Watermark is not a brand. It is a seventeen-year answer to a question Mark Anthony Tarling asked himself in a Surrey kitchen, halfway through a stew, in 2008. What follows is the long version.
Mid-afternoon. A pot on the hob. Organic vegetables, locally sourced, chopped with care. And then the question, almost flippant: what is the most unhealthy ingredient in this dish?
Not the salt. Not the oil. The water. Chlorinated, fluoridated, micro-plasticised tap water, doing its quiet damage one boil at a time. Mark realised that you could eat local, vegan and clean — and still marinate it all in toxins before the first mouthful.
Mark spent the next eleven years studying the chemistry of hydration: how water moves into cells, how it carries information, how the wrong water makes healthy tissue impossible. He bought, tested, and dismantled almost every domestic water filter on the British market. Most disappointed him. One or two pointed the way.
"You can eat organic, local and vegan, but if you boil those ingredients in toxic tap water, you've compromised the dish before the first bite."
The technical breakthrough came courtesy of TC — a water-treatment engineer who had been pioneering filtration since the 1960s. Over a couple of years, TC handed Mark a working understanding of water chemistry that most consumer-facing brands either don't have, or actively don't want.
It is the lens that runs through every Watermark system today: a scientific reading of water that begins with biology, not branding.
Mark cooked the very dish that had started everything thirteen years earlier. He won the week, jointly. His Superfood Stew remains the only ever vegan mains dish to win an episode of Channel 4's Come Dine With Me.
And in the corner of the frame, almost incidentally, was Watermark's water. The first time British prime-time television carried his filter quietly into the country's living rooms.
The same year, Watermark's first commercial system — the Portable Well — appeared at Medicine, Warm Up, Give, Buddhafields, Green Gathering and Wilderness festivals. A flight-cased filtration rig that turned a muddy field standpipe into water you'd happily drink.
The reception was so emphatic that the answer to the next question became obvious: this filter belongs in homes, not just festivals.
Three iterations later, Watermark v3 launched in 2026 with a new idea baked into the design: not all British water is the same. A house in Farnham doesn't drink the same water as a house in Essex; a Cornish well doesn't behave like a London mains supply.
Version 3 reads your postcode, profiles your supply, and tunes the system accordingly. It's why we've stopped calling it filtration and started calling it Postcode Perfect.
Watermark is not a marketing department. Mark designs and installs the systems himself; Anthony surveys homes across Essex and the South-East. When you call the number, one of these two answers.
The Surrey-based founder, designer, installer, and reluctant TV personality behind Watermark. Seventeen years of practical water chemistry, three product generations, and a habit of answering the phone himself.
Anthony handles the Essex side of the operation: postcode surveys, site visits, water-quality profiling and on-site supervision. If your postcode begins with CM, CO, SS, or RM, you'll likely meet Anthony first.
Every Watermark system is engineered to outperform supermarket bottled water on cost, on quality, on carbon and on conscience. If we can't beat the bottle, we don't ship the system. So far, every system we've shipped has.