualities are commonly represented: Anthony and Daphne Friend’s assets gush, liquid and crystal clear, from their kitchen tap. By bottling the natural spring water which feeds their non-mains plumbing system, and selling it to those who no longer trust their own taps, the Friends believe they are doing their bit to aid British digestions and the balance of payments. As Mr Friend declares with fervour: ‘It is utterly absurd that our shops import bottled water from France, Italy, Belgium, not to mention Bulgaria, when we’ve got the real thing pouring out of the hill in limitless quantities behind our dairy farm’. The Friend’s Dorset Spring Water (DSW) comes from haunts of lark and buzzard, high up on Lewesdon Hill, filters down through deep Jurassic rocks and trickles out as a spring amid lush moss and nettles . . . Suggest to Mr Friend that it’s all a con trick, that water-snobs would be none

– 218 –

Watering the House and Garden the wiser were he to bung any old water into fancy labelled bottles and he gives you short shrift: ‘Natural water, bottled at source, is not at all the same thing as bottled tap water . . . tap water has about it the chlorine reek of municipal swimming pools’ . . . In the 18 months since setting up the business the Friends have sold 30,000 litres of water and orders flood in . . . People buy bottled water to add to their whisky. They also buy it, according to Mrs Friend: ‘because they’re anxious about the chemical pollution of public water supplies plus the fact that in heavily populated areas drinking water has already passed through 4 pairs of kidneys before reaching one’s own’ . . . ‘I can tell you this, and it’s an appalling indictment of the Dairy Industry, we make more out of DSW per litre than we do out of our milk.’ Grateful imbibers write letters effusive in their praise of DSW. After a few glassfuls, complexions have become blemish-free, livers decongested, gallstones animated. A Mrs Pickles from Poole, semi-invalided with a kidney disorder, maintains that it’s made a new woman of her . . . A sprightly couple from West London write glowingly of its beneficial effects on their sex life entreating to be told its magic formula. (Hennesey 1983:28–29 [my emphases])

Although water company executives and scientists may consider it irrational for people to choose expensive bottled water over their carefully treated tap water, with an appreciation of the meanings it encapsulates, this is revealed as a much more rational choice, enabling people to cope with a less secure social context and the dissonance between modern resource management and the meaning of water.

– 219 –

–13 – Water Pressure Over the River Interactions between domestic water users and water managers and regulators, are negotiated through the proposal and enactment of policy instruments for the management of water resources, and the responses that these elicit. These instruments are, in effect, a dialogue not just about water, but also about social inclusion, access to resources, rights and responsibilities, and the distribution of wealth and power. This chapter considers the major policy instruments through which the government and the water industry try to influence the use of water in people’s homes, and some of the potential policies that will have to be considered if supplies fail to keep up with demand. It examines how these policies intersect with the meanings of water, and why they have failed – and will probably continue to fail – to restrain water usage.

Cash Flow We [Wessex Water] are a private company, free to make our own decisions and make as much profit as we can, providing we spend our money on what we are told to and we charge what we are allowed to. Apart from that we are a private company with free choice – and at the end of the day what does any business want to do? Have freedom to charge what it can effectively get away with. (INF28) If you don’t want to pay a lot, you only use a little bit of water . . . We only have like a big wash like a shower or bath once a week, and just wash our faces and hands the rest of the week. (INF65)

Since the privatisation of the water industry in 1989 the major policy debate has centred upon negotiations about the pricing levels permitted for water supply. OFWAT’s setting of water charges is primarily a legislative tool intended to balance the economic interests of the water industry and water users:

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Contraflows Price limits should allow companies sufficient revenue to cover their operating costs, depreciation and infrastructure renewals and provide a reasonable return on a company’s capital base. (OFWAT 1999b:128)

The charging debate is always the most contentious regulatory issue, as it brings together water – the image of wealth – and money, the artefact that materialises wealth. The price of water and the extent to which people are forced to pay this is ultimately a negotiation about ideology and wealth distribution. Governments intending to rule water consumption by price mechanisms should remember that only as long as water is a commons, freely accessible to the poor, can the over-consumption of the rich be curbed by high tariffs without causing the poor’s ruin. (Roberts 1994:23–24 in Ward 1997:92)

Although many people remain unaware that they can no longer be ‘cut off’, the non-payment of water bills is on the rise, and debt recovery is an increasing problem for water companies. Wrangles between OFWAT and the industry are often concerned with distinguishing the ‘poor’ (now called ‘vulnerable groups’) from those who ‘won’t pay’. The industry asserts that much debt is due to the latter. We [Bournemouth and West Hampshire Water] certainly provide help where people have difficulty paying their bills, but I am not sure if we have anything up front where we can target the lowest socio-economic groups . . . If they contact us and say that they may have problems in paying their bill . . . we look at a payment plan . . . I don’t think we actually cut anybody off for not being able to pay. We’ve only cut people off where it appears . . . they don’t want to pay. (INF22)

Water companies (and to a lesser extent the regulators) usually classify nonpayment as socially irresponsible: Wessex is there to maximise profits, along with . . . look after its customers . . . That’s business. You’ve got to persuade them to pay at the end of the day, because if they don’t pay, you and I are going to pay more. (INF44)

However, in 2003 the National Consumer Council reported that 4.7 million (nearly one in five) households in the UK had outstanding debts on their water bills, and noted that ‘the households most affected are those living in areas where charges are high and those receiving means-tested social security benefits or tax credits’ (Klein, 2003:32). This suggests that some people have genuine difficulty in meeting the rising costs of water. At the same time, the Dorset study shows that many water users remain firm in their beliefs that access to clean water is their right and should not provide profits for a privatised industry. Non-payment should therefore also be – 222 –

Water Pressure acknowledged as an elliptical form of protest against the enclosure and commodification of water resources. Access to water – although in theory, in an ideal world, it’s a free good, and everyone should have an equal right to it, in practice you’ve got to have some control, like any resource, to make sure it is not over-exploited . . . I think there still needs to be some democratic control, through elected bodies. I suppose I’m not happy that it should be entirely in private hands. (Colin Marsh)

Environmental issues have also been brought into the pricing debates. Conservation groups point to the accumulating ecological costs of failing to limit water usage or invest in higher levels of environmental protection: I think water is pretty cheap to be honest – I mean, basically, if you are not paying for the clean-up you are getting your water cheap, because you are actually using a resource and you are putting it back to the environment in a way that is really not satisfactory. (Douglas Kite)

Some conservation groups believe that higher prices for water will discourage profligate usage and enable investment in environmentally friendly water collection and treatment technology. Water companies, who insist that their ‘customers’ will be happy to pay more, have taken up this argument enthusiastically: We’ve done extensive research with our customers, and it’s coming back the good old 80–20 rule, that 80% of them would like to see the money going into the environment, the other 20% percent would like to see bills reduced. But even in the poorest socioeconomic grouping, they still want to see some going into the environment – about 50– 50. (Richard Lacey)

Other groups, such as consumer organisations, have expressed severe doubts about the veracity of these claims. Water users along the Stour were similarly cynical, assuming that, although infrastructural improvements might alleviate ecological problems (and they felt this was indeed desirable), these are not the real motivation for the industry’s demands for higher prices. In general, they believed that increased income for the water companies would go either directly into profits or into developing commercial assets: They say they are investing these large amounts of money and yet where is it? (INF16) If I thought they were being completely honest about it I wouldn’t mind – as long as shareholders dropped their money. But it’s all very difficult isn’t it. I can never understand – all this water’s being wasted, and they say ‘well we can’t afford to mend the leak.’ (Beryl Coward)

– 223 –

Contraflows Despite the optimism of conservation groups, the ‘bottom line’ is that higher prices in the UK have not worked as a demand side management mechanism. Price hikes have produced some temporary restraint, but as per capita usage levels continued to rise inexorably throughout a decade in which prices leapt by 67% (40% in real terms), this has obviously not been sustained. In 2003, the industry argued that the next five yearly price review (in 2005) should permit an average price rise of approximately 75 pounds per household. While certain to improve the water companies’ balance sheets, this is unlikely to reduce water usage in the majority of households (though would doubtless add to the financial strain on the one in five already struggling to pay their water bills). It appears that any price increase draconian enough to force meaningful reductions in levels of water usage would have seriously detrimental effects on a large section of the population. With unremitting public resentment over the privatisation of water, any government permitting such measures risks paying a high political cost: in reality, it is much easier to let the ecosystem pick up the tab.

Measured Responses The physical measurement of water supply is closely aligned to debates on pricing, and raises related issues about social equity. Meters are now installed in about 10% of homes in the UK, and in about 80% of businesses (Water Services Association 1997:41). All water companies have an optional metering scheme, and since April 1991 (when houses ceased to be given rateable values) new properties have automatically had a meter installed. Meters have been presented quite effectively as an instrument for ‘fairness’, and some of the water users in the Stour Valley concurred with this view: I think it would be fairer, really, because there are five of us – we’ve got a lodger – so there’s five of us living here, and our water rate is the same as . . . there used to be an old lady used to live next door on her own, and she paid the same, and it seemed wrong. She might have only bathed once a week, you know, whereas the children are in and out of baths and showers all the time. So at least then you would pay for what you used. (Sue Jackson)

Like the poll tax, however, metering an essential resource raises issues about disproportionate effects on different income groups. Some of the highest domestic water users are young families with a large number of children, or people with chronic medical conditions, so there tends to be a converse relationship between levels of use and ability to pay higher bills. Under a system linked to the rateable value of housing, these types of users are likely to pay much less for their water. Much discussion has therefore centred upon the problem of how to combine – 224 –

Water Pressure metering with means testing of some kind, possibly through special ‘social tariffs’ or benefits. This appears to be acceptable to some water users: I believe that people should all be on meters, because then they know what they use and they pay for what they use . . . But . . . they might have to sort of look at low-income families or something. Or the government, even, should see that low-income families were adequately provided for. (Dorothy and Barry Cooper)

Others, however, distrust the motives behind metering, and believe it will mean less access to resources for some. While there has been extensive discussion about special rates or benefits for those in dire straits, little has been said about the pressure that higher bills will create for those not quite eligible for social benefits, but who would nonetheless find it difficult to pay water bills that continue to rise massively above levels of inflation. The experience of people I know who’ve had water metered recently is that it does become more expensive, and I do think water metering is more a way for water companies to earn more money than to restrict water. I think it’s the usual catch, that the people who’ve got the money can throw water away and the people that might have a lot of children and a very low income, they have to pay extra. (Sue Degan) With the water you’ve got no choice, and they know this, so they’ve got you over a barrel . . . They are putting the meters, they are charging probably for the price of a meter through your water bill, and what you’ll end up doing is trying to save your water more and more and more . . . You can’t walk around in dirty clothes . . . I sometimes wonder just what we are turning into really – I think we are a very greedy country. (Pat Herbert)

