A Drink from the Tap
The water supply plant is at the Sutton Bingham reservoir, located on the Somerset/Dorset border, four miles south of Yeovil, and is run by Wessex Water in SE England. Wessex water supplies around 96 million gallons of water a day to its customers and has a turnover of £367 million - that is £95 for every gallon of water they pump!
The water treatment plant in Bournemouth is relatively new as treatment works go. Up until recent times, the water industry used to be nationalised (owned and run by the government) and coastal sewage treatment works were rare because governments were not so keen to spend cash on the treatment of foul water when they could simply flush it into the sea. In the nineteen-eighties the Government sold out and private water companies, such as Wessex Water, were created. Then, under new government pollution guidelines, the private water companies found they had to build those treatment works which the government had not bothered to pay for itself! This is the main reason why UK water rates are higher for people living near the sea.
The dirty water that feeds the plant is pumped several miles inland from the pipes that used to feed raw sewage into the sea. Once it is clean, it is emptied into the nearby River Stour. Confession: we were not able to see how the clean water from the plant made its way back into the environment, so we borrowed a shot from Perfect Paper. What you actually see is water coming out of St Cuthbert's Paper Mill in Somerset rather than the sewage farm in Bournemouth! Please forgive us, as it was all in the interests of making our visual narrative sufficiently understandable for children to absorb.
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Production Notes
Locations:
Bognor Regis; Farm near Arundel Castle;
Lake District National Park, Cumbria;
Sutton Bingham Reservoir and Water Treatment Works, Dorset;
Wessex Water sewage treatment works, Holdenhurst, Bournemouth.