Alida Baxter

Renowned London journalist and author

 

View from Soho,

Something in the water

Here in present-day London, we wash a reasonable amount and tend to have indoor plumbing, but Thames Water deals cautiously with the strange wet substance in its charge, refusing to be rushed when dealing with this unusual stuff, and is continuing to suck its teeth over its latest disaster – a burst water main in Regent Street, in the very centre of the West End, has closed that thoroughfare to traffic, slaughtered businesses, and created a nightmare for the beleaguered general public.

The main burst on a Saturday, and while various staff worked till they dropped baling out flooded premises, Thames Water closed the street but did nothing about anything on wheels headed towards it. That they left to the Highways Department, who on the Monday found utter mayhem and tried desperately to get the gridlocked chaos moving. They succeeded, but only just: since then the masses of diverted vehicles have been inching their way along unfamiliar routes of twice the usual length, while wistful faces peer from their windows. This has been going on for over ten days with nothing but promises of an end in sight which keeps becoming more distant, and, as an exhausted woman told me when she'd had to set out for work again too soon after she'd eventually got home, “It's only a few weeks since the last one!”

Too true – in the past month a burst water main at Tottenham Court Road created what was then thought to be enough of a nightmare, with no bus stops for half of Oxford Street and harried people disembarking and trudging from near the British Museum to any point South or West. This was bearable for the tourists, but not for people headed for jobs in shops or cafes, where they'd spend the entire day on their weary feet, and it wasn't brilliant for the disabled or mothers with baby buggies either.

Thames Water is one of London 's principle disadvantages, along with the Tube's Northern Line and pickpockets. And it's rapidly heading for the top of the list. Because unlike its competitors, it has the dread words “public utility” attached to its name, and that makes it invulnerable to any kind of control. Basically, if you're a public utility, you can do what you like.

The Highways Department may tear its hair, the public itself may shriek and suffer, but if a public utility says it's going to dig the road up, and leave it up as long as they like, you can't do a thing. And neither can anyone who'd usually be in authority.

If you want to lay a TV or internet cable, if you want to demolish or build something that'll mean a partial or full road closure, you have to get permission, and the Highways Department has the right to tell you to go and boil your head – although they usually don't. (By that stage an original application will already have been OK'd by the Council.) But what they will do is to try and ensure that you work to a deadline, and that a closure for you doesn't clash with another nearby which would create an impossibly difficult situation.

But nothing like this applies to Thames Water, whose attitude is that everyone else should go boil their head. The current chaos is resulting in Twitter-storms, constant radio and TV news bulletins that eclipse even the weather, and banner headlines in local papers, but Thames Water are impervious to criticism. This is difficult, they say loftily, and point to a hole in the major artery they have paralysed. Holes are, admittedly, their speciality. Not work, just holes.

As we all discovered when a much-vaunted “improvement” plan went into operation over five years ago.

Back then, old water pipes were going to be replaced, carolled the company. Those old Victorian pipes were hopeless, the new ones would be wonderful, it was going to be great! What wasn't great was the new, work-free attitude towards work which went along with the pipes. Dig a hole, go away and leave it, and dig another hole, was the procedure. And don't come back after that. At one point every one of the six streets leading into my bit of Soho was a fenced-off stretch of earth with an abandoned wheelbarrow in it, and even people trying to get through on foot were in trouble. They were, incidentally, the only people to be seen. Of workmen there was no sign.

Boris Johnson was our newly elected Mayor, and I wrote to him. Someone had recently been stabbed in Oxford Street , and a life had been saved by paramedics. But no emergency vehicle, even a bike, could have reached any building for hundreds of yards around me. Johnson had been elected on a “rationalisation of roadworks” ticket, promising an end to exactly this kind of mayhem, and I thought he might be able to help us.

But I had no reply. After six weeks I phoned his office and a shocked aide told me that Mr. Johnson didn't read letters. Untouched by the mayoral hands, they were sorted and sent to appropriate people. So which appropriate people had mine been sent to? To London Transport of course, retorted the aide! I tried explaining that public transport doesn't run through the streets of Soho, but that got me nowhere, and after another month I received a bewildered letter from Transport for London, pointing out that they didn't run buses through – I read it and shrieked, “I know, I know!”

What I should have been told is that no-one can control a public utility, and whatever our new Mayor might have declared in his manifesto, the holes would stay.

For years the chaos continued, and the most sickening aspect was that even when there was work, it ceased before 4.00 p.m. every week day and for the whole of all weekends. So the project crawled. Oxford Street was excavated, and diverted buses trundled through side streets so narrow that the breeze of their passing rustled first-floor curtains. Cab drivers told me bitterly that in other major world cities metal grids were laid over such diggings, so that traffic could continue as normal during the day and the work could be done at night.