Although it supports optional metering, and has edged gradually closer to supporting compulsory metering in some circumstances, WaterVoice notes that the ensuing bills are one of the major reasons for customer complaints: We support the Government’s proposal to allow companies to meter those who consume water for non-essential purposes, i.e. those using garden sprinklers or filling swimming pools. But we believe that companies should also be able to meter customers in areas where water resources are forecast to remain under pressure. (ONCC 1999:12)

Water companies and other resource managers have regularly presented metering as a way of encouraging more conservative domestic usage and ensuring sufficient supplies. The industry’s own trials suggest that the installation of a meter, by making levels of use more visible, initially discourages what they regard as profligacy. However, it seems that, as with price hikes, the effects are only temporary. Wessex Water’s trials demonstrated a typical pattern: – 225 –

Contraflows We had a drop, a massive drop, with a very slow climb, but nobody suffered. What it did is what we are trying to do most of the time, is make people more aware. They were overusing it in my book. I mean, yes, it climbed slowly, but it made people think. OK, if you want to put a sprinkler on, pay for it. (Geoff Galpin)

Some people felt that making their water use more visible did give them pause for thought: The fact that we are metered makes a difference psychologically – we are much more aware of what we are using. (Sarah Solly) There is no doubt that metering shows up the cost of water doesn’t it. It really – I find I get quite distressed when my neighbours leave their hose on the runner beans, and I think, ‘Crumbs, that’s been on two or three hours: what amount of water has gone through that?’ . . . And they will be the people who will say ‘why should we pay for a hosepipe?’ (INF12)

For this reason, some of the people most concerned about the ecological effects of over-abstraction have been inclined to support the metering of supply: I do worry about people’s water consumption . . . I think people should be aware of watering and how much they are using – it does worry me when people just put three loads of washing on a day and a bath and a shower and God knows what else, put sprinklers on their lawns and things – I think that’s all unnecessary. (Sue Degan)

Government agencies, anxious to ensure reliable supplies above all else, have also tended to see metering as a potential curb to overuse, and as a way to avoid drought orders, rationing or unpopular price hikes to pay for new infrastructure: Customers who use water for discretionary purposes such as garden watering should be metered. (DETR Water Industry Act 1999. Draft Guidance to the Director General of Water Services, Consultation Paper 1999:7.3)

Most water companies do charge extra or insist upon meters for people who have swimming pools, ornamental ponds or sprinklers, and there are also debates about whether they should be able to differentiate between metered and un-metered households in imposing hosepipe bans. However, although some people in the Stour Valley said that meters had made them more aware, they confirmed Wessex Water’s findings that this didn’t necessarily translate into more than a hiatus in use patterns: I think we’d be more aware. I don’t know that we’d use any less, because I don’t think we are desperate water users as it is. (Sue Jackson)

– 226 –

Water Pressure As some consumer agencies have pointed out, there is very little elasticity in domestic water usage levels,1 which suggests that it would take more than ‘visibility’ to reduce domestic usage. And since current water charges have failed to reduce usage levels, the only logical development of this policy instrument is widespread metering followed by very significant price increases. Certainly the industry is very keen to see meters in all households and businesses, and is willing to spend millions of pounds to install them as quickly as possible. It’s a huge cost implication, typically £200 a house to put a meter in, 850,000 domestic houses in Wessex Water, circa £200 million to put water meters in Wessex. Undoubtedly we feel that houses should be metered. (Richard Lacey)

Water company representatives maintain that universal access will be maintained with ‘block tariffs’ – differential prices for set amounts of water. Previously these have been used in a declining scale, to offer bulk discounts to commercial users. However, the block tariffs now being proposed for domestic water users are increasing or ‘progressive’, which in theory would permit basic water costs to remain fairly stable but would penalise ‘luxury’ water usage. This, the water companies say, will cut down on ‘wasteful’ use, or at least ensure that it is highly profitable. They are therefore targeting high rateable value houses first in their metering campaigns: We would like to see some sort of block tariffs, whereby everybody is entitled to a basic volume of water – say 60 cubic metres per year per capita, which would be at a relatively low rate. And then if you live in a big house and want a swimming pool and to irrigate an acre of lawn, then, yes, you can have it if you really want it, but you would pay much more per unit because it’s a luxury use of water . . . We target high rateable value houses specifically, and we are getting about a 20% uptake. So we will put in this year something like 6000 meters on high RV [rateable value] houses, which is about the same number as we put in last year on all houses. (Richard Lacey)

Other versions of these arrangements are being mooted: seasonal tariffs have been mentioned, and a per capita rather than ‘rateable value’ relationship has been suggested. The Wessex OFWAT CSC discussed economy tariffs recognising particularly low consumption. All of these possibilities of course depend heavily on the widespread metering of households. Water users might be inclined to wonder why, instead of spending £200 million to build new infrastructure to store rainwater, or treatment facilities for downriver abstraction, Wessex Water is directing its investments towards installing household 1. The National Consumer Council calculates that 95% of domestic water use is essential (Water UK 1998:4).

– 227 –

Contraflows meters that make little different to usage levels and therefore are unlikely to solve the ecological or supply problems that are being put forward as the reason for them. There is also a major question about why government agencies are backing metering, unless they intend to accept price rises for ‘luxury’ usage that are large enough to discourage all but the most wealthy from using water for anything other than essential purposes. Just as pricing reduces and commodifies ‘nature’, the material culture of metering imposes human agency onto water, emphasising its re-creation as a product, manufactured by the water industry. The process of measurement reframes water as a cultural artefact, distributed and controlled by resource managers. This is partly a materialisation of a particular political and economic ideology, but metering also reflects the water companies’ own engagement with water, encouraging an increasing sense of ownership and a desire for their ‘product’ to be measured and valued highly. In the foreground of their vision is all the work it takes to supply potable water to millions of people. As a Wessex Water executive put it: Metering is a very emotive issue, and people don’t like to think they are paying for something which is a free resource which falls out of the sky and just ‘miraculously’ ends up in their tap through umpteen kilometres of pipe work and treatment plants in a condition which is not harmful to public health. (Richard Lacey)

It is therefore difficult for private water company employees not to feel that water is ‘theirs’ to the extent that ‘customers’ should pay for it litre by litre, and it is reasonable to expect that, to a lesser degree, the same dynamics are likely to affect the centralised government agencies whose efforts are similarly focused on resource management. In effect meters concretise private ownership and empower managers, rather than the population as a whole, to decide what constitutes ‘profligate’ water use, or, as government agencies put it more diplomatically, ‘discretionary’ or ‘non-essential’ purposes. With so much publicity given to the potential insufficiency of water resources, and the anxiety this creates, it is difficult for consumer organisations, environmental groups or ‘the public’ to challenge this increase in control, couched as it is in the language of ‘fair shares’, ‘ensuring reliability’ and ‘environmental improvements’. Many water users are aware of these issues, and some are cognisant that, whatever the stated motivation for installing meters, it represents a further and very significant loss of public control over water. It opens the door to unwelcome restrictions and, in sufficiently severe circumstances, is likely to lead to rationing or widely differential access. Though this has not been widely publicised, the prospect of enforced metering is already under discussion, and OFWAT has gained the support of WaterVoice (and its regional committees):

– 228 –

Water Pressure We also think it is right in areas where water resources are under stress . . . that all customers – not just those using significant quantities of water for discretionary purposes – should lose the right to remain on an unmeasured charge. (ONCC 2000:14).

The mere fact that all of the water companies are strongly in favour of metering is sufficient for many domestic water users to conclude that this policy instrument is not in their interests, and a number of people in Dorset said plainly that, while they could accept the need for some control, it should come from themselves, via democratic representation – i.e. public ownership – and not from a privatised industry: I think it should be State-owned, because only people in responsible positions should have control of it. [Water companies] they put money first . . . they are planning to make a vast amount of money aren’t they . . . So therefore the people who control . . . they should be responsible people . . . [to] be in charge of such a valuable commodity. (Fred Hunt)

Metering therefore represents a very fundamental issue about resource ownership that, in many ways, rubs salt into the wound left by privatisation. If these issues were to be more widely articulated, people would very probably be inclined to question the pressure for metering, particularly when many disbelieve the water companies’ assertions that water resources are genuinely limited: I am always a little bit concerned when it rains and rains and rains and rains, and then they say we are going to have a drought, and I think ‘now why isn’t this water conserved more?’ sometimes . . . It just seems as if we get endless rain – we can never be considered to be anything other than a wet country, and yet we often have got a water problem. (Sue Jackson)

Even those who accepted the reality of water shortages often felt that the industry was to blame for these, because of their expenditure on ‘fat cat salaries’ rather than sufficient water storage or treatment facilities: We had quite a lot of summers with rainfall, and we suddenly had a bout of droughts and I think they were caught napping a bit . . . They hadn’t invested for a long while had they, and I think it caught up with them. (Beryl Coward) We go to Cyprus every year, and . . . although water is said to be short, they’re still watering the fields from the hosepipes – water the fields! And they don’t get any rain between March and April till October, at all – any water! And the river ducts are all dry, but people are not restricted in water usage. Now here where we get water – like last year – every month of the year . . . If we can’t collect enough water to see our population through, I think there’s something missing somewhere. And these water board people

– 229 –

Contraflows who draw a million pounds a year and what have you – it’s immoral for them to draw the money and not be able to do their work! The first thing I would certainly start with, extraction of water starts at the mouth of the river, and not at the top of the river. They could extract it in Christchurch, they could extract enough water in Christchurch to see the whole conurbation of Poole, Christchurch and Bournemouth – the whole lot, could be dealt with quite easily be extracting water down there, putting it through filters, and instead of depriving all the rest of the countryside of the water coming through their fields and what have you. (Tom Suttle)

Just as meters encapsulate a particular political and economic ideology, they also express perfectly the social individuation that has led people to feel that their resource use takes place within the fortress of the family home, detached from the wider social and physical environment. Household meters could only be conceivable in this kind of social and economic arrangement. This raises an interesting question: how likely is it that installing a type of material culture which epitomises individual and competitive water usage, rather than cooperative management, will engender a greater sense of societal and environmental collectivity and encourage water conservation? If the meanings emphasised by meters offer a contradictory message, it is surely possible that they might have the opposite effect. In this case widespread metering will increase rather than reduce the pressure on aquifers and upriver sources, while absorbing investment that could otherwise be used to develop alternatives to these.

