City Cows

This shop is a rare remainder of the Welsh dairies once common throughout London. It's hard to imagine today, but once cows were kept and milked in the heart of the city - one way to ensure fresh milk!
Not that freshness alone guaranteed that milk was good. In his memoir of mid-Victorian life, Alfred Rosling Bennett describes cows being brought through the streets directly to customers and milked then and there. However,

our milkman said that if people could only see the quantity of water "them poor cows" were compelled to drink before starting, they would cease to wonder that the milk was so thin and blue.