London water is pretty bad
no it’s not.
I remember lots of taste tests where thames would come out top or near the top, here’s one from 2013 where it comes 3rd:
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/eau-de-thames-beats-volvic-in-taste-test-6673595.html
One big difference is people nearly always drink spring water from the fridge – try putting tap water in the fridge and then telling the difference.
Plus there are much tighter regs on what can be in tap water, spring water and mineral water are much looser.
I remember a documentary on waters – there’s one named 99.9 as it is a very pure water, filtered many times. They asked if they started with spring water, they said no way as it is too dirty, they started with tap water.
One spring water they tried was more readioactive than it should have been, many had too much of some mineral or another, and one was festering with bacteria (a highland spring bottling for a supermarket) as the room where they bottled it wasn’t clean enough and therefore human skin dust got into the plastic bottles, and then gorged itself on the plastic so by the time you bought it it was festering.
Plus all those plastic bottles are an environmental nightmare.