Affinity Water

That didn't stop Thames Water from putting it, with minor tweaks and changes, into every five-year management plan since.

now rebranded the South East Strategic Reservoir Option as a joint proposal between Thames Water and Affinity Water, supplier of drinking water to the South East, owned by various fund managers, it looks likely to finally go ahead.

England does need more water storage, and London's 90-day supply is clearly untenable with dry summers set to increase.

But does it need a giant sledgehammer solution to land in rural Oxfordshire? Or, as local campaigners, the Group Against Reservoir Development, argue, are there myriad other, less damaging options on the table? One of which is the storage beneath our feet.

And not just a marginal gain.

Water supply and water storage all comes down to capturing rainfall, and there is no greater surface area in England than farmland.

Jake Rigg, then Director of Corporate Affairs and Communities at Affinity Water in the east of England, told me he had asked an agricultural research institute to establish how much more water can go to the natural underground aquifer using no-till techniques.

And they said, you're talking about having an Abingdon reservoir-sized amount of extra water in the aquifer.