Technological Fixes The range of potential technological fixes for ameliorating water supply problems is considerable, and each carries its own social and political issues and cultural meanings. Although new legislation has forced some investment in new treatment technology, the water industry generally favours artefacts aimed at demand-side management, provided that these are small and cheap. Thus hippos and water butts are popular with water companies, while more expensive schemes – recycling technology, desalination plants, secondary piping to supply drinking water separately – are generally regarded as ‘not feasible’ (i.e. not financially profitable). There is little incentive for the water industry to direct funds towards infrastructure that is expensive to build and maintain if, by emphasising a potential paucity of supply, they can persuade the regulators and the public to accept increased prices for less water. Though these debates have had little public discussion, people in the Stour Valley found the idea of some domestic conservation technologies quite acceptable, but were much keener to see large-scale technological investments in better water collection and storage facilities. Their responses to the various alternatives – 230 –

Water Pressure demonstrates a very direct relationship between the meanings of water and the way in which various forms of water treatment and delivery are perceived. In technical terms, for example – as noted previously – downriver water treatment is more challenging than abstracting from ‘clean’ upriver aquifers and springs. The water is a great deal more likely to be polluted, and thus much riskier. As a water engineer pointed out, ‘it only needs one mistake or a combination of chances to come together and you have a problem, a potential epidemic’ (John Fisher). The technology to deal with current levels of river pollution would have to be more complex, and even if industries and farming could be persuaded to reduce or even halt entirely their discharges of pollutants, the system would still be more vulnerable to accidents or abuse. Nevertheless, with more sophisticated treatment technology it is quite possible to produce water that meets the legislated safety standards, although it is apparent from the ethnography that people have some doubts about the adequacy of these. Above all, though, downriver water – from the nether regions of the river – runs into powerful symbolic reasons for opposition to this kind of development. The iconic associations between the ‘end’ of the river and the ‘end’ of life, and the evaluations of water quality that come with ideas about the purity and vitality of springs, mean that downriver water will invariably be regarded much more dubiously than supplies drawn from upriver sources. These meanings emerge equally powerfully in assessments of the water that might be produced via desalination. In 1992, South West Water began looking seriously at desalination technology. One proponent argued that [a Reverse Osmosis System] could comfortably supply 50,000 people with water purified in a building a little larger than a double garage sited near the sea. This is far less intrusive on the environment and faster to install than a reservoir and at one quarter the building cost. What I am really saying is that there is no need for people to have these restrictions in England. Why should we have a water shortage when the technology is there not to have it? (Philip Perkins quoted in Sandall 1992:6)

However, salt water comes from ‘the great sink’ of dissolution which represents the ‘end’ rather than the ‘beginning’ of life that is offered by spring water. Coupled with the knowledge that being forced to drink salt water drives humans mad and eventually kills them, the idea of drinking it – in any form – is cognitively dissonant. As a substance, it is categorically opposed to the desired neutrality or ‘sweetness’ of fresh water. Indeed, salt water ‘stands for’ water that is not potable: it is seen as a way of desiccating and preserving, rather than irrigating and flushing. In addition, there has been considerable publicity about the health effects of excessive salt intake, and although people know that the point of desalination is to remove the salt from the water, some remain unsure that it would all be taken out, and uncertain about the health risks of the end product: – 231 –

Contraflows I would be very much more aware in salt-water areas. It can tend to be a danger can’t it . . . that it’s much more dangerous for you in salt-water areas . . . it affects the heart and things in that way. [But] I’m not sure if that’s true. (Colin Coward)

Concerns about drinking from the ‘wrong end’ of the river could be circumvented if upriver sources were used just to provide drinking water, which comprises only 5% of the water used in most households. Water resource managers are reluctant even to discuss the possibility of imitating the system – used in many countries – in which drinking water is supplied separately from water for other purposes (which could then quite safely come from further downriver). The prevailing view in the industry is that installing a dual delivery system of any kind in the UK would be prohibitively expensive. It would undoubtedly be very costly, but much depends upon whether a short- or long-term view of the potential costs is taken and, more particularly, whether the ecological costs of continuing to rely on upriver water supplies are taken seriously. Given that much of the water supply infrastructure is in need of an overhaul in any case, it is perhaps a better time than most to consider this kind of change. A number of the people interviewed in the Stour Valley, particularly those with first-hand experience of dual supply systems in other countries, liked the idea of a separate drinking water supply, and some felt that it would be perfectly sensible to have water delivered in other ways: Double water supply – a water supply that you could use for washing the car and flushing the toilet – isn’t that the sort of water supply that you’ve got in most places in the world? That to me would be the answer to it. (Rodney Legg) It’s got to be the way we are going. It always strikes me as ridiculous that the water I drink from the tap, and expect to drink in a healthy fashion, is the same water that I wash clothes with and just squirt all over the car if I wash the car. That’s bizarre . . . They are providing the whole country with 96% of the demand with a quality that is excessive . . . You’d almost be better to simply say ‘It’s such a small amount, drinking water, we’ll provide everything by bottled water, free of charge, which you just pick up from your local post office, and all of the infrastructure that we’ve already got we’ll just switch to non-drinkable water for absolutely everything else.’ You can quote me on that and they can pay me a commission! (John Turner)

Although 40% of the population is buying bottled water by preference already, it is unlikely that many would welcome this as their only source of potable water, given the potential inconvenience of collection (or delivery) and storage, and the knock-on environmental effects produced by the need for transportation, container manufacturing and disposal. Given the industry’s current relationship with water users, it would also be virtually impossible for it to propose such a change or, even with a considerable cut in water prices, to get agreement for what many people – 232 –

Water Pressure would see as a step backwards. The potential disruption of installing a dual water supply to households would be unwelcome, and the costs a major disincentive. However, in areas where potable water is in particularly short supply, or in new housing developments, there may be a case for experimentation. And as a ‘technological fix’, this kind of supply – by preserving access to the ‘right’ end of the river – would at least enable people to feel secure that their drinking water was uncontaminated by the cultural landscape through which it currently flows. The most popular technical option with domestic water users was that water company investment should be directed towards better collection and storage of rainwater. People believe that this will produce few of the environmental problems associated with summertime abstraction. Although most were aware that localised effects would be inevitable, this was considered to be much more palatable than the prospect of the whole ecosystem dying of thirst in the summer. Most importantly, though, rain, like springwater, is seen as ‘new’ and (however erroneously) uncontaminated, having evaporated from the sea to the purifying heavens, to be returned, courtesy of the Lord, as ‘soft, refreshing rain’. The accumulation of water in communal reservoirs also signifies a collective accumulation of ‘wealth’ and ‘spirit’, satisfying a yearning for social cohesion and equity and presenting a vision of a rich and secure cultural landscape abounding with life and resources. In a direct scheme transfer, the same meanings come into ideas about the accumulation of familial resources within the household, where cisterns permitting the accumulation of domestic supplies had considerable appeal. People observed that in many other countries houses are automatically built with their own large cisterns for rainwater storage, and expressed enthusiasm for this to be done in the UK. While cistern introduction may only be feasible in a tiny percentage of the existing UK housing stock, it could certainly be considered with new houses, and would go a long way to reducing the pressure on water resources brought by rapid expansions in housing. Ideas about the value of accumulating and storing pure water within the family space also flow into the positive meanings attached to the use of rainwater butts in the garden. Providing the visible storage of ‘clean’ rainwater, and a semi-public statement about familial agency and social responsibility, these have proved to be one of the most popular water saving measures. Accumulations of ‘pure’ rainwater are one thing; the idea of keeping used greywater in the house is quite another. In technical terms, it is possible to consider retrofitting greywater recycling technology to some kinds of dwellings, though to the industry this simply represents an expensive investment in ineffective technology (as well as a reduction in profits). As a Wessex Water executive commented: We did put some money into a total greywater house in Bristol, which has been an experiment run by the National Housebuilders Federation, just to show people what the

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Contraflows ultimate is you could do, if you wanted to . . . It’s probably politically incorrect to say so, but frankly I think it’s a gimmick. I can’t see it’s ever going to take off seriously. It adds about 1% to the cost of a brand new house, so maybe it’s not significant, but to retrofit it into your average house is quite a lot of money, and if people are going to spend one, two, three thousand pounds to put a greywater system in and it’s going to save them ten, fifteen twenty quid a year on their water bill, the payback period just isn’t there is it? And I don’t think it’s going to add to the value to the house when you sell it. (Richard Lacey)

Like other technologies aimed at resource conservation (e.g. energy-efficient appliances) the expense of greywater systems is heavily dependent on the number being produced and used. The equation may change as water costs rise, particularly if block tariffs penalise ‘luxury’ use such as garden watering, which is precisely where greywater usage is ideal. However, with individuated resource management and households moving on average every four years in the UK, very few people are willing to make a major investment in this kind of technology, but some expressed willingness to make a contribution towards it, if they could be sure of its benefits.2 I think we’d do our best to use that, I think it would be a good thing. More so if it was my own house – there’s always a question about investing in a house you don’t own. (Mike Ladle)

Quite apart from the technical issues, though, people living along the Stour had rather mixed feelings about greywater. On the one hand, although it doesn’t contain urine or excreta – the ultimate ‘dead matter’ – it is still fairly dubious symbolically, since in washing clothes and bodies it removes and is thus contaminated by other forms of human waste or ‘otherness’: sweat, dead skin, skin oils, and even more threatening bodily fluids that would normally be ‘flushed away’ from the domestic space as quickly as possible. Even if it could be semi-treated and didn’t smell (thus breaching boundaries and disordering the inner cleanliness of the home), people didn’t like the idea of keeping it ‘hanging around’ in the house, and using it to flush the toilet. It seemed that people accustomed to rural life were more relaxed about this prospect than those from urban areas. This may be because they are accustomed to other forms of recycling, but also suggests that they do have fewer anxieties about water than more individuated urban dwellers. Thus one woman, married to a local farmer, commented that greywater recycling seemed like a very ‘good idea’: 2. A comparison could be made with efforts in the early 1990s to increase the installation of energyefficient boilers. Grants were provided, and these were taken up by quite a few people, despite the expense that still fell to the householder.

