Why do the British have plastic bowls in their sinks?

Alan Cleaver gets to the bottom of one of life's great mysteries

The kitchen sink - but what's with the bowl?

Why do the British have plastic bowls in their sinks? - so said a quezi.com  ("Now you know...") entry using one of my stock pictures of a kitchen sink. It had never occurred to me that this was such a great mystery to the rest of the world, although I had sometimes been baffled by kitchens that had no bowl or, indeed, had two sinks. But it seems that Johnny Foreigner is fascinated to find this unusual item in all our sinks. The article is here but in short they point to the poor plumbing and drainage in the UK, the lack of space in our tiny houses and the need to have some way of discarding slops while still having a basin of hot water for washing-up. And then they start talking about our habit of not swilling dishes! One suspects an American bias to this article - the appalling extravagance of hot water systems left on all the time, water just being poured down the sink etc etc. Indeed a recent quezi article asks how much hot water costs (they don't know??!). I was surprised when I visited Russia in 1984 to see that hot water, like cold water, was 'on tap' all the time - no waiting for boilers to heat up the water. It was considered a basic necessity by my Russian friends. But then it was -40 degrees over there!