A HAIR salon and an ice cream parlour were forced to go about their business in a slightly different way earlier this week.

Innervision Hair and Beauty Salon and Sprinkles Gelato, both in Portswood High Street, were left without water on Tuesday due to a leak.

Salon owner Debbie Marlow, 49, resorted to buying bottled water to wash her clients' hair after supply was cut for an hour and a half.

She said: "It was about 10am when we realised there was no water coming from the tap and we had customers booked for colour work.

“We walked to the neighbouring shops and realised that other shops also didn’t have any water come.”

When Debbie called Southern Water to ask what had happened, she found out maintenance works were taking place between 10 and 11.30am.

“I called them and the person speaking to me said they had planned works but it wasn’t meant to affect our area, but the reality was that it meant we couldn’t carry out business.”

Debbie was forced to buy bottled water to use in the shop.

“I asked the clients in the shop to go to Waitrose to buy some water bottles so we could at least wash their hair,” she said.

“We also had to reschedule four clients because we knew we wouldn’t be able to do any work on them.

“Normally Southern Water warn us about any cuts they might be scheduling but this time there was nothing. 

“In their defence they weren’t expecting us to be impacted by this so it’s not completely their fault.”

Staff at Sprinkles also had to rely on water bottles.

Store manager Rebecca Elliot said: "We produce our own ice cream in the store therefore because of the water cuts, we had to use water bottles to produce our ice cream as well as to wash our equipment."

In a statement, a spokesperson from Southern Water said: “We apologise to customers who may have briefly experienced low pressure or no water on Tuesday. This was caused by a leaking valve. We isolated this from our network and customers supplies returned. 

“We will be replacing the valve to ensure our network is resilient.”

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