When the first public drinking fountain was unveiled in London 150 years ago, a large crowd gathered at St Sepulchre’s Church at Snow Hill to witness an engineering marvel that for the first time would provide the city’s poor with cold, clean, fresh water (and, the authorities hoped, would also keep the toiling masses out of the pub).

A rather smaller crowd gathered in Hyde Park yesterday for the opening of the first drinking fountain built in the park for 30 years, and the serving of champagne would suggest that fountains no longer have the same links with the Temperance movement.

Small, but no less significant; for the event marks a growing backlash against the bottled water industry, which is accused by critics of squandering resources as well as creating huge amounts of waste.

“The water in London is fantastic,” said David Harber, the sculptor who created the fountain, a 1.2m (4ft) steel sphere on a plinth of hammered granite with four drinking positions. “It is clean, it does not taste too chlorinated. It is about as good as it gets.

“I was in the Middle East recently, and the water came from Fiji. When I was in California, the water came from Scotland. It does not make sense.”

The fountain was bankrolled by the developer Michael Freeman, a trustee of the Royal Parks Foundation, who has been running in Hyde Park for the past 30 years. But if the fountain, with its polished stainless steel studded with bronze petals, and bill of more than £30,000, seems expensive then it is at least observing a tradition.

One of the largest in London is the Ready Money fountain in Regent’s Park, ten tonnes of Sicilian marble and four of red Aberdeen granite, financed in 1869 by a Bombay philanthropist, Cowasji Jehangir Readymoney (his name, incidentally, was a nickname that the family later adopted officially).

The philanthropists who in 1859 created what would later become the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association were trying to solve the problem of contaminated water, which had led to cholera. It was also hoped that fountains would reduce drunkenness. The focus today is on ridding the city of plastic water bottles. The association, now the Drinking Fountain Association, is working with the City of London to establish 150 fountains within the Square Mile.

Mr Freeman said that they need not be as elaborate as the one that bears his name. “You could do a drinking fountain that is perfectly adequate for a couple of thousand.”

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