Lee Common, Buckinghamshire

Wellsprings of LibertyWhen I catch myself taking our water supply for granted in the face of countless communities in other parts of the world who do not have the benefit of a reliable supply of clean water, I think back to my childhood. In the village in Lincolnshire where I was born, my mother had to go to the village pump everyday to collect the water we needed to drink, wash and clean. And we were lucky. Our house was called Pump Cottage because it was next to the pump – fetching the water was simply a matter of walking down the garden path and opening the gate. For my grandparents, in a still more rural location (their house was in the middle of a field), water was even nearer: a spring discharged right next to the kitchen door. But in the 1950s, neither of these households could draw water by simply turning on a tap. Universal fresh water in England is a surprisingly recent development.*In some villages, people had to wait for a local philanthropist or benevolent landlord to…