William Heath’s 1828 cartoon, Monster Soup [Wellcome Collection_CC BY-NC 4.0]

IN the 17th and 18th centuries, King’s Cross and St Pancras were destinations for the city’s health-conscious. Fashionable Londoners gathered at the area’s wells to enjoy their healing waters, rich in mineral content and supposed medicinal value.

Fed by the River Fleet – a lost river, now confined to the city’s underground sewers – these watering holes were places to relax and socialise, part of the fabric of London life.

Water’s ability to sustain bodies and communities is a theme that resurfaces throughout the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition, Thirst: In Search of Freshwater.

Curator Janice Li shows water in its absence and abundance, a resource shaped by human invention. It draws together diverse examples of water systems for communal use, from engravings of London’s historic wells to satellite imagery of underground qanats that supplied ancient Persians with ice for chilled drinks and irrigated their paradise gardens.

One of the first artworks in the show is Raqs Media Collective’s multimedia collage Thirst/Trishna (2025), which uses imagery of the stepwells of ancient India to evoke a vast commons.

Through a combination of sculptural and audio-visual elements, the viewer descends into the stepwell’s spiralling depths, taking a centuries-old pilgrimage of social and spiritual significance.

Against the backdrop of these forgotten architectures, the curators turn to Wellcome’s archives to reflect on how freshwater access was transformed by the scientific advances of the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet they also reveal how these technologies became instruments for water mismanagement and exploitation, deepening inequalities of race, class, and gender.

Reflecting on the disastrous impact of these misuses of water is William Heath’s 1828 cartoon Monster Soup, Commonly Called Thames Water. In Heath’s satirical style, a refined woman of the era examines London’s water under a microscope, dropping her tea in horror at what she finds. The comic represents not only a period of population increase, contaminating the city with sewage and refuse, but also anticipates the scandals faced by Thames Water nearly 200 years later.

Decades of extraction and pollution have had a downstream impact on our current climate crisis, reshaping the Earth’s water bodies and making their patterns harder to predict. Several artworks bring this urgent message to life, none more powerfully than Deluge by Gideon Mendel, which shows the impact of mass flooding across five synchronised screens.

In Pakistan, Australia, and Bangladesh, Mendel creates near-mirror images of people wading through inundated streets, united in their shared vulnerability.

The sight of so much water marks a visual break from the first part of the exhibition, “Aridity”, where M’hammed Kilito’s photographs depict a parched Moroccan oasis with the warning title Before Its Gone.

The exhibition ends by placing the viewer at a crossroads: to continue into a dystopian future, where water-hungry AI is powered by asteroids, or to return to a more balanced, community-oriented relationship with our most precious resource.

The more hopeful of these avenues brings us home to north London by spotlighting the Calthorpe Community Garden in King’s Cross. Working with local artists, artistic director Gaylene Gould revives the history of Black Mary’s Well – run by the legendary black healer Mary Woolaston in the 1600s – near its original site. The project seeks to create an inclusive space for community healing, centred on water.

This ethos is echoed in other socially-engaged projects, from the Eden Wastewater Project in Iraq to grassroots campaigns to save the Beirut River.

The artworks and artefacts in this exhibition are a record of our collective human needs and desires, as well as the broad creative inspiration that artists have taken from fresh water, even in the face of existential threat.

As Raqs Media Collective put it: “All living beings eat different kinds of food. But everything that lives slakes thirst with water.”

• Thirst: In Search of Freshwater runs until February 1 at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, NW1 https://wellcomecollection.org