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Water Pressure You are not consuming it – if it’s going on the garden. I’m not actually shocked by that, because we have Wessex Water spraying human waste on the ground round here, believe it or not, up at the back of the farm. Wessex Water have a plant and they actually do spread – you know – on the ground . . . So I don’t think I’d be averse to second-hand water for that sort of thing. Good idea isn’t it? (Dorothy Cooper)

Recycling itself brings some important meanings to the fore. It speaks symbolically of ‘regeneration’, and has in recent years received a lot of social approval. Ultimately it would be the answer wouldn’t it. I think, if it was a way of conserving water, I would be open to ways like that . . . I suppose I would like to know what the implications were of this water – whether it was a health risk. I would like to look into it. (Beryl Coward)

It would probably be a great deal easier to persuade most water users to recycle greywater if it was only stored and used outside the house. The symbolic distance between house and garden – interior and exterior space – is crucial. Wastewater held to be repugnant in the bathroom or ‘festering’ in an interior tank becomes more acceptable if stored safely outside the familial body of the house. In the exterior space of the garden, where plants can absorb it and recycle it actively, it becomes much easier to reclassify greywater and its ‘dead matter’ as ‘fertiliser’, completing its recategorisation as a positive, regenerative substance. However, garden space is more socially and spatially permeable, and although families might find it easier to put their wastewater outside, their neighbours might feel quite differently about ‘someone else’s’ wastewater being too proximate to their own exterior space. Given that flushing toilets uses about 34% of domestic water supplied, a great deal could be saved with domestic sanitation which requires less water, or even none at all. Individual composting reactors are widely used in some countries (e.g. Australia), and there may be scope for their use in some areas of the UK. However, by dealing directly with human excreta, and holding it on site, such technology magnifies the kinds of problems noted with regard to greywater recycling, and would be unlikely to gain acceptability except in situations where – again – it could be dealt with at some distance from the house itself. There are less controversial ways of saving water via changes in household technology. In 1995 the NRA suggested that, rather than building new reservoirs, it would be cost-effective for water companies to give people grants to buy waterefficient washing machines and dish washers, or replacement toilets which use less water.3

3. Dual flush toilets, or those with smaller cisterns, are now required in new housing.

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Contraflows Spending £300 per family buying a new lower flush toilet would be more cost efficient than building a new reservoir . . . And supplying the entire country with new toilets could save 13% of its water needs. (Ward 1997:121)

So far, water companies have confined themselves to very low-key efforts in terms of water saving technology. Apart from occasional financial incentives to encourage people to buy rainwater butts for garden watering, the most successful demand-side management instrument used by the water industry to date has been the distribution of free ‘hippos’. Bournemouth and West Hampshire Water issued 50,000 hippos to their domestic water users between 1998 and 1999, and according to their own research: ‘Survey results show that the bags have been fitted by 69% of metered households and 80% of un-metered households amongst the survey respondents’ (Mark Burton).4 A few informants along the Stour raised some concerns about hippos disintegrating and ‘clogging up the system’, or leaving insufficient water for flushing waste effectively, but they were generally positive about them: The hippos . . . there was obviously the cost to post them out to people, but it’s worked I think, it has been quite useful. When people have had them come in the post, I think they’ve used them. (Sue Jackson)

Hippos demonstrate the importance of finding a well-gauged image and pitching demands for change at the right level. Using an appealing water creature to represent ‘saving the environment’ was effective, as was the choice of a blue ‘sanitary’ colour and a reliably stable material. Issued free to householders, they represented a fairly small request for conservation, and required little effort, putting little pressure on an uneasy relationship between suppliers and water users. Older people could recall the tried and tested practice, common in previous droughts, of putting a brick in the cistern, and therefore drew parallels between this modern water saving device and the more cooperative society of their youth.

Educational Issues Part of the purpose of the hippos was to send an educative message about water conservation. Educational policy instruments are the most common method used

4. It would be interesting to know why people with meters seemed less inclined to use the hippos. If what the water companies say about meters encouraging conservation were true, it would be expected that their uptake would be higher than that of non-metered households. However, this result may have been simply the product of a fairly small-scale statistical survey which did not account for local contextual issues.

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Water Pressure by resource managers to try to encourage people to reduce their water usage levels, or to dissuade them from polluting water resources. There is a huge array of such instruments, which can be loosely classified (with obvious overlaps) into specialised efforts which attempt to persuade householders directly to conserve water resources; broader educational material about water issues; and general educational material about wildlife and the environment. These take many forms: information on bills; leaflets and newsletters; reports; features and advertisements in newspapers; radio and television; public tours or events; and – increasingly – websites. All of the groups involved in water management make use of these methods to varying degrees, and almost all such efforts are situated, at least in theory, on the moral high ground of environmental protection and improvement. As a manager at Bournemouth and West Hampshire Water put it: Certainly we have tried to link water that we supply as a resource. Following on from that, it is an environmental issue. So we have been tapping into our customers’ perception of environmental impact . . . That’s through environmental reports and our newsletters. (Mark Burton)

Since the privatisation of the water industry, companies have been required to promote water efficiency. Most have therefore produced sophisticated educative materials aimed at improving relationships with domestic water users and persuading them to reduce their use of water, particularly in the summer. Water companies now issue a flood of glossy newsletters, leaflets and information packs (the paper expended suggesting a greater concern for water resources than for forestry conservation). Slogans such as ‘Working together to use water wisely’ introduce publications devoted to ‘waterwise gardening’ and ‘water efficiency in the home’. Most try to strike a balance, reassuring people that ‘there’s enough water for everyone, but it’s still very precious’ (Thames Water undated:2). Advice covers the maintenance of domestic plumbing, buying water-saving technology (or using existing appliances more effectively) and, particularly, reducing treated water usage in the garden by buying water butts, planting less thirsty vegetation and watering more efficiently. Quite often, water companies have funded educational materials for consumer or environmental organisations, for example sponsoring the Gardening Which? information leaflet for The Water Conscious Gardener. In this sense they have astutely aligned their aims with those of the many conservation groups who are also keen to encourage people to reduce water usage. Sometimes the educative efforts of the water companies are very active: for example, Wessex Water advertises its willingness to go into people’s homes to provide advice on water efficiency. This exercise often results in the installation of a water meter:

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Contraflows We’ve got lots of innovative things like that going on . . . We’ll do a free water audit on your house: we’ll come and have a look at your white goods [washing machines and dishwashers], your tanks, your piping work and everything else, and to increase awareness on leakage, we will carry out free repairs or relays on the customer’s service pipe . . . We’ll repair or replace that free of charge. So we’ve got a lot of things going on to help on conservation, and of course meters help us prove that point. (Richard Lacey)

All of the water companies and their trade associations now have newsletters that promulgate their views on water issues, describe their progress in improving technology and service, and – increasingly – emphasise their environmental activities and the recreational aspects of water resources. There are various collaborative efforts: for example, the Water Services Association produced ‘Wet and Wild’ with Bird Watching Magazine, featuring ‘45 great reservoir sites to watch birds’; an insert to Country Walking described ‘Waterside Walks’; and ‘WaterWorld’, in conjunction with Trout Fisherman, provided ‘an exclusive reservoir leisure guide’ for anglers. Government involvement in education on water management stems in part from the powerful environmental legislation emerging from the EU. The UK Mirror Task Force on water, along with other EU Task Forces, noted the need for ‘an international public education project’ on issues such as water resources, water supply, wastewater treatment and disposal, and climate change: The programme would be targeted at the general public and an important objective would be to improve the teaching of environmental subjects in schools . . . The public education project . . . would be helpful in promoting the concept of conservation and reuse and could result in consumer-led technological development to reduce water consumption and domestic sources of pollution while furthering a conservation ethos throughout industry. (Foundation for Water Research 1996:3–4)

The government agencies involved in water management produce material that reflects their particular interests. Thus OFWAT’s Water and You provides a breakdown of the costs of everyday use of water and sewerage5 and presents meters as a significant benefit, noting the ready availability of ‘free’ meters, and supporting their installation: ‘Many more customers could benefit from having a meter because they would pay only for the water they use’ (OFWAT: 1999c:2). The most educationally prolific government body is the Environment Agency, which – reflecting the broadness of its remit – publishes numerous educational leaflets and handbooks, such as River Life from Source to Sea, How You Can Help 5. In 1999 taking a bath or using the washing machine apparently cost 28p, while showering cost only 13p. Watering the garden for an hour cost about 76p, and flushing the toilet still involved only ‘spending a penny’.

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Water Pressure Your Local River and Looking After Our Rivers, as well as specialised leaflets for anglers and other recreational water users. It produces detailed reports and local plans, and adds its voice to the clamour attempting to persuade domestic users to cut their water usage with leaflets such as Making Your Home and Garden More Water-Efficient: Make A Difference – Slow the Flow, published in cooperation with the New Homes Marketing Board. It directs some of its educational efforts at industry with, for instance, a Waste Minimisation and Recycling Guide, and often collaborates with local groups in producing publications for children, for example helping to fund the ‘Stour Pack’ that became part of a curriculum project in Gillingham. There are now regular ‘Waterwise’ events in the Blackmore Vale; farmers are visited by proponents of the Department of Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs’ (formerly MAFF’s) Habitat Schemes, and, as noted previously, the various environmental groups, such as the Dorset Wildlife Trust, frequently organise waterrelated activities. A great many educational publications are aimed at children. Some are formally included in a school curriculum that now deals extensively with the hydrological cycle. Even the youngest schoolchildren interviewed in Dorset were well informed about what they called ‘the water cycle’: How the rain comes down then, and evaporates, and it goes to the clouds and then the clouds join together, and then when they go up a steep hill, sort of thing, it starts to rain, it starts all over again. (Wyke Primary School children)

Conservation organisations aim a lot of educational activities at children too. The Stour Valley Project provides wildlife checklists for them, the Gillingham Action for Nature Group takes them pond dipping, and the Dorset Wildlife Trust shows them how to be ‘River Monitors’. However, as one of the Stour Valley Rangers pointed out: When we actually talk to school children, they don’t make the link between water that they use at home and the local area. It’s just – there’s no perception at all that we are all part of the same water cycle. (Clare Freeman)

Some teachers have begun to try to encourage them to make the connection between water issues and water conservation in the home: We talk about how much water do you think you use? So we have a little brainstorm about how do you use water. They start off with very obvious things, and they begin to think ‘Oh yes and we water the garden, and we give our dog water’, and it begins to go out from there and they realise that we are using water all day for different things. (Sue Jackson)

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Contraflows Although most of the institutional material focuses on ‘scientific’ issues about aquatic species and pollution or overuse, there is increasing grassroots attention to the history of water and social questions. The Common Ground Confluence project has been a great success along the Stour, and the Gillingham ‘Stour Pack’ was initiated by a couple of schoolteachers who felt that much education about water resources was lacking in holism and failed to consider local issues. A thing that I’ve been aware of with children is they know an awful lot about the Amazon . . . Yet they don’t know anything about a river just down the road from them . . . There’s not a lot of relevance, teaching children about rivers as these sort of ‘textbook objects’. It’s much more realistic if they can actually experience the river, which is what we’ve tried to do. (Sue Jackson)

On Message All in all, there is no shortage of information available on how to conserve water or avoid polluting it. In some respects these educative efforts have been highly effective: most of the people interviewed along the Stour were well informed – or at least had some awareness – about most of the relevant issues. The only problem was that this made little or no difference to the way in which they used water. Those who did conserve water tended to be the most frugal or environmentally aware, who had already been doing this for years. Otherwise, the majority had put the free hippos into the toilet cisterns, and some had bought water butts or had meters installed, but only a few really tried to remember to shower instead of bath, used dishwater on the garden, or turned the tap off while brushing their teeth. Most, although they said they knew they ought to do these sorts of things, admitted that in reality they did very few of them. The major result of the flood of information is that it has made them feel guilty about their water usage: I do feel guilty about it . . . Because I do have that attitude, it’s not just for me, it’s for the whole environment. And if we all say ‘Oh who cares’ . . . (Julie Galbally)

