On waste bins and water fountains... Yes, there aren't many (London is uniquely bad in the UK for the former afaik). But I've been pretty successful bringing my tin bottle with me into town and just asking cafe staff if they don't mind refilling. Branches of Pret a Manger and other cafe chains often have refil stations anyway. There was some big effort a few years back to publicise places that would refill bottles for you with an app, but I'm not sure what happened to that.
In 2019 I took a one week structured bus tour of london. What I always found fascinating about london is the tour guide made it a point to mention that the financial district of london is called “the city of london” I was just remembered of that today because I started reading Henry Farrell’s book; “underground empire” and on page 21 he writes “the 1960s banking industry was a Victorian survival into the modern era, a clattering steampunk of rusting pistons and guta percha covered cables with a few incongruously modern parts bolted in….banking staff had to hand write payment instructions on a form which they stuffed into a canister and inserted into a partial vacuum conduit that ferried it to its destination (the city of london had built miles of pneumatic tube networks in the nineteenth century)
This is something my tour guide failed to mention.
We mostly fruitlessly carried bike bottles around Europe. Very few public places to refill, and plastic bottles were everywhere, at least in the touristy areas we were. We were actually shocked to find a bottle filling station at ... Gatwick airport, I think it was, after going so long without. Speaking of plastic bottles, the caps there are attached to the neck of the bottle - they don't fully snap off from the anti-tamper ring. I guess that prevents losing it or littering? It seems like they're designed to snap open so they're out of the way when you're drinking, but either they don't work very well, or I just didn't get the hang of it, because I was constantly having to use a finger to keep it away from my face.
On waste bins and water fountains... Yes, there aren't many (London is uniquely bad in the UK for the former afaik). But I've been pretty successful bringing my tin bottle with me into town and just asking cafe staff if they don't mind refilling. Branches of Pret a Manger and other cafe chains often have refil stations anyway. There was some big effort a few years back to publicise places that would refill bottles for you with an app, but I'm not sure what happened to that.
In 2019 I took a one week structured bus tour of london. What I always found fascinating about london is the tour guide made it a point to mention that the financial district of london is called “the city of london” I was just remembered of that today because I started reading Henry Farrell’s book; “underground empire” and on page 21 he writes “the 1960s banking industry was a Victorian survival into the modern era, a clattering steampunk of rusting pistons and guta percha covered cables with a few incongruously modern parts bolted in….banking staff had to hand write payment instructions on a form which they stuffed into a canister and inserted into a partial vacuum conduit that ferried it to its destination (the city of london had built miles of pneumatic tube networks in the nineteenth century)
This is something my tour guide failed to mention.
We mostly fruitlessly carried bike bottles around Europe. Very few public places to refill, and plastic bottles were everywhere, at least in the touristy areas we were. We were actually shocked to find a bottle filling station at ... Gatwick airport, I think it was, after going so long without. Speaking of plastic bottles, the caps there are attached to the neck of the bottle - they don't fully snap off from the anti-tamper ring. I guess that prevents losing it or littering? It seems like they're designed to snap open so they're out of the way when you're drinking, but either they don't work very well, or I just didn't get the hang of it, because I was constantly having to use a finger to keep it away from my face.