The public utility industries function day by day largely un-noticed and unappreciated. Only when they become deranged in some way – through a burst water main, say, or a power cut – do we remember their vital importance. Reminders of their existence are, however, all around us if we are alert enough to seek them out. Many of the facilities exist within an invisible network of tunnels, subways and ducts beneath the roads and pavements of our cities and towns. The access points to this underground network are protected by strong metal covers so durable that some have lasted a century or more. Consequently the older ones may bear the names of long-defunct local authorities or utility companies, while the newest may be less informative.

This is the evidence which lies beneath our feet. Other examples of older street furniture are more visible: cattle troughs, perhaps, or direction signs. These, too, may have inscriptions identifying their original owners, or the name of the county council or former local authority which first put them there.

Brief histories of the principal public utilities operating in the London area are given below to assist in identifying these and other items of street furniture as they are found.

Note: most of the local government dates shown in this website have been checked against Frederic A Youngs, Jr, Guide to the Local Administrative Units of England, Volume 1: Southern England (Royal Historical Society, London, 1979). The remaining dates have been checked against the appropriate volume of the Victoria History of the Counties of England.

The MWB remained London’s principal supplier until the Water Act 1973 became law. This created, from 1st April 1974, ten regional water authorities for the whole of the UK which also took responsibility for rivers, drainage and sewage management. In London this was the Thames Water Authority (TWA). The TWA was part-privatized under the terms of the Water Act 1989 to become the publicly-quoted company Thames Water, while regulatory functions were devolved to a newly-created National Rivers Authority.

(iii) Fire Hydrants
The provision of water facilities to fight fires was for long in the hands of private companies or, increasingly in the later nineteenth century, local authorities. In built-up areas water mains have provision for standpipes to be inserted at frequent intervals along most roads and streets into which the fire brigade’s hoses can be attached. These are now generally known as Fire Hydrants though other names such as Fire Plug were once used. The hydrants are constructed to standard dimensions. Older covers often bear the name of the local authority which was originally responsible for the provision of the hydrants in their area and they sometimes bear a year of manufacture too. The design of fire hydrants has changed in recent years; they are now shorter in length and the covers may have 45-degree chamfered corners at one end. They are also coloured yellow. The older size covers are no longer made so whenever older hydrants are reconstructed Thames Water in London retains the covers wherever possible so that spares are available whenever covers become broken. For this reason the local authority name on the hydrant cover may not be the district where it is now located.

Ever since 1707 there has been a legal requirement for hydrants to be indicated by signs. At the present time the most familiar sign is the yellow ‘H’ plate fixed to a wall or small post nearby. On older signs the upper figure is the diameter of the pipe in inches and the lower figure the distance to the hydrant in feet; on newer signs the upper figure is the diameter in millimetres and the lower, the distance in metres. Unfortunately such signs are neglected and many are now missing, often through the construction of front-garden car parks involving the demolition of garden walls. Newer covers are usually coloured yellow, while older ones have sometimes had yellow paint rather hastily applied to them, perhaps to make up for the absence of a hydrant plate.

(iv) Cattle Troughs
In the nineteenth century increasing concern in London for the provision of clean drinking water led to the foundation of the Metropolitan Free Drinking Fountain Association in 1859. It expanded its remit to include cattle troughs in 1867, though horses were probably the principal beneficiaries. Its new name, the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain & Cattle Trough Association, was prominently engraved on all the Association’s troughs and drinking fountains. They became a widespread and familiar sight across London but gradually diminished in number during the later twentieth century as horse-drawn transport declined, through road-widening schemes and (sometimes) theft. The organization changed its name at an unknown date to the Drinking Fountain Association.

GAS SUPPLY

Coal gas began to be used for lighting purposes towards the end of the eighteenth century. In London the Gas Light & Coke Company was founded in 1810 (chartered in 1812) and from this time gas mains began to be constructed across the capital. By the middle of the nineteenth century gas was also being used for cooking and heating but it retained its supremacy as a source of lighting until the gradual spread of electricity supply from the 1890s onwards. The invention of the incandescent gas mantle in 1887, and its improvement in 1903, gave a boost to gas lighting but by the middle of the twentieth century this use of gas had largely been superseded. In the early years there was a large number of gas companies in and around London supplying only their own local areas but mergers gradually reduced the total. In 1938 the principal gas companies in the County of London were:

North of the Thames
The Gas Light & Coke Company (founded 1810)
The Commercial Gas Company (1847)

South of the Thames
The South Metropolitan Gas Company (1842)
The South Suburban Gas Company (1858)
The Wandsworth & District Gas Company (1856)

TELECOMMUNICATIONS

(i) Electric Telegraph Service
The first statutory company for the provision of inland public electric telegraphy in Britain was the Electric Telegraph Company, incorporated in 1846. Competing companies soon emerged, among them the British Electric Telegraph Company (1850) and the English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company (1851). These amalgamated in 1856 to form the British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company. The last major inland company to be formed, the United Kingdom Telegraph Company, was also incorporated in 1851. Two London local companies were also formed, the London District Telegraph Company (1859) and the Universal Private Telegraph Company (1860), both utilizing over-house distribution wires. Virtually no evidence of the infrastructure of any of these companies now survives. In 1870 the inland telegraph companies were nationalized and their operations taken over by the General Post Office (GPO).

(ii) Telephone Service
The telephone was introduced to Britain in 1878 but the GPO had only a small involvement with telephone development for most of the nineteenth century. Instead they licensed a number of commercial companies to provide telephone services. In 1889 the three largest such companies, the National Telephone Company, the United Telephone Company and the Lancashire & Cheshire Telephonic Exchange Company, merged to form an enlarged National Telephone Company (NTC).

In 1901 the British government obliged the NTC in London to accept the GPO as a telephone competitor. For administrative purposes London was divided into three zones. The Green zone was the western half of the Greater London area, Yellow, the eastern half, and White, inner London. The GPO took Green, the NTC, Yellow, while both competed within the White. In the Green zone the NTC continued to maintain its existing network but could not expand it.

The GPO, as a government department, had the authority to break up the roads for underground ducts and will have done so from 1870 onwards. The NTC, however, was legally obliged to negotiate wayleaves from all landowners in order to construct underground ducts (the NTC frequently petitioned the government to get this restricting legislation amended). For this reason much of its distribution network was by means of overhead poles and wires. The existence of pavement ducts from the NTC era will be evidence that permission had been successfully negotiated in a particular district but this will be hard to confirm unless NTC joint-box covers are actually found. Even then caution should be exercised as it cannot be certain that covers are still in their original location. Probably the majority of telephone ducts and joint boxes in London date from 1901 onwards. The NTC came to an end on 31st December 1911 when its licence expired and its entire organization and infrastructure were purchased by the GPO.

The development from the early 1930s of ‘voice-frequency telegraphy’ (in other words, using alternating currents similar to telephone signals) reduced the distinction between telegraph and telephone circuits. Why the GPO had so many joint-box covers marked for telegraphs is not known but their indiscriminate use along telephone ducts is evidence of probable re-use of such items recovered from other sites.

The GPO ceased to be a government department in 1969 to become a public corporation, so the initials GPO were no longer used and the post of Postmaster-General was abolished (there was instead a Minister of Posts and Telecommunications). The Post Office was split into separate postal and telecommunications businesses in 1981 and telecoms was privatized in 1984.

In recent years cable subways and ducts constructed for electric traction purposes, for example power distribution for first-generation electric tramways or, later, trolleybuses, may have been re-used by telecommunications companies for their cables.