The problem with guilt, whether induced by meters making water use more visible, or by a deluge of educative material, is that although it might persuade some people to reduce consumption at least occasionally, it is just as likely to encourage others to rely upon a classic mechanism of denial and ignore the issues completely. This points to a whole set of problems in the ‘messages’ that people have received about water resources in the last two decades. Firstly, with privatisation, the ownership and control of water resources was ‘taken away’ in a bitter and divisive move that – judging by the feeling it still engenders – was deeply troubling. Since then access has become steadily more limited by the closing of riparian land, – 240 –

Water Pressure by rising water costs, and by more individuated and measured forms of delivery that commodify water and underline people’s alienation from a ‘collective substance’. Secondly, there is the stream of messages about insufficient water. In an attempt to encourage conservation, the government, water companies and environmental groups have all tried to point out that water resources are finite. People have been told over and over again, often by scientists clad in academic authority, that water resources are running out, that the rivers are dying, that plants and wildlife are disappearing along with streams and wetlands. Summer drought orders and hosepipe bans have underlined this problem dramatically in some parts of the country, and have been noted even in relatively water-rich areas such as Dorset. The high profile given to the problem of clean water – the lifeblood – ‘leaking away’ adds to the awful perception that there really isn’t enough water. Imagine our green and pleasant land without its rivers and streams, wetlands and all the wildlife and plants we take for granted. Imagine an arid, dry dustbowl . . . (EA 1997b:1)

Seen in the light of the meanings of water, these are true images of Armageddon. They are so powerful, in fact, that it is tempting to ask whether they do not represent some kind of millennial vision of doom – a collective way to dusty death.6 How are such messages interpreted? How does the dramatic prospect of a landscape dying of thirst affect patterns of water usage? It is rational enough to assume that such images will persuade people to use less water: after all, this message had just such an effect when the country experienced a severe drought in 1976. Now, however, it seems to fall upon deaf ears. Such messages have to be reconsidered in the context of changing socio-cultural dynamics and the new relationships between water users and their suppliers, between the populace and its government, and, perhaps most critically, between the members of a society in which individuation has gained supremacy over collective representations of identity. These are real differences with real effects on how people use water resources. Although ‘scarce’ essential resources might have been preserved in a more communal era in order to protect collective interests, in a competitive context it is more likely (if they cannot accumulate such resources) that people will simply consume what they can, while they can. The prospect of deprivation – as anyone who has ever tried to diet or give up smoking will know – can be very counterproductive, leading to an increased and sometimes obsessive fixation on achieving access to the object of desire. An individuated social arrangement is highly supportive of competition for resources, encouraging flagrant consumption – a kind 6. It is worth noting, for example, that, as the year 2000 approached, the industry was required to spend millions of pounds to provide emergency water storage tanks and make other special provisions at every treatment plant, just in case the ‘millennium bug’ brought supply systems to a halt.

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Contraflows of post-modern potlatch.7 As a resource symbolising wealth and demonstrating generative power (that green lawn again), water use and control provides a perfect way to win the competition for individual agency and status. Representations of the ‘life-giving’ ‘elixir’ as scarce have been highly effective in encouraging people to re-evaluate and sometimes even re-sanctify water. This is excellent news for the privatised water companies, facilitating greatly increased water charges ‘for the sake of the environment’. But forcing people to pay more for water also serves to affirm these values, possibly encouraging them to express their personal vitality and agency by using it all the more generously. This suggests that many demand-side management instruments may actually be counterproductive, increasing rather than limiting demand. Water resource managers – government agencies and the industry alike – have continued to apply policies that were developed in a different socio-political context and in a different arrangement of water ownership and control. In the context of a privatised industry and an economic system led by ‘market forces’, these no longer work. The changing dynamics are well illustrated by the responses of water users to problems. Public attitudes to drought or shortages have hardened considerably. In the drought years of the mid-1970s, domestic water users responded cooperatively to the ‘Save It’ campaign: demand fell by 30% in some regions, and there were few complaints about the pressure reductions initiated to save a further 10%. 90 per cent of the population answered pleas to cut down on bathwater, and over 80 per cent said that they had taken more care to put the plug in basins and sinks, though only 9 per cent said they had put a brick in the WC cistern. [National Water Council 1976:6]. In 1976 there was instant cooperation between water companies so that . . . in the worst drought for 250 years, engineers managed to keep water flowing. There was active cooperation from the public in reducing demand. There were no recriminations, simply a willingness to learn from the experience. By the time of the drought of 1995, the climate had changed. The public blamed the water companies and the companies blamed the public. (Ward 1997:94–95)

Similarly, as problems with sewer flooding have increased in recent years, it has become plain that people no longer have any sympathy for the technical difficulties of water management, reacting with anger to any perceived failure on the part of those responsible. With public ownership – however centralised – it was possible for them to see water suppliers as part of a wider community. In a post–privatisation context, water users feel very differently.

7. A ‘potlatch’ is a ceremony traditionally carried out by native peoples on the North-West Coast of America. It involved the ritual destruction of valuable goods in a competitive demonstration of wealth and social status.

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Water Pressure The failure of demand-side management instruments to slow rising water usage levels demonstrates the centrality of water as a medium and as a metaphor through which social, political and economic relationships are negotiated. Decisions about water usage are heavily dependent not only on practical needs, but also upon the interaction between suppliers and recipients, the ways in which power and agency are arranged between them, and the degree of co-identification that is possible. Under current circumstances, it is unlikely that any acceptable policy instruments will prove persuasive.

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Conclusion I suppose [water’s] always been there and we’ve not really been conscious, we’ve used a lot more, but we haven’t thought about it. We thought that it was endless. (Beryl Coward)

An Uncommon Tragedy The water flowing down the Stour is both natural and cultural, responsive to a changing spatial, temporal, physical and ideational landscape. Its material qualities – its composition, its transmutability, reflectivity, fluidity and transparency – are inherent, but also responsive to context. Similarly, people’s biological, sensory and perceptual experiences of these qualities are universally human, and yet simultaneously a product of a particular individual and cultural moment in time and place. Their physical, emotional and imaginative interactions with water render it mesmeric, sacred, comforting, stimulating, beautiful and fearful. The cultural meanings – the metaphors, images and systemic models that flow from human engagements with water – reflect this pattern of continuity and change. Because of its literal essentiality, its formal qualities and its ubiquitous presence, the core meanings and values encoded in water are extraordinarily powerful. Although they have readily absorbed changing religious and scientific ideas and vast technological developments, these meanings have retained enormous intellectual and emotional consistency over the centuries, flowing through time and space and across cultural boundaries. Their constancy serves to underline the importance of material qualities and physical, sensory and affective experience in the generation of meaning. The meanings themselves – water as the spirit, as life, as social, connective substance, as wealth and power, as generative source and regenerative sea, as nature, id, emotion and unconscious – all of these permeate the interactions that people have with water. Sometimes near the surface and visible, sometimes deeper and out of sight, they seep into every decision made about water use, wash over every aesthetic, religious or acquisitive vision of water, and swirl in powerful undercurrents in every quarrel about ownership, access and control of water resources. Given that water is used continuously and intensely, and that it is very much an object of desire, there are many such quarrels. The Stour’s journey through a

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Conclusion particular cultural landscape demonstrates that the arrangement of water resource ownership and management is an extremely accurate indicator of social, political and economic relationships between groups, invariably revealing their relative power and status and the influence of their particular beliefs and values. These dynamics have been manifested, concretised over time, in the physical arrangement of mills and water courses, boreholes and treatment plants, and in the material culture of water management and supply. In Dorset, as in the rest of the UK, long-term technological development has articulated with massive social change, enabling and reflecting the growth of larger and more fragmented populations and more intensive resource use. With greater social mobility and pressure on finite resources, the control of water has passed from common ownership into feudal enclosures, from women to men, and from collective management to the control of small elites. In the last half-century a postwar effort to re-establish common ownership through nationalisation has been countered by the re-institution of private ownership ameliorated only by regulatory control. In essence, water ownership is a debate about collective and individual rights and responsibilities, with water framed respectively as a common good and as a commodity. There is an inevitable paradox with resources such as water which, on the one hand, people regard as a ‘pure public good’, but which also have ‘all the properties of an exclusive economic good’ (Rogers 1993:87–88). In recent decades the latter view has come to dominate debates. This is very much an issue of scale: as resource management has shifted out of local communities into ever larger and more centralised national and now international organisations, water has much more readily become, as Blatter and Ingram put it, ‘dematerialised’ – abstracted from its physical and social location and transformed into an invisible, tradeable ‘global’ commodity. One of the most important transformations that will alter the meanings of water is the metamorphosis of municipal water companies into multinational corporations . . . Their privatization has been accompanied by decisive steps towards globalization and symbolization . . . Water banks and water companies traded on the stock market can be envisioned as quite modern phenomena. (Blatter and Ingram 2001:45)

This ‘de-materialisation’ – a metaphorical abstraction of water in which it ceases to be particular to any place or group – is also a ‘de-socialisation’ that denies the reality of local, specific human–environmental relationships and alienates the medium through which individuals can identify with a locale and its other inhabitants. The appropriation from local communities of the ‘essence’ of human being, the substance through which identity is embodied, inevitably compromises their potential for social cohesion. Knowledge and expertise in the management of water has also de-localised, shifting control to epistemic communities, networks of scientists, whose focus is – 246 –

Conclusion specialised and general rather than holistic and particular. Political and legislative control has also shifted up and out of local representational structures into the hands of centralised national and international regulatory agencies and government institutions. This centralised control has been accompanied by more individuated forms of ownership. The result is a widening gap between the institutions that now manage water resources at a national level, and the vestiges of local collective control of water represented by riparian industry, conservation activities and grassroots political involvement. As Herzfeld (1992) has made plain, this large-scale disenfranchisement produces, on the one hand, an indifferent and detached bureaucracy, and, on the other an increasingly disillusioned and cynical populace. The process of centralisation, enlargement and alienation, compounded by the recent privatisation of the industry, has perceptually severed the ties between most people and water resources. Running directly contrary to the meanings encoded in water, it is unsurprising that this has created deep anxiety and abiding resentment. The links between local communities and water managers and owners, tenuously maintained until the 1970s, have now dissolved, leaving water users feeling that ‘their’ most vital substance is in the hands of a highly untrustworthy ‘other’. The water companies’ manipulation of the regulatory process, and their willingness to extract enormous profits for shareholders and directors, have caused outrage. Combined with the alarming foreign buyouts of a significant number of UK water companies (nearly half of the entire industry), this has encouraged intense antagonism towards those responsible, and serious doubts about whether any of the organisations that now own, regulate or manage water resources can be trusted at all. This has generated widespread belief, despite reassuring evidence to the contrary, that the quality of the water emerging from the domestic tap has been compromised. This lack of trust, and the adversarial relationship that it engenders between water users and the suppliers and regulators, is immensely problematic because, despite the abstraction and alienation of water resources from local communities, water itself has retained its core meanings. Under water, in the deeper cultural currents, very little has changed. For all of the right-wing rhetoric, the ‘re-branding’ and the dominating discourses about ownership, regulation, pricing and infrastructure, water is still central – literally and metaphorically – to ideas about individual being and identity, social inclusion and concepts of ‘community’, rights to health and wealth, and access to power, agency and life itself. It remains inextricably part of everyday physical life, everyday language, everyday imagination, and although its cultural meanings may have gained new idioms and formulations, these changes are superficial. The enclosure of water resources is fundamentally at odds with the cultural meanings encoded in water. This does not bode well for the success of current arrangements. Whatever policy makers do, when it comes to a resource which carries such powerful meanings, people will either want to know that they have secure access – 247 –

