We drank, we fought. We made our ancestors proud

Guaranteed to make you more angry than the infantilised urbanities, though, is Michael Mascha, author of Fine Waters: A Connoisseur's Guide to the World's Most Distinctive Bottled Waters (Emperor's New Clothes Press; price: your dignity). Mascha lectures you about the "terroir" of different bottled waters, about their "mouthfeel", about their distinctive molecular structures. He sees sophistication as changing waters with each course and frets about the sorry state of stemware culture.
- Marina Hyde

If there's anything more likely to make Brockley Central reexamine its humanist principles than an anonymous conspiracy theorist, it's bottled water drinkers.

It takes about three litres of water and approximately 3.4 megajoules of energy to produce and sell a single litre of water in a plastic bottle. The environmental impact of a glass of tap water is less than 1% of a glass of bottled water. It costs hundreds or thousands of times more to drink it, offers no health benefits, tastes worse and occasionally does favours to juntas.


According to the Good Tap Guide, people in Brockley have even less excuse, since we are possessed of an outstanding drinking fountain, in Telegraph Hill Park. Awarding it four drips out of five, it says:

A wonderfully quiet and peaceful location where you can spy on the busy city life whilst relaxing on the grass. And what better place for a water fountain to quench your thirst than on top of hill? Just perfect.