But no such revolutionary idea occurred to Thames Water, whose record is so incredible that I'd congratulate them on it, if I didn't want to throw eggs. Despite all the twentyfirst century advantages at their disposal, their rate of progress was actually slower than that of Joseph Bazalgette, who created a magnificent, massive sewage system for the whole of London in the nineteenth century.

Parliament didn't even pass the act which enabled Bazalgette to begin work until 1868, when this genius devised and began to supervise the construction of 82 miles of underground sewers and 1,100 miles of street sewers, with various pumping stations on both sides of the Thames . Edward, the Prince of Wales, opened the system in 1865. Yes, the entire system wasn't completely finished for another ten years, but all the major work, from its design and inception onwards, had only taken seven.

In the past decade, all Thames Water had to do was to dig down a few feet to reach the water pipes it had to replace, not to create deep underground a vaulted, virtually endless cathedral to health and hygiene as Bazalgette did. But the replacement of those few water pipes was begun in 2007, wasn't completed even in our little area (where pipes are still bursting) for at least two years , and in London as a whole is still going on!

It must be a real downer these days, not having navvies with picks.

I wanted to be completely accurate about how long the work in the streets around me had taken, so I telephoned Thames Water, and discovered something fascinating. No logs are kept of such completion dates. And no, I couldn't believe it either. But that's what I was told, and if it's true any complaint about past performance comes down to the level of an “Oh, yes, you did!”, “Oh, no I didn't!” family row. The incredible get-out that no-one can check how many years were taken to finish a job that should have had top priority (given the disruption to the centre of the capital) is apparently just another bonus a public utility enjoys.

So I have to rely on folk memory, and however many years there were (I believe more than two), they passed eventually; Oxford Street was reopened, the road surfaces in Soho returned, and we had the wonderful new pipes. Didn't we?

Just North of Piccadilly, a freshly laid and rather beautifully paved pedestrianised area erupted like Krakatoa – a water pipe had burst. And I knew what had gone on there, and that the pipe surely had to be a new one.

A long, narrow street a hundred yards from my building suddenly sprouted a rash of closed signs and barriers – another burst pipe. And the repairs not only took weeks, but endangered the pavements, so that a publican and café and restaurant owners were driven to madness by the “couple of hours a day” working regime. Particularly as the same street had been closed for so long when the new pipes were laid…

In Oxford Street, it was declared that a whole further phase of closure and traffic rerouting was essential, because work on Crossrail had uncovered a dangerously fragile water main. Really? What about all the months when nobody could get anywhere while the brand new wonder pipes had been laid?

Hmmm, hmmm, well, apparently perhaps this wasn't a brand new wonder pipe. Or maybe it was. Whichever, Oxford Street was dug up again and Thames Water had its beloved holes.

This latest horror in Regent Street is only that – the latest in a long succession. All too regularly the London TV news shows remorseless footage of roadworks here and gushing water pouring down a street there. Yet we, like all other consumers, are constantly being reminded that we must save water.

Fit a water meter. Don't clean your teeth under running water. Don't have a bath. Put a brick in the toilet cistern, or better still don't flush it at all. I'm just waiting for somebody to suggest we should all go back to earth closets.

Meanwhile, the leaks from water pipes mean that thousands of gallons of wasted water are pouring down overwhelmed drains. If an ordinary householder left every tap in their home running for a year they couldn't begin to equal that.

According to Thames Water's website, the amount of water wasted by leaks is currently a third of what it was in 2004, thanks to all the work being done in replacing old pipes with new ones. So they do keep logs of something, do they? And are we supposed to believe them?

I hate to sound cynical (actually, I don't care a damn) but I can never remember as many burst mains and leaks as we've endured since the great replacement scheme began. Could the old pipes have been better? Or the skill with which they were laid?

Perhaps it's simply that in the past if we did have a burst pipe it was dealt with so promptly that the inconvenience didn't linger in the mind.

But to-day the aeons it takes to solve such problems, no matter how great the emergency, are a daily reminder of an attitude that no Victorian would have tolerated, least of all Bazalgette.

He wasn't a public utility, he was a life-saving public servant, and isn't it an appalling shame that Thames Water seem to have forgotten they too should care for and serve the public.

* * *

To bring you up to date, Regent Street was finally reopened, but only after three weeks . The financial cost to traders, and the emotional cost to travellers, doesn't bear calculation – and I doubt that anybody at Thames Water will be calculating it.

© Alida Baxter

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