Conclusion and a ‘fair share’ of water held in common by a group with whom they can identify, or – if they are left uncertain of this – they will simply compete to accumulate or use as much water as possible within their familial castles. However strenuously the water industry tries to reframe water as a cultural artefact, as a product or commodity, it remains elusively part of nature, part of the body, part of the environment. Experiencing it as such, people feel and believe that it is a part of themselves, of their own ‘nature’. They will always want and need to engage with water, to control it, and to express themselves through their use of it. Any lack of access to water is always going to be indicative of poverty and social exclusion and, inevitably, this means that people resent – and will continue to resent – being excluded from collective ownership of it. With privatisation, the meanings of water set the populace at odds with those who have taken control of it, creating an adversarial positioning that is at best tolerated and – under stress – unstable and contentious. Political discourses and public relations may obscure this tension, but are unlikely to resolve it. Governments and water companies cannot enclose and attempt to commodify an essential and inalienable substance, while simultaneously asking for ‘community-spirited’ cooperation and support. There is a fundamental dissonance between these ideas. It is similarly difficult to promote social justice and equity through access to water resources while prioritising profitability and a competitive edge in ‘the market’. Some might say that this is just a difficult balancing act, but the responses of water users in Dorset suggests that such intensely contradictory aims are in fact irreconcilable. Changes in social organisation and the emergence of a much more fragmented social and physical landscape have had major effects upon water usage patterns. It is clear that domestic water use is heavily influenced by a need to respond to major demographic upheavals, to the stresses of geographic mobility, and the anxieties created by living ‘cheek by jowl’ with strangers in spatial arrangements that permit only tentative exchanges over the garden fence. The ethnography demonstrates that ideas about cleanliness, pollution and the maintenance of boundaries are intensely powerful. If socio-spatial mobility increases, the need to sanitise personal and familial space – and thus to use more water – will probably rise accordingly. Similarly, more individuated and competitive social forms, and the need to express these within increasingly isolated domestic spaces, have led – and will continue to lead – to the ‘profligate’ use of water as an expression of familial or individual agency and creativity. The deepening divide between water users and managers in the UK has entrenched this problem, leading to stubborn resistance to cooperative forms of resource conservation. Though widespread, the ecological effects of people’s water usage patterns are now perceptually and physically distant, taking place in a landscape from which ‘the public’ is largely excluded. In environmental terms this – 248 –

Conclusion could be described as a classic Tragedy of the Commons, in which individual competitive use of resources creates cumulative environmental degradation. In another way, though, this is a Tragedy of the Uncommon. With a privatised water industry and centralised governance, resource control and responsibility is no longer held ‘in common’, and with a breakdown in collective action and a dissolution of localised communities, the participants also have neither physical nor social ‘common ground’. It is both ironic, and indeed tragic, that this alienation should centre on the common substance, the essence of human being. Overabstraction, as well as creating visible systemic environmental damage, is thus a metaphor for social and political imbalance. Floods are not merely a symbol of nature out of control, but represent a social drowning by more powerful forces; dry riverbeds and water shortages threaten cultural as well as ecological regeneration; the perception that there is ‘less water to go round’, that ‘they are taking far too much out’, is not merely a reading of environmental change, but is closely tied to feelings of social loss: If one thinks back, there always seemed to be a lot more water than there is now. And I do think that water is becoming less and less in our rivers: one can see the levels dropping. (Colin Coward)

Given the cross-cultural commonality of meanings encoded in water, the anger felt by people in response to being alienated from water resources in the UK is being echoed in many countries, as the mantra of market forces and privatisation is exported to the developing world. As Giblett notes: ‘colonisation is as much about the colonisation of nature as it is about the colonisation of “the natives”’ (1996:74). Given the meaning of water as the essence of nature, and as the source of life, wealth and human agency, the appropriation of resources by multinational institutions, more than any other hegemonic enclosure, assists the promulgation of capitalist ideology. The missionary zeal with which multinational corporations have leapt forward to privatise water around the globe is thus a source of deep concern to many populations. With increasing water shortages, which the UN estimates will affect half the world’s population by 2025, such feelings are likely to become more extreme. The control of water resources by private monopolies is unlikely to facilitate harmonious and equitable solutions to this problem. In the UK, policy makers tend to assume, unless there is widespread and vociferous protest, that people are reasonably content. Carefully circumscribed surveys produce statistics in which most water users can be shown to be fairly happy with supplies that – for the most part – emerge from the tap reliably and plentifully, and are clean and potable. There are some anxieties about foul flooding and leakage, and increasing concerns about access to water, but so far these have only affected a few people directly. Generally, it appears that people accept the current arrangements because most of the time water supply is unproblematic, because they do not – 249 –

Conclusion have time to engage with the issues, and because they feel powerless to affect the situation in any case. However, the concerns expressed by water users in Dorset suggest that this is a fairly thin veneer of tolerance. There is rumbling and often deeply felt discontent which, if supplies were to become less reliable, or drastically more expensive, or if problems such as foul flooding or pollution got out of hand, would lead rapidly to major protests. The non-cooperation in demand management, the non-payment of bills, the rising levels of usage, are important indicators, warnings that should not be dismissed as mere lack of restraint, ‘wastefulness’ or irresponsibility.

In Solution Dissonance between meaning and practice is an intractable problem. Linked to the material qualities and ‘essentiality’ of water, the core themes of meaning that have emerged from this ethnography cannot be erased by its acculturation through treatment and supply technology, or by economic and political arrangements in which water resources are putatively commodified. On the other hand, current practice, the privatised ownership and management of water resources, is similarly difficult to change. It has great ideological momentum, and to try to suggest alternatives is to swim against the tide. A further impediment is presented by longterm infrastructural and technical development that has concretised a particular form of water supply and delivery. In practical terms this is a considerable hindrance to any proposed reorganisation. However, tides turn: a belief in the ‘efficiency’ of privatisation and market forces is not enough to solve the practical problems, and the water industry in the UK is at an important juncture. It is theoretically possible that with careful public relations and intensive lobbying water companies can persuade OFWAT to permit sufficient price rises for it to invest in new infrastructure and thus keep pace with rising demand, while also maintaining profitability. However, it is highly questionable whether the level of investment needed for the long term is actually being initiated, and whether it will, in any case, meet levels of demand if they continue to increase at current rates. Water users are unlikely to limit their usage or accept vastly increased water charges from a privatised industry or from a government that they distrust, and in any case no government willingly opens the door to major increases in charges for essential resources. This problem has dogged the water industry since it first shifted out of the hands of Victorian philanthropists and local communities into more centralised institutions, and has been greatly exacerbated by the privatisation of the industry. Meanwhile the water supply infrastructure – the glory of the Victorians – is crumbling away, and in a shaky global economy investors are harder to find.

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Conclusion Climate change appears to be leading to extreme weather patterns: winter floods that overload sewerage infrastructure and cause water users to disbelieve pleas to cut usage in the summer, and more prolonged periods of drought at times when demand for water is at its peak. The continued profitability – indeed the solvency – of the privatised water industry is far from secure. An insufficiency of investment presents a possibility that in time – and sooner rather than later if there are further lengthy droughts – demand will outstrip supply in many parts of the world, leading to serious water shortages and extensive environmental degradation. Faced with the need for massive injections of support into a privatised industry, or with persistent difficulties in maintaining reliable supplies, water users may demand fundamental changes in the way that water is owned and managed. If this tide should turn, a good place to start would be to consider what kind of arrangement would cohere rather than conflict with the cultural meanings and values encoded in water. With an understanding of these meanings it is possible to critique existing and proposed policy directions, to consider where there is dissonance, and to inform policy development with criteria that might narrow the gap between ideal and existing arrangements. For example, it is clear that, for water users, the deepest anxiety is created by a fear of lack of access to the ‘substance of life’. It is therefore essential that any socially harmonious arrangement will provide secure access to water for all. At present some security is provided by legislation, but this is heavily undermined by the control of water resources by a perceived ‘other’. The meaning of water as a connective medium of ‘social being’ needs to be reflected in methods of managing resources that are localised, collective and inclusive, rather than exclusive and alienating. Because social identity is bound up with these connections, some kind of localisation of management would appear to offer a more sustainable way forward than management through distant and centralised institutions. The potential for co-identification between water users and suppliers is similarly central in evaluations of water quality, which appear to depend heavily upon a positive social and economic relationship with those responsible for protecting collective health and well-being. The meanings of water as a social substance, and as the element most essential to the regeneration of the shared environment and human ‘being’, point to an important tie between involvement in resource management and collective responsibility for limiting demand. This issue is situated in much larger questions about social and economic organisation and sustainability. The widespread effects of the overuse of water resources point accusingly to the short-term nature of promulgating individual competition for resources, and suggest that the enthusiastic (and highly profitable) exportation of these ideologies to the developing world should be considered a great deal more critically. If the ethnographic evidence from the Stour Valley is broadly representative of a wider population, then a large proportion of people are abidingly unhappy about – 251 –

Conclusion their loss of collective control over water resources and would welcome an arrangement which re-instituted this, if not physically, at least legally and symbolically. An obvious step is to reconsider public ownership in some form, thus improving the potential for cooperative management and conservation of resources. Mutualisation has been dealt with warily in the UK. Public–private partnerships have been shown to be an expensive oxymoron, but the political climate remains very chilly towards public ownership in any form. Models such as the ‘mutualisation’ proposed by Yorkshire Water, which appeared to unload costly infrastructure onto the public while retaining the profitable operational aspects of water supply (as noted in Chapter 9), have led to considerable cynicism. However, there are other possibilities: for example (as noted in the same chapter), the Glas Cymru experiment in Wales – a part of the UK where communities remain more stable than elsewhere – replaced a private water company with a semi-mutualised ‘notfor-profit’ organisation. Such experiments do at least move in the direction of arrangements that reflect the cultural meanings encoded in water, and there are other potential models. The historical record suggests that alignment between meaning and practice was met more readily in previous era, when people physically and legally managed local water resources collectively. It is clear that these kinds of communal arrangements cannot feasibly be replicated in a modern technological and demographic reality, but it does explain why people romanticise earlier models nostalgically. It also suggests that if these aspirations could be met, some of the pressures for conspicuous individual consumption might be relieved, and the potential for sustainable resource management improved. What is feasible, with a little creativity, is to consider how the qualities and values which characterised earlier arrangements might be carried into a modern context to inform policy decisions and thus to enable more collaborative and ecologically sustainable arrangements of water ownership, use and management – arrangements that would flow with, rather than against, the meanings of water.

