SES Water Brand Guidelines: Caterham Springs, Bough Beech & a 2024 Move to Pennon

Two Surrey companies, one merger.

SES Water is the trading name of Sutton and East Surrey Water plc, a water supply company for parts of east Surrey, West Sussex, west Kent and south London. Its history, as English Wikipedia sets it out, runs through two Victorian lines. The first began in 1859, when a builder put in a borehole, short lengths of main and a pumping engine for a housing development on Caterham Hill. A group of businessmen bought the works and in 1862 obtained an Act of Parliament creating the Caterham Spring Water Company, with a mandate to supply places including Caterham, Redhill, Reigate and Godstone.

After joining with the Kenley Waterworks Company, founded in 1869, the business became the East Surrey Water Company under an Act of 1885. It went on to absorb its neighbours: the Reigate Water Works Company in 1896, Leatherhead and District Water under an Act of 1927, the Limpsfield and Oxted and the Chelsham and Woldingham companies under an Act of 1930, and the Dorking Water Company, whose amalgamation took effect on 1 January 1959, Wikipedia says. In 1968 East Surrey Water finished its only surface-water reservoir, at Bough Beech near Edenbridge in Kent, which is fed mostly by water pumped from the River Eden in winter.

The second line began with the Sutton and Cheam Water Company in 1863, which was re-formed under an Act of 1871 and renamed the Sutton District Water Company, supplying places such as Sutton, Cheam, Carshalton, Banstead and Morden from wells in the chalk. The two companies merged in 1996 to form Sutton and East Surrey Water plc, with its head office in Redhill, and the company moved into a new building there in 2000, according to Wikipedia. It began trading as SES Water in February 2017, while keeping Sutton and East Surrey Water plc as its registered name.

Ownership in plain dates.

The company has changed hands several times. In 2005 the Office of Fair Trading cleared the planned purchase of East Surrey Holdings plc by Kellen Acquisitions, a company owned by funds managed by Terra Firma; the OFT described East Surrey Holdings as the parent of Sutton and East Surrey Water, with further businesses in gas in the Greater Belfast area and in Great Britain. A 2006 OFT case describes Sutton & East Surrey Water as a wholly owned subsidiary of Aqueduct Capital (UK) Limited.

In 2013 the Japanese trading company Sumitomo Corporation bought Summit Water UK, the holding company of Sutton and East Surrey Water, and later that year sold half of it to Osaka Gas, with the joint venture renamed Sumisho Osaka Gas Water UK, English Wikipedia says. On 10 January 2024 Pennon Group, the owner of South West Water, acquired the whole of Sumisho Osaka Gas Water UK from Sumitomo Corporation and Osaka Gas, Pennon says.

The Competition and Markets Authority then reviewed the completed deal under the Water Industry Act 1991. Its case page records that on 3 May 2024 it found the merger might prejudice Ofwat’s ability to compare water companies, and that it would refer the deal for a deeper investigation unless acceptable undertakings were offered; Vox Markets reported that day that Pennon planned to offer undertakings similar to those it gave when it bought Bristol Water. On 14 June 2024 the CMA accepted undertakings in lieu of a reference, and the case closed later that month. After completion, the holding company was renamed Sutton and East Surrey Group Holdings Limited.

Wikipedia describes the supply area as about 322 square miles, running from Morden and South Croydon in the north to Gatwick Airport in the south, and from Cobham and Dorking in the west to Edenbridge and Bough Beech in the east, with more than 282,000 homes and businesses and a population of about 675,000; Pennon’s acquisition announcement used a figure of over 750,000 customers. Wikipedia lists treatment works at Cheam, Elmer near Leatherhead, Cliftons Lane in Reigate, Woodmansterne, Kenley, Godstone, Westwood and Bough Beech, with most supplies drawn from wells in the chalk and Lower Greensand aquifers. Pennon describes SES as a water-only operation.

Design and documentation.

Most of what the public sees of a water company is practical rather than promotional: the vans that turn up to fix a main, the signs on the gates of treatment works and pumping stations, the bill that arrives through the door, and the notices posted when roads are dug up. For a design reader, those everyday pieces carry the identity more often than any advertisement does, because they are seen by every household in a supply area.

A bill is a working document, setting out what is owed, how to pay and where to find help, and a customer campaign is usually a single request; for a design reader, both are worth studying as type, layout and tone. Group names matter too: Pennon, for example, lists South West Water, Bournemouth Water, Bristol Water and SES Water as separate businesses on its own website, so one owner can sit behind several regional brands.

Photography leans on the landscape the companies manage. Reservoirs, moorland catchments, rivers, coastlines and the buildings of treatment works appear again and again, and some sites double as visitor places: English Wikipedia notes public access to Southern Water’s Bewl Water and guided tours of the Victorian sewers of Brighton and Hove, and a charity, South West Lakes Trust, that manages inland water sites across Cornwall, Devon and West Somerset.

Corporate pages carry a different kind of information. In the UK, water companies sit under the economic regulator Ofwat and the Environment Agency, and the Environment Agency publishes dated press releases on prosecutions; owners, regulators and court outcomes are therefore part of the record. This guide treats them as dated facts, set out alongside the history of each company and the palette and type choices made for it.

Chalk, greensand and a reservoir in Kent.

SES Water’s public voice is practical. Its website’s autumn 2026 water-saving campaign, “Every Drop Counts – Come Rain or Shine,” pairs short lines such as “Small actions. A big difference.” with tips on fixing leaky loos and switching to showers, and points customers to GetWaterFit, a tool for finding where water is used at home. The three-letter SES name, adopted in 2017, gives the company a short mark alongside its longer registered name.

Its landscape is a design resource too. Bough Beech reservoir, finished in 1968, has a nature reserve of about 50 acres at its northern end managed by the Kent Ornithological Society, while the southern end is used for fishing and sailing, and since 1999 a purpose-built education centre beside the works has welcomed school groups, Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, SES Water shows a compact water-only company whose identity can draw on Victorian spring companies, chalk and greensand wells, and one reservoir in the Kent countryside. Compare it with its sister company under Pennon, South West Water, and with Thames Water. For this guide we use Wandle teal, greensand gold and deep slate with Bough Beech blue, with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep SES Water’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.