DEVASTATION BY RESERVOIR.
rpHE Enborne Valley is safe, at the expense of Weybridge,
1 Staines, Walton, and their neighbours." So wrote a correspondent to the Spectator last week, in reference to the plans of the Metropolitan Water Board for supplying London in the future. We wonder how many residents in the neigh. bourhood of the Thames between Windsor and Sunbury, and how many others who regard the Thames as a trust which it is our duty to preserve unspoiled for posterity, recognise Precisely what those plans are. Let anyone who is nt erested in the subject obtain a oozy of the Bill promoted _ by the Water Board, which is shortly to come before Parlia- ment, and see for himself what 'the plans of the Board entail; and let him, before he measures out on the map the area which the Board proposes to flood, read as a preface the remarks made by Mr. John Burns in his speech at Crosby Hall on February 6th—a full report of 'which was published by our enterprising contemporary The New Age in its issue of February 16th. Mr. John Burns was dealing with the subject of town planning and the refusal of the community in the past to allow the idealist to work with an eye to the future. When he came to the question of water supply, he referred to the proposals of the Metropolitan Water Board in a way which leads us to hope that the Board will have at least one uncompromising critic in the House of Commons :—
" London has an enormous population. There are seven millions in police London, about eight or nine millions in water London, and twenty years hence the population may be from twelve to fifteen millions. Now, I think that the supply of dean water to London is at the very bottom of civic survey and town plan- ning. But see how we arranged our water supply in London. I was one of the few idealists who, twenty-five years ago, thought we ought to spend twenty millions of money in going straight to Wales and bringing from the mountain and the mist our water supply to London, by gravitation and without pumping. We did not do it, and what is the result ? The result is that along the banks of one of the most beautiful rivers for health, for pleasure, and for enjoyment that there is in Europe, certainly from Battersea up to Oxford, what do we see? Through lack of prescience on the part of our governors in the past you see enormous tracts of land - scheduled for use as reservoirs. I am an engineer, and I will say this, that I never yet saw a reservoir in any country that was strictly beautiful. You may put your banks at whatever angle you like-45 or 50 degrees—and you may grass them as you please, but they are never so beautiful as natural, undulating. scenery. Now, what do we see? Land that fifty years hence will be needed for gardens, parks, houses and villas is covered with large reservoirs, extending from Hammersmith right up the river. And there is a proposal that still more should be acquired. The result is that land is unprofitably utilised. The river is marred; the scenery is blotted out; all because, in the past, Bumble and
, Parliament had not the wisdom and the courage to do the bold, the generous, and the ideal thing, and go to the right place- eloudland—for the water that is now running to waste in the most extravagant way in the West Country."
That is Mr. Burns's comment, which we cannot better with the present Bill before us. What is the "proposal that still more land should be acquired " ? The Metropolitan Water
Board, turning their faces away from the mountain and the mist, appear to have hesitated between submerging a Hamp- shire village and dealing with the Thames Valley ; they have finally decided upon the Thames Valley. They have fixed upon the stretch of country which lies between Walton-on-Thames
and Datohet—the first stretch of real country which a traveller journeying up the Thames finds on his way from London—
and this stretch of country they propose to devastate for miles. Let the reader torn to the one-inch map of the Ordnance Survey (Windsor, sheet 269) and see for himself where it is proposed that the new reservoirs are to be placed. There are to be eight of them, and they are:to stretch, roughly speaking, from a mile south-east of Datchet to Walton-on- Thames, where they will link up with the Sunbury and Molesey reservoirs, which already have hopelessly disfigured the river scenery west of Hampton Court. The first five re- servoirs are to be contained in an irregular oblong, of which the boundaries are these : on the north, the road running from Welley Farm, south-east of Datehet, through Horton, to Stanwell; on the-south-west, the Windsor branch of the Lon- don and South-Western Railway and the road which runs from Wraysbury Station, through Wyrardisbury (Wraysbary), to Hythe End ; on the south, the existing aqueduct which runs east from Hythe End ; on the east, the enormous reservoirs of the Staines waterworks, which already cover nearly three-quarters of a square mile. The next two reservoirs, Nos. 6 and 7, are to adjoin each other, and are planned to lie between the road which runs from Laleharn to Ashford on the west, and the road running from Ashford Com- mon past Charlton Court to Shepperton Station on the east ; the north boundary is the aqueduct which lies parallel to the road running from Staines to Kingston. The eighth reservoir, which in certain respects must be regarded as a distinct pro- posal, separate from the rest of the scheme, lies opposite Walton-on-Thames. Its northern boundary is the road from Shepperton. Station, through Upper Halliford, to Sunbury; its western boundary is the road from Upper Halliford to Walton Bridge; and its third boundary; on the east, is the river Thames. It is to cover 250 acres of Meadow and arable land, and to line the bank of the Thames for a mile with a clay wal forty feet high.
There are two ways of looking at a proposal of this kind- Yon may lament the destruction of quiet country scenery, the banishing of wild life, the unending desolation of flat water without trees, without rashes, without wild-fowl. You may claim that it is indefensible on sentimental grounds deliberately to devastate so many miles of countryside—retreating further and further from a metropolis which every year needs its quiet and its greenery and its clean air more and more. Or you may look on the matter from a purely practical point of view, and decide that London mast have water and that this is the least costly method of obtaining it. The Water Board, presumably, take this second point of view, and care nothing for what they spoil in the way of scenery. Very well ; but let them, in that case, prove that their scheme is practical. They will find plenty of engineers to tell them that it is not. The string of reservoirs which they propose mast in any case alter many of the conditions under which at present the Thames Conservancy deal with floods. But the lowest of the string, reservoir No. 8, actually makes the flooding of the Thames not merely an inconvenience but a serious danger. As matters now stand, one of the difficulties in running off the Thames floodwater is the barrier formed by the reservoirs at Sunbury. It is now proposed to stretch across the Thames valley at Walton, in the shape of a water-tight reservoir wall, an impervious barrier of clay half a mile in width and a mile in length. The result of erecting this barrier will be to head back, in times of flood, the surface water which would naturally distribute itself over the neighbouring low-lying meadow land, and which would find its way back to the river-bed through the gravel soil of the bank. This surface water, headed back, will accumulate in an ever-rising lake above the combined barriers of Walton and Sunbury, and this rising lake will constitute a grave danger to the health of the district. At Chertsey and Weybridge the damp-courses of the low-lying houses are constructed air inches
above flood-leveL If the flood-level is raised, not only will these houses be rendered uninhabitable, but the sewage system will be swamped, and undiluted sewage will find its way back into the river and so into the intakes of the water supply of the neighbourhood. Is this part of a practical proposal ? It is not an imaginary objection ; it is the opinion of surveyors and engineers, and it remains for the Water Board to show that the objection is groundless. Meanwhile, what of another public body directly concerned P To turn from the practical objections of to-day to the sentimental- which-are the practical objections, too, of the next generation —what does the Thames Conservancy think of a proposal which is to destroy the Thames Valley for miles, and to turn the Thames above London from a pleasure resort into an annexe to a scheme of water supply ? It may be necessary, for reasons which we have not heard, to give up the scheme of "bringing water from the mountain and the mist," but it has certainly not yet been proved necessary to devastate the Thames Valley. If the Thames Conservancy have not yet approved the scheme of the Water Board, they may surely be appealed to before they abandon, with the Thames Valley, the meaning and dignity of their name. Whatever this scheme of the Water Board may be, it is not a scheme for protecting and preserving the Thames.
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