Probably OK if you open and close them a couple of times every day.
VB
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The copper bateau is truly a wonderful thing…But this base, this base launches atomic anger.
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You may already have these, but one thing I’d recommend is inline isolator valves in the feeds to the taps. That way any servicing that needs doing on the taps doesn’t involve switching the whole house off at the main stopcock.
VB
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I think I only fuck about!
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Annoyingly we do not already have them - we WILL have them when the bathrooms are re-done, or Lincolnshire’s verdant fields will run red with the blood of my enemies! 
PS: the isolator tap for the entire cold water feed in the house is located outside the boundary of our property on the edge of a field ~250m away from the house itself. No-one knows where the pipe actually comes into the house, nor indeed how far down it is…! 
Richie: massively impressive all-told. I wouldn’t have an ice-cube-in-hell’s chance of getting Sam round to any of that, and pragmatically the entire house would need remodelling to make it work overall.
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Roger that.
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Yes! This where we fall down. Massive overspend on bathroom and rest of house goes to shit, whatchagonnado? Do the bathroom badly? I can’t do that. Someday ill get the money to finish it all off and them I’ll die. Fuck. 
What really is the point of anything?
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Have a weekend painting, eating and music bake off
Fixt
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No. Well, yes. 
It doesn’t work at the moment…
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Pleasure. Everything else is window-dressing 
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It was a safety feature because of our historical use of water tanks to store water before it was heated.
I remember the first time as a kid looking in the water tank at my parents house and asking why a bird skeleton was floating in it.
The cold tap was always direct from the mains so ‘clean’ and drinkable.
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we were the same with our kitchen at the time, about 20+ years ago, with the aim of doing a room per year nicely…but we’ve nothing… now the kitchen is getting new worktops…
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Our situation was bad, but not that bad. In an attempt to deal with the damp and the cold our house’s owner some time in the 70’s added a blockwork skin inside the two external walls of the kitchen, creating a cavity wall, albeit one that is nearly 18" thick. He didn’t move the main stop valve though. He just left half a block out under the kitchen sink so if you need the valve you can reach through into the cavity and there it is. By the time we bought the place the Edwardian valve had developed quite a bad weep round the gland nut. There wasn’t room to get a spanner to it. So the floor was damp and when we lifted the baseboard in the fitted sink unit the floor was literally invisible under a seething heap of woodlice. We scooped them up with a dustpan. Then we ran a new poly water pipe from the street valve.
Since your street valve is your only valve I imagine it has been turned once in a while. Ours hadn’t and was bloody stiff. The strong advice from our plumber’s merchant was to get Thames Water to come and shut it off as, technically, it’s their valve. Back then (1991) they would do this for free. It was perfectly legal for us to try to use it. But if we snapped the handle off or sheared the shaft or worse then the repair costs would fall on us, whereas if they bust it it was down to them to replace it for free.
VB
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I understood the tanks were used to reduce peak demand (in mornings and evenings) for water as they filled at a slower rate due to partially opening ball valve.
Not sure, why we used to have cold water tanks, that sounds plausible.
A header tank takes mains pressure out of the equation, that means that you have for instance a shower working off the hot water and someone turns on the cold tap in the kitchen, you don’t get scalded. With the popularity of combi boilers fewer houses now have header tanks.
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I like our cold water tank. Doubles up as a cooling plunge pool in the warmer weather
Makes me feel somewhat lucky - our house was 100% unmodernised apart from the arrival of mains electricity in the 1930s and mains gas in the early 1970s when its previous owners purchased it in 1978 - it was unchanged and undecorated since it had been restyled ca. 1860ish when the top floor and much of the back of the house was strapped-on, and the Georgian interior replaced with a Victorian one. Infuriatingly the local-history obsessed woman who lived here kept no record of how it looked when they bought it, and never even researched the history of her home, merely passing us a box of unremarkable bric-a-brac her hubby had dug-up when gardening! What they will have had to deal with will have been much like what you had to deal with and then some - it had been occupied since its decline as a farm in the 1940s by two impoverished spinster sisters who’d ceased to live in most of it!