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Index abstraction, 21, 29, 158, 192, 230, 231 abstraction for farming, 172, 176, 188 environmental effects, 10, 26, 43–4, 155, 226, 233 low flows, 10, 131, 155, 190 see also environmental issues, pollution health issues, 210 historical, 26, 40 industrial, 168 licences, 34, 37, 147, 156 metaphorical, 246, 247, 249 technical, 142, 227 acculturation of the senses, 5, 49–50 acculturation of water, 58, 115–16, 141, 155, 218, 250 as a commodity, 130, 139 see also commodification of water, enclosure, privatisation industrial 170, 173 symbolic, 91 see also cultural landscapes, history, material culture aesthetic issues, 103–11, 114, 117, 145, 188 affective responses, 50, 104, 106–7, 111, 162, 207 cross-cultural comparison, 103–4 water in Heaven and Hell, 101–2 see also cosmology, gardens, meanings, recreation, sensory experience Astrup, P., 3, 78, 84 Banks, M., 49 bathing, domestic 204, 224, 226, 240, 242 health, 12, in the river, 10, 77, 212 see also recreation sensory responses, 50, 55–7, 126, 200 see also immersion, sensory experience sharing bathwater 38, 74–5 technology, 198–9

Bender, B., 5 Bennett, V., 4, 21, 38 Blatter, J. and Ingram, H., 5, 6, 26n11, 217, 246 blood, 64, 65, 73, 89n15, 92, 122 circulation, 63, 214 exchange, 74, 76 kinship, 72 vitality, 135 see also homologues, identity, meanings, scheme transfers boating, see recreation bottled water, 163, 232 buying 140, 209, 213, 217 health, 96, 211, 217 meanings of, 218–19 taste, 50 see also drinking water, meanings, pollution Bourdieu, P., 4, 55, 60 Camelford, 215 Caplan, P., 5, 73, 205 chlorine, see drinking water climate change, 42–3, 131, 238, 251 cognitive processes, 3, 5, 60, 61 see also homologues, scheme transfers, sensory experience commodification of water, 41, 148–9, 228, 246 historical, 31, 36 water industry, 130, 136, 248 protests, 233 see also acculturation, privatisation common land, 161 loss of, 12, 13, 16, 190, 204–5 see also enclosures, farming, history, privatisation competition in the water industry, 139, 146, 151 conservation groups, 113, 161, 167, 181–9, 192, 223–4 educational activities, 237, 239 see also policy instruments

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Index membership, 21, 113 partnership with government agencies, 159 partnership with water companies, 143–5, 144–6, 167 see also aesthetic issues, environmental concerns, environmental issues, recreation conservation of water, see water conservation cosmology, 6, 61, 95, 102, 122, 129 ancient, 83–85 Celtic, 85 Christian contemporary, 83, 84, 94, 96 Christian ecologists, 94 history, 25, 88–9 enlightenment, 100, 102, 105 see also fountainhead symbolism of water, 90–93, 98–102 Pagan, 85–90, 102 neo-Pagan, 93–9 secular, 95–6, 113, 114, 120 see also holy wells, hydrolatry, living water, meanings, mythology, ritual Countryside Alliance, 18 Countryside Stewardship Scheme, 172 cross-cultural comparison, 5, 62, 65, 249 cultural landscapes, 5, 9, 39, 95, 245, 246, 248 water resources, 21, 191, 195, 233 see also acculturation, domestic water use, enclosures, gardens, farming, material culture Customer Service Committees, 149–51 see also WaterVoice demography, 9, 13–15, 83, 186, 187 mobility, 36, 196, 201, 202, 248 see also population desalination, 230, 231–2 Descola, P. and Palsson, G., 4, 41 Dirty Museum, 120 domestic waste water, 10, 36 domestic water services, 38, 49, 139, 192 domestic water use, 28, 31, 131, 198, 227 aesthetics, 117 see also aesthetic issues conservation, 143 history, 23 households, 2, 44 see also demography

levels of use, 6, 143, 189 per capita, 2, 199 meanings, 198–9 patterns of use, 2, 3, 195, 199–204 see also gardens, gender issues, material culture, meanings, policy instruments, pollution, water conservation Donahue, J. and Johnson, B., 4 Douglas, M., 4, 5, 6, 65, 73, 122 drinking water, 3, 138, 143, 171 chlorine, 114, 144 opposition to use, 116, 154, 210, 211, 214 fluoride, 116, 144, 154, 210 health, 121, 130, 154, 210–19 history, 30 legislation, 35, 38, 153 quality 58, 77–8, 123, 210–19 see also aesthetic issues, bottled water, meanings, pollution, sensory experience Drinking Water Inspectorate, 147, 149, 153–5, 158, 160, 163 drought orders, 226, 241 drought, ecological, 1, 33, 43, 44, 117, 251 see also abstraction, environmental issues, low flows public responses, 136, 229, 236, 242 symbolic, 69–72, 79, 185, 241 see also homologues, meanings, scheme transfers, water imagery education, see policy instruments Ellen, R. and Fukui, K., 5 embodiment, 4–5, 54, 72–6, 122 see also identity, homologues, meanings, scheme transfers, ritual enclosure, contemporary, 19, 21, 130–9, 204, 247–9 historical 5, 11–12, 20, 24–5, 37 see also gender issues material, 40, 88, 91, 170, 196 protests, 12, 136, 188, 190, 223–4 see also acculturation, commodification of water, common land, cultural landscapes, farming, privatisation entrophication, 42 see also abstraction, environmental issues, pollution environmental health, 121, 130, 154, 161, 202

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Index environmental issues, 9–10, 148, 241, 252 aquatic plants and wildlife, 1, 28, 42, 161 see also abstraction, entrophication, pollution degradation, 1, 130–1, 143, 161 falling water tables, 86, 107 historical, 27, 29, 30, 33, 35, 36 loss of wetlands, 42–3, 155 low flows, 10, 155, 176 see also abstraction, drought, pollution environmental legislation see legislation environmental organisations, see conservation groups environmental values, 117, 146, 205 activism, 94–5 public concerns, 2, 19, 45, 131, 188, 191, 205 water companies, 139, 142–4 epistemic communities, 26, 40, 156, 182, 246 farming historic, 10, 12–19, 22, 25–8 industrialisation, 172–3, 177 GM crops, 117, 173, 178 intensification, 1, 11–12, 16, 17, 31 foot and mouth disease, 177–8 meaning, 172 organic, 121, 174 scientific, 12 fertilisers, 2, 40, 42, 107, 172–7, 191 herbicides, 117, 121, 172, 211 nitrates, 119, 121, 153, 172, 175, 177, 216 pesticides, 2, 42, 144, 172, 175 public concerns about, 117, 121, 177, 211–2 see also environmental issues, pollution water management, 40, 117, 119, 167, 171–6, 216 irrigation, 1, 12, 26, 31, 176 land drainage, 12 water treatment, 113, 153 see also abstraction, pollution, water meadows see also acculturation, cultural landscapes, demography, environmental issues, environmental values, enclosures fishing, see recreation

floods, control, 30, 86, 155, 161 see also water meadows ecological, 42, 117, 251 foul flooding, 3, 76, 242, 249, 250 metaphor, 61, 68–71, 90, 121–5 see also homologues, meanings, water imagery fluoride, see drinking water Fontanalia, 87–8, 91, 95 see also cosmology, history, well dressings, ritual Foucault, M., 6, 72 fountainhead, 91, 99, 100, 102, 107 see also cosmology, Stour Head Freud, S., 4, 67, 73 gardens meanings, 125–8, 172, 204–8, 233, 242, 248 water conservation in, 45, 198, 204, 225–7, 233–40 water features, 51, 187–8, 226 aesthetics, 97, 104, 107, 195 meaning, 125, 128, 206–7 see also fountainhead see also aesthetic issues, domestic use, homologues, living water, meanings, recreation, scheme transfers, Stour Head, water imagery Geertz, C., 4 Gell, A., 6, 23, 51 Gellner, E., 14–15 gender issues, 23–5, 36, 84–91, 94–5, 102, 192 see also history, cosmology, domestic water use, meanings Giblett, R., 5, 58, 64, 84–5, 90 Gibson, J., 4, 5, 49, 50 Glas Cymru, 155, 252 Goubert, J., 3, 198 greywater systems, see material culture, policy instruments Hardin, G., 2 Harrison, G. and Morphy, H., 5 Harvey, G., 4 healing water, 12, 87–90, 98–9, 102, 107 therapy, 51, 55–6, 58

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Index see also cosmology, history, holy wells, hydrolatry, meanings, sensory experience Herzfeld, M., 4, 41, 216, 247 history Celtic, 5, 10, 16, 21, 27, 83–6 see also holy wells, ritual Danes, 11 Dark Ages, 22 industrial revolution, 27, 28, 36 Luddites, 22, 136 Normans, 11 plague, 12, 28 Romans, 21–2, 27, 39, 136, 84, 86–8, 95 see also Fontanalia, holy wells, ritual Saxons, 5, 11, 88 see also cultural landscapes, demography, enclosure, hydrolatry, invasion, privatisation holy water, see living water holy wells, historical, 4, 21–2, 85–90 contemporary use, 95, 97, 214 see also gender issues, history, hydrolatry, living water, meanings, mythology, ritual homologues, 60–6, 74, 120, 125, 142, 201, 206–7 psychological, 67–72 religious, 84–6, 90 see also blood, cognitive processes, identity, meanings, pollution, scheme transfers, water imagery, water qualities Howes, D., 5, 201 hydrolatry, 22, 24, 83–9, 95, 102 secular, 103 see also cosmology, gender issues, living water, history, holy wells, meanings, mythology, ritual hydrological cycle, 114, 117, 239 as cleanser, 78, 118 as homologue, 62–5, 98, 119, 172 see also cognitive processes, cosmology, homologues, meanings, pollution, scheme transfers hydromancy, 87, 89 see also cosmology, holy wells, hydrolatry, mythology identity, location of, 4, 5, 15, 111, 162, 191 performance of, 20, 95, 169, 182, 207, 248

personal and familial, 201–2 social, 16, 19, 131–2, 196, 208, 241, 251 water as essence of, 67, 72–3, 121–4, 184, 204–5, 217, 246 water as medium of, 21, 61, 62, 92 see also embodiment, homologues, meanings, ritual, scheme transfers imagined community, 123, 196 immersion, see sensory experience Ingold, T., 4, 5, 49, 50, 54 invasion, historical, 5, 10–11 metaphorical, 93, 119, 123, 201 of strangers, 15, 17, 19, 124 see also blood, embodiment, history, homologues, identity, meanings, scheme transfers Jung, C., 4, 67 Kinnersley, D., 4, 24 Lacan, J., 5, 72 Lansing, S., 5, 26 leakage, 121, 151, 223, 237, 241, 249 legislation, 158, 169, 182, 185, 230, 238 environmental, 37–9, 151, 158, 169 historical, 29–38 regulatory agencies, 147, 251 restrictions on use, 228 right to roam, 17 water quality, 130, 153, 155, 212 see also regulation living water, 96–9, 106, 115, 119, 213, 215 Christian, 62, 82, 91, 92, 99 see also blood, cosmology, history, holy wells, hydrolatry, hydromancy, meanings Lowi, M., 4 Lupton, D., 5, 73, 217 material culture analysis, 5–6, 49, 72 historical, 39, 86–87 recreational 109 technology, 230–6, 246, 250 biotechnology, 178 domestic, 57, 197–200, 204, 208 historical, 11, 21–5, 30, 31 metering, 228, 230

