Ok, here is something that I have been wondering about ever since I moved to Britain:
Why on earth do so many British sinks have dual taps?! I have bored many of my British friends with this question and the answers I received ranged from “That’s a good point” and “They do the job” to “Aren’t mixer taps dodgy?”. It just must be one of these cultural things for which there is no proper explanation… No one in their right mind could actually want to be faced with the decision whether to freeze or burn their hands every morning.
To my delight I found an article from the Wall Street Journal which discusses the issue and to my surprise reveals that if it would have been up to Churchill, Britain would be on par with the rest of the civilised world as far as mixer taps are concerned:
LONDON (Oct. 31, 2002)—During a wartime visit to Moscow in 1942, Winston S. Churchill discovered a marvel of modern technology: hot and cold water flowing from the same faucet.The plumbing in the villa where he stayed as a guest of Stalin was unlike the primitive British standard of separate taps for hot and cold. Rather than having to fill up the sink to achieve the right blend, the British leader could wash his hands under gushing water “mingled to exactly the temperature one desired,” as he put it in his memoirs. From then on, he resolved to use this method whenever possible. His countrymen have been slow to take up the single-spigot cause. Most bathroom sinks in Britain still have separate hot and cold taps today, 60 years after Mr. Churchill’s conversion and decades after nearly all dual taps were scrapped in the U.S. and most vanished from continental Europe. For reasons of thrift, regulations and a stubborn attachment to tradition, the British have resisted the tide of plumbing history. Even when they renovate old homes, many choose two-tap systems, and builders often install them in new, low-end housing. Separate taps account for an estimated 40% of all bathroom-faucet sales in the U.K. “It’s very strange to me,” says Ayelet Langer, who moved to London from Israel last year and found two faucets mounted on the newly installed bathroom sink in her apartment. “I thought I couldn’t really cope with it at first, but now I do.” Worried that the water from the hot tap will scald the fingers of her one-year-old son, she washes his hands in the kitchen sink, which has a single spout. Britons don’t understand why foreigners raise a fuss over this issue. “The British are quite happy to wash their hands with cold water. Maybe it’s character-building,” says Simon Kirby, managing director of Thomas Crapper & Co., a maker of bathroom equipment in Stratford-on-Avon. Boris Johnson, a Conservative Party member of Parliament representing Henley, congratulates “the higher civilizations” that have adopted advanced plumbing technology. But he argues that having the choice of either hot or cold for washing hands “is an incentive to get it over and done with and not waste water.” (…)
(“Old-Fashioned Faucets: Unique British Standard” by James R. Hagerty; from The Wall Street Journal Online)
Right, got to go and build my character, err wash my hands…
2 Comments
November 7, 2007 at 4:48 pm
I think it allows better temperature control of a basin of water for washing in or a bath
November 9, 2007 at 10:39 pm
[...] gibt einige Dinge in England, die für Außenstehende unverständlich sind, zum Beispiel die getrennten und weit auseinander stehenden Wasserhähne für heißes und kaltes Wasser oder warum die Engländer im Linksverkehr rechts überholen aber auf der Rolltreppe in der Subway [...]