The water supply of Surrey, from underground sources, with records of sinkings and borings / by William Whitaker ... with contributions by Hugh Robert Mill ... Pub. by order of the lords commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury.

  • Whitaker, William, 1836-1925.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The water supply of Surrey, from underground sources, with records of sinkings and borings / by William Whitaker ... with contributions by Hugh Robert Mill ... Pub. by order of the lords commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    17/368 (page 7)
    noted). ’ ’ (quality prove He adds “ Tlie result of my own researches of the waiters derived from the Jfa^shot series contamination witli veg^etable matter. into tlie g'oes to rhe Lower fjondon Tertidnes. / The sandy beds and the pebble-gravel of this series yield water in small quantity, at all events in the eastern part of the county, elseivhere the beds being chiefly clays; it is indeed only at the far east that we have a broad outcrop of permeable material, the pebble-beds and sand of tlie Black heath Beds. The whole is of no great thickness and the outcrop is mostly very narrow. Sometimes however a fairly large amount of water seems to come from the Thanet Sand, where it is reached at considerable depth : so larg*e indeed as not to be accounted tor by the small extent of gathering* ground provided by the narrow outcrop. The explanation of this is that the wTiter from the underlying Chalk must have forced a passage upwuird, the somewhat clayey bed at the base of the sand not being strong enougii to withstand the upw^ard pressure. The Chalk. We now come to what is far and away the chief water-bearing formation of the South East of England, and wdiich is indeed the chief contributor to the largest water-supply in the w’orld. London, using that name in a broad sense, unlimited by any legal boundary, gets a large amount of wmter from wells in the Chalk, chiefly in Kent, Hertfordshire, and Middlesex, but also in Essex and Surrey. Moreover the w^ater of the Thames and of its tributar;^ the Lea, from wdiich the metropolitan supply is chiefly taken, very largely comes from Chalk streams and springs. To this perhaps, together wdth the care tliat is taken in filtering the w^ater, is owdng the excellence of the supply, the only large one in the kingdom that is mainly taken direct from lowland rivers. In Surrey no really large supply is got from w^ells in any other geologic formation, wdiilst the Chalk-w^ells of Croydon, of the Sutton Company and of the East Surrey Company afford a notable supply in the eastern part of the county, and all three sets of works have been greatly extended since their start. These are followed by other supplies of considerable extent, the Woking and District Company, Richmond, Guildford, and the Leather- head and District Company supplying populations ranging from about 35,000 to 15,000. yoRTS ag*o Prof. E. J. Chapman made some experiments on the absorption of water by Chalk, and one of his specimens came from the neighbourhood of Blechingley. It had a specific gravity of 2-49 and the wmter absorbed by 100 parts wxas 15*6.^ Chalk in itself is by no means a type of a permeable formation; sometimes indeed the lowest part more nearly approaches the impermeable. It is chiefly to the planes of jointing (more or less vertical cracks or fissures) that the Chalk is indebted for the ^ Phil. Mag^ 1853, ser. 4, vol. vi, p. 118.