A load of dead men peeing

Wander around on foot long enough and the chances are you’ll develop a fascination with certain kinds of street furniture. Telephone boxes, memorial benches, statues, that sort of thing. In my case, it’s fountains, faucets and public taps.

I’m not sure when this started, but the seed had obviously been sown when, during a radio interview in the late-1990s, I found myself critiquing the lacklustre fountains on the Centre and describing them as “a load of dead men peeing”.

Since then, this interest in municipal water features has grown more serious – not to the point where it’s become an obsession, but certainly to the point where visiting somewhere doesn’t feel complete until I’ve checked out its hydro-projectile action. 

Most of the time, this is a pretty harmless activity. Fountains are meant to be looked at, faucets often have inscriptions designed to be read, public taps are asking to be drunk from. Sometimes, though, it’s as well to bone up on the local etiquette in advance. 

In Kosice in eastern Slovakia, for instance, the local residents are extremely proud of a spectacular (and spectacularly kitsch) city-centre fountain which sends quivering feathers of water into the air accompanied by a light show orchestrated to tinny renditions of Chopin preludes. It looked particularly impressive in the dark and so, at nightfall, the family dutifully lined up for a series of photographs in front of its garish, flickering spouts.

After a while, however, I began to notice a strange clicking sound emanating from the surrounding darkness. The fountain was circled with benches and these were all full: forty, maybe fifty people were watching us and tutting with varying degrees of irritation. They’d come out specially to gaze adoringly on their pride and joy and here we were, another bunch of pesky tourists, interrupting the view. Had we not retreated, we might well have been dismembered by an irate gang of elderly fountain fetishists. 

What I should have done, of course, wasn’t huff like a retired colonel, but turn to them as fellow connoisseurs of aquatic sculpture. In the absence of a mutually comprehensible language, fountains might well have been our common ground.

What, then, is the attraction of such things? Well, aside from the fact that gurgling water appears to be inherently relaxing, a soothing antidote to urban fluster, there’s the sheer variety of design – from humble standpipe dribbling into verdigris’d trough all the way through to grandiose baroque pomposity.

And if some can be cheesily over the top and, frankly, rather silly (which good burgher of Bologna decided that the city would be improved by a fountain suggestively spouting water from the marble breasts of a topless goddess?), others can be unexpectedly moving – enduring remnants of lost communities, memorials to the war dead or reminders of tragic totalitarian excess.

As for Bristol – it’s curious. The city’s got a bloody big floating harbour right in the middle of it and the River Frome snakes beneath its streets, so it’s not short of water – but while it’s got a fair few fountains, faucets and taps, the vast majority of these liquid monuments never seem to be working.

Sure, the dead men on the Centre continue to pee with intermittent reliability and those silvery walls of water in Millennium Square (which look like bits of scenery from a 60s sci-fi film) continue to shimmer and act as a seemingly irresistible toddler magnet – but many others are either permanently dry or dry for most of the time. Either that or I’m just unlucky and miss the few occasions when the fountains outside the Vic Rooms or the maritime-themed one by Under the Stars are actually switched on.

And let’s not forget the missed opportunities. The podium in Broadmead’s crying out for an imaginative watery display while replacing King Billy with tastefully jetting sprays and an expansive lily pond would vastly improve Queen Square.

Maybe in this year of self-conscious greenness that’s something to think about – and maybe as part of our born-again municipal environmentalism someone could get round to reopening the taps, bring a few more splashing gouts of water back to our streets and stop Bristol becoming known as a city of dead and dying fountains.