Southwark and Vauxhall Waterworks Company

The company extracted water from the River Thames using steam engines to pump it to a cistern at the top of a 60-foot-high (18 m) tower.

An enormous annual outlay, equally in utter waste, in the salaries of canvassers and commission to agents, who procured tenants; in the bills of plumbers, who changed the service pipes of the tenants from one set of mains to another; in the charges of taking up and relaying roads and pavements on the like occasions; in double and treble sets of turncocks and pipe-layers; and, as the climax of absurdity, a payment of all parochial and district rates in every parish on all the pipes of all the companies, in proportion to the capital expended on assumed profits or interest, which it is needless to say had no existence.

[1] The area supplied by the SVWC was centred on the Borough of Southwark, reaching east to Rotherhithe, south to Camberwell and in the west including Battersea and parts of Clapham and Lambeth.

c. 84) was enacted "to make provision for securing the supply to the Metropolis of pure and wholesome water".

[4] In the meantime, an outbreak of cholera in 1854 led to the deaths of an estimated 4,267 people supplied by the company.

[5] To comply with the legislation, the Southwark and Vauxhall Company built new waterworks in Hampton between Molesey and Sunbury Locks in 1855.

Organic impurity was measured relative to the Kent Water Company's benchmark, who supplied part of London (in areas, in direct competition with the others).

The sample of the Southwark Company's water was poorest: "slightly turbid from insufficient filtration, and contained moving organisms".