Water hasn't always been on tap. Local historians PERCY REBOUL, left, and JOHN HEATHFIELD, right, investigate while, facing page, KEVIN BURCHALL looks at the modern solution to an old problem:

There are few things more taken for granted than an abundant supply of clean water. We turn on a tap and there it is.

It was not always so; the earliest settlers in our area, like many of today's villages in Third World countries, would have had to carry their water collected from springs, ponds and rivers and streams such as the Brent and Dollis Brook.

Later, in the 17th and 18th centuries, inhabitants relied upon rainwater tanks, private wells and the parish pump, such as that located at the junction of Brent Street and Bell Lane in Hendon.

However, such wells, both then and later, were a notorious source of fatal diseases like typhoid, often caused by pollution from adjacent cesspits.

The law sometimes took its own course. On October 4, 1873, for example, Samuel Bell of Whetstone was fined for failing to close an insanitary well in his garden after having been ordered to do so by the sanitary inspector, Mr Brooking.

Wells were hazardous in other ways too.

In November 1888, 13-year-old Maude Ingham was found drowned in the well of her house in Oakleigh Road.

She had been badly neglected by her parents.

Finchley seems to have had particularly good water in its wells with public wells such as that at Brownswell being used by travellers across Finchley Common. To meet the demands of a growing population, however, the only answer was piped water.

In the north of the borough this was originally supplied by the East Barnet Water Company (later to become the Barnet District Gas and Water Company) which had wells near New Barnet Railway Station. They went through 500 feet of London clay to the underlying chalk and were said to be 'inexhaustable'.

In 1866, the West Middlesex Waterworks Company was empowered to provide piped water to the southern part of Hendon and, in 1873, the Colne Valley Water Company began to supply Mill Hill, which had until then relied upon wells.

In Friern Barnet, Queen Elizabeth's well in Friern Barnet Lane was declared insanitary around 1900 and in 1925 was replaced by a drinking fountain.

A pumping station was erected in Colney Hatch in 1876 by the New River Company to supply the New Southgate area.

What we have described so far has been the battle to provide clean drinking water. It is only part of the much larger story, beyond the scope of this article, of providing water for other purposes such as industrial uses, fire fighting and public troughs for watering animals not important today but in its time a vital service.

No story about water would be complete, however, without reference to our association with one of the greatest achievements in the history of London's water the bringing of water into the metropolis in 1606 by Sir Hugh Myddelton.

He formed the New River Company which built a canal from Amwell in Herts to the New River Head near Sadler's Wells in Clerkenwell to bring in clean drinking water.

John Miles, who in 1851 bought Friern Manor Farm house (today the clubhouse of the North Middlesex Golf Club) and all the land between Friern Barnet Lane and Oakleigh Road, was a director of that company.

He named Myddleton Park in honour of his famous predecessor.