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Index water efficient, 189, 230, 232–3, 235–6, 238 recycling technology, 168, 174, 230, 233 water supply, 6, 122, 139, 142–3, 233 water treatment, 153, 186, 192 waste disposal, 199 see also acculturation, cultural landscapes, enclosure, policy instruments, privatisation meanings, 91, 172, 245–7 aesthetic, 103–11 passim, 114, 145 see also aesthetic issues agency, 198–9, 205–8, 242 see also cultural landscapes, gardens bottled water, 218–19 change and transformation 62–5, 70–1, 91, 105, 119 cleansing, 64, 74–6, 91, 99, 101, 121, 199 cross-cultural, 61 drought, 69–72 ecological order, 65, 119 educational policies, 241–2 encoding, 5, 22, 24 essentiality, 61–5, 85, 100, 122–4, 213–17 passim floods, 69–72, 79, 84, 86, 251 gender, 85 see also gender issues health, 172, 215, 218–19 social and physical, 73–6, 155, 213 spiritual, 98–9 see also healing water, holy wells human-environmental linkage, 61, 72, 122, 162, 168, 170, 172 knowledge, 68–9, 100, 123, 124 life and death, 63–5, 76–80, 83, 86–8, 94–5, 99–115 passim, 213 material, 24, 39 see also material culture moral, 101–2 see also aesthetic issues, cosmology nature, 129–30 order, emotional, 67–8, 70, 79 physical and social, 77 social and economic, 134–5 see also cognitive processes, homologues, pollution, scheme transfers

psychological, 67–73 passim regeneration, 61–98 passim, 102, 111, 155, 168–72 passim, 202–8, 218–19 see also farming, gardens, recreation secular, 83, 90, 114, 155 social, 122–4, 131, 215–17, 221, 223 social and spiritual, 65, 145, 205–8, 213, 218–19 social identity, 6, 71–9, 92, 96, 168, 207 social order, 65, 68–9, 79, 202 time, 63–5, 79, 84, 96, 98, 105–7, 231 unconscious, 67–8, 79, 85, 99, 100 use patterns, 3, 45 wealth and agency, 122–6, 167–8, 170, 172, 198–9, 222 see also cognitive processes, droughts, floods, homologues, living water, pollution, sensory experience, scheme transfers, water qualities meters, see policy instruments Milton, K., 4 Morphy, H. 49, 51, 103 mutualisation, 152, 252 mythology, 67, 74 contemporary, 72, 90–3, 97 ancient, 69–72, 84–9, 100, 105 see also cosmology, history, holy wells, hydrolatry, ritual nationalisation, 34, 148, 152, 246 New Age, 95–6 policy instruments education, 2, 45, 155, 161, 185, 236–43 hippos, 45, 230, 236, 240 meters, 40, 45, 197, 224–30, 238 responses to, 38, 125, 203, 205–7, 236–7 pricing, 41, 45, 148, 150–3, 221–30 passim, 250 responses to, 135, 226, 228 see also water conservation rationing, 45, 197, 225–9, 241 technology, 230–236 see also material culture, recycled water see also acculturation, commodification of water, enclosure, conservation groups, legislation, material culture, privatisation, recreation, regulation

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Index pollution, physical aquatic 3, 10, 28, 33, 42, 240 chemical, 154, 171, 173, 209–12, 216 concerns about, 42, 75–9, 107, 130–1, 116–18, 171 drinking water, 156, 208–19 farming activity, 9, 169, 173, 175–6, 188, 190–1 domestic, 199, 238, 240 health related, 153–5, 210–15, 231 historical, 25, 30, 33, 42 industrial, 29, 30, 34 legislation, 31, 33–4, 147, 155, 169–70 policing, 155–7, 184–5 see also abstraction, chlorine, environmental concerns, environmental issues, fluoride, farming, history, water issues pollution, symbolic, 2, 5, 97, 122, 169–70, 234, 250 concepts of, 65, 119, 122, 172, 213, 248 homologous, 119–23, 200–1 ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, 113–19, 120 sensory experience of, 58, 76–8 social, 19, 123–4, 217 spiritual/aesthetic, 92–3, 97, 100–2, 104 substantial, 73–6, 213 see also blood, cognitive processes, embodiment, homologues, identity, meanings, scheme transfers population, national, 1, 195, 246 Dorset, 10–14, 27–8, 31, 181 mobility 15–16, 36, 39–42, 201 see also demography privatisation, 3, 6, 35–8, 176, 240–3, 246–52 contemporary, 35–8 dissonance with meanings, 3, 129–30, 219, 248, 250–1 historical, 10, 29, 31–4, 36–7, 39 contestation, 30, 37, 132–3, 140–1, 153, 222–3 protests, 136, 188–9, 207 responses, 38–9, 129–36, 216, 229 ecological consequences, 41–5, 131, 224 effects on water industry, 136–146 passim regulation, 147–8, 151, 221, 224, 237 see also acculturation, commodification of water, enclosure, history, meanings

rainwater butts, 204, 230, 233, 236, 237, 240 recreation, 14, 104–9, 111, 188, 146, 238 boating, 19, 110–11, 144, 190, 191 fishing, 19, 108–10 economic, 9, 22 river management, 190–2, 208 swimming, 63, 71 in the river, 19, 78, 110, 121, 192, 212 sensory experience of, 54, 57, 111 see also bathing, immersion walking, 162, 191–2 see also aesthetic issues, conservation groups, embodiment, environmental concerns, identity, meanings, environmental values, sensory experiences recycled water, 35, 79, 118, 204, 234–5 see also material culture, meanings, policy instruments, pollution regulation, general, 65, 142, 147, 158, 221–2, 246–7 contemporary, 37, 38, 132 historic, 33 Drinking Water Inspectorate, 153–5 Environment Agency, 155–61 environmental, 42, 145, 169–70, 173, 175 Local Government, 161–3 OFWAT, 147–53 see also history, legislation, policy instruments, privatisation Reisner, M, 4, 6, 21, 90 reservoirs, 35, 37, 131, 231, 235–6, 233 historic, 28, 29 recreational use of, 144, 192, 238 see also cultural landscapes, gardens, meanings ritual, 67, 97–8, 109, 126 cleansing, 91–3 regeneration, 62, 73, 85–9, 93–8, 126 social inclusion, 62, 91–2, 97 sympathetic magic, 109 see also cosmology, Fontanalia, holy wells, hydrolatry, meanings Rival, L., 5 Roberts, J., 222 Rogers, P., 246 Rothenberg, D and Ulvaeus, M., 1, 50

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Index Schama, S., 4, 84, 99, 100, 105, 206 scheme transfers, 60, 65, 79, 119–21, 124, 233, 245 see also cognitive processes, embodiment, homologues, meanings sensory experience, 3, 5, 6, 48–51, 68, 200, 206 affective responses, 57, 59, 103–7 109–11, 200, 206 cognition, 60–1, 66–8, 245 immersion, 5, 50, 54–7, 72, 73 experimental, 55 ritual, 92 see also bathing, recreation ingestion, 59, 72–3 smell, 58, 76–8, 209–11, 234 taste, 50, 58, 209–11 temperature, 56–7 touch, 50, 54, 56 vision, 50, 209–10 see also aesthetic issues, cognitive processes, homologues, meanings, recreation, scheme transfers, water qualities Shore, B., 60 social agency, 2–4, 36, 123, 125–6, 205–8, 242, 248 material, 5–6, 23, 115, 139, 228, 233 political, 21–2, 24, 37, 196, 244, 247 see also acculturation, conservation groups, enclosure, gardens, history, identity, meanings, privatisation Stour Head, 100, 105–7, 184, 205, 206 responses to, 99, 111, 119, 207, 214 see also aesthetic issues, cosmology, cultural landscapes, gardens, meanings Strathern, M., 4, 5, 205 swimming, see recreation Tilley, C., 5, 48, 205 Tuan, Y., 5, 63 universality, 5, 49, 61 Ward, C., 4, 21, 24, 29, 33, 36, 38, 135, 140, 174, 236, 242 water conservation, 2, 143, 158, 169, 183, 203–4 obstacles to, 76, 125–6, 198, 230, 240–3, 246–9

see also domestic use, environmental concerns, environmental issues, meanings, policy instruments water divining, 96–7 water imagery, 60–1, 79, 120, 122, 134, 245 theology, 3, 83–90, 99–102 psychology, 4, 67–74 see also cognitive processes, homologues, meanings, scheme transfers water industry perspectives, 136–46, 141–6 water issues, access, 133, 189, 198–9, 208, 216, 241 debates, 1–2, 135, 153, 161, 222–31, 247 public supplies, 23, 31–2, 49 recreation, 181, 187, 189, 191–2 water courses, 17–19, 21, 26, 34, 124–5 demand, see domestic water use, environmental issues, farming, meanings, policy instruments management, see acculturation, domestic water use, farming, legislation, regulation ownership, see acculturation, commodification of water, enclosure, history, privatisation water meadows, historic, 5, 12, 25, 26, 40, 157 contemporary, 70, 187 water museum, Sutton Poyntz, 144–5 water qualities, 83, 103, 104, 245, 250 audial, 52, 53, 101–2 duality, 49, 57–8, 68, 70–1, 87 essentiality, 5, 73, 250 fluidity, 49, 50, 61, 73, 122, 245 hypnotic effects visual, 50–2, 103, 104, 106 audial 52–3 tactile, 54–7 see also sensory experience meaning, 6, 61–62, 66–8 see also meanings, sensory experience movement, 49–53, 61, 64, 82, 122, 129 odour, 58, 101–2, 115 reflectivity, 50–2, 245 taste, 50, 58, 98, 101–2, 209, 211 neutrality, 58–9, 231 texture, 57–8, 101–2 transmutability, 49, 115, 122, 245 visual, 50, 51, 101–2, 210

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Index see also cognitive processes, drinking water, homologues, meanings, pollution, scheme transfers, sensory experience WaterVoice, 149–151 see also Customer Service Committees

well dressing, 88, 95 see also Fontanalia, history, ritual Wittels, B., 4, 68, 69 Wittfogel, K. 21, 24 Worster, D., 4, 6, 21, 36, 37, 189

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