Ask a Brummie what they're drinking and there's a decent chance the answer is "council pop." Ask them to elaborate and they'll look at you like you've asked what a chair is.
Council pop is tap water. Free, cold, straight out the kitchen tap. The joke being that it's the fizzy drink the council provides, except it isn't fizzy and it isn't a drink anybody chose. It's the most Birmingham piece of slang there is: unbothered, faintly sarcastic, and quietly proud.
And here's the bit that catches people out. Birmingham's tap water genuinely is exceptional, and there's a properly mad Victorian story behind why.
Birmingham's water does not come from Birmingham
It comes from Wales. Specifically the Elan Valley in Powys, roughly 73 miles away.
In the late 1800s Birmingham had a serious problem. The city was growing at an extraordinary rate and its water supply was dirty enough to be actively killing people. Cholera and typhoid were routine. The local supply simply could not cope.
So Birmingham Corporation did something that would be almost unthinkable now. It went to mid Wales, bought up an entire valley, dammed the rivers, and built a chain of reservoirs. The Elan Valley scheme opened in 1904, with Edward VII turning up to do the honours.
The bit that's actually incredible
The water travels those 73 miles to Birmingham without a single pump.
The whole aqueduct is gravity fed. Engineers built it on a continuous, almost imperceptible downward gradient, dropping around 170 feet across the entire route, so the water simply flows downhill the entire way and arrives under its own steam. It has been doing this continuously for over a century. It does not stop. Nobody switches it on.
Water leaving the Elan Valley takes somewhere in the region of a day and a half to reach Birmingham taps. There is water in the pipe right now that was in Wales the day before yesterday.
So why does it taste better?
Because it's soft. Elan Valley water comes off Welsh uplands where the rock doesn't dissolve much into it, so it arrives with very little calcium and magnesium.
Anyone who's moved from Birmingham to the South East has discovered this the hard way. Hard water leaves scale in your kettle, fights your shampoo, ruins a cup of tea and tastes faintly of a swimming pool. Soft water does none of that. Brummies who move away tend to spend the first month wondering what's wrong with everything before working out it's the water.
The uncomfortable footnote
It's worth being honest about the cost. Building those reservoirs meant flooding the Elan Valley, and the villages, farms, chapel and school there went under with it. People were displaced so that a city 73 miles away could drink.
Welsh water going to English cities remains a genuinely sore subject, and it's not really Birmingham's to laugh off. Worth knowing when you're enjoying the tap.
Say it with your chest
So when a Brummie tells you council pop is the best drink in Britain, they're being annoying, but they're also just correct. Soft Welsh mountain water, delivered by gravity, arriving free at your sink.
Our Council Pop tee puts a tap and a droplet on the chest for everyone who already knew all this and has been waiting years for a chance to explain it. There's a women's V-neck as well.
Now go and put the kettle on. It'll taste better than it would anywhere else in England, and now you know exactly why.
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- What does "kanjus" mean? If free tap water appeals, you may enjoy the Gujarati word for a cheapskate.
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