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It is difficult to recapture now what it must have been like to witness the rapid changes to the environment that occurred during the latter half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th as a consequence of industrialisation. Small settlements, such as Manchester and Birmingham, were transformed into large towns and cities. Only 27.5% of the population lived in urban settlements in 1800; by 1851 this had risen to 43.5%, and by 1900 it reached 77% (today it is around 89%).
Not only was the infrastructure lacking for the supply of clean water and the disposal of waste to cope with this change, but there were no institutions to take responsibility. Many rapidly growing towns were still governed like the small parishes that they had been until recently. Local government officials were faced with financial and technical challenges beyond their experience or their ability to cope, and the laissez-faire economics of the day militated against the levels of public investment required. In his role as Home Secretary in 1828, the future Prime Minister Robert Peel expressed a view popular among the establishment classes of the day: that water should be supplied to British towns ‘through the application of private capital and enterprise’.
Infectious ideas
Change came about slowly, and in response to a cholera epidemic that reached Britain in 1831. This was a worldwide phenomenon that caused more deaths in the 19th century than any other epidemic disease. Many theories were put forward to explain the outbreak, from ‘divine intervention’ to ‘miasma’ – the erroneous idea that foul air was responsible. Only in 1848, when another outbreak occurred in Lambeth, did scientists finally recognise that water contaminated by sewage was the real cause. The influential physician Arthur Hassall put it graphically in his 1850 report Microscopic examination of water supplied to the inhabitants of London (skip the rest of this paragraph if you are eating your breakfast): ‘the inhabitants of the metropolis are made to consume, in some form or another, a portion of their own excrement, and moreover, to pay for the privilege’.
By ‘paying for the privilege’ Hassall was referring to the way that London-based water companies operated as a monopoly, selling minimally treated river water to the public for sums that enabled them to pay handsome dividends to their shareholders with no obligation to provide a clean and healthy supply. To quote Hassall again, the water he examined from the Southwark Water Company, drawn from the tidal reaches of the Thames and simply channelled into a settlement reservoir to allow suspended mud to sink before selling on to consumers, was ‘the most disgusting I have ever examined’.
Public anger and agitation eventually persuaded a reluctant government to intervene. Even the libertarian John Stuart Mill expressed the view in 1851 that water should be regarded as a public resource and that its supply should be ‘municipalised’ (that is, brought under municipal ownership or control). The government’s response was to pass the Metropolis Water Act of 1852, which required water companies to use the upper reaches of the Thames as a source for their supplies, theoretically upstream of the sources of sewage pollution, and to introduce more effective methods of filtration. However, they were given until the end of 1855 to enact the necessary changes, and so the Act did nothing to prevent the cholera outbreak of 1853/1854.
Enter Thomas Hawksley
Some towns got the message well before the tardy metropolis: boards of health were being set up in various parts of Britain to take command of all sewers and build new municipal waterworks. James Douet, in his recently published history of the Victorian sanitary crisis (see ‘Further reading’ box below) credits Nottingham, not London, with being the progenitor of all modern water supply schemes. In August 1830, the Nottingham Trent Waterworks Company decided to invest in a new network and it entrusted the task to 23-year-old Thomas Hawksley (1807-1893), who started work immediately so that the steam pumps of the new supply were set in motion a mere nine months later, in May 1831.
Hawksley’s scheme involved drawing water from the River Trent at a site outside the town through perforated brick tunnels laid in the gravel banks of the river, which filtered out heavier residues. A steam pump then raised the water to a reservoir for settlement of the finer particles, before a second engine pumped the cleaned water to a hilltop reservoir above the town for distribution via 12 miles of iron mains pipe. The water was delivered under constant pressure 24 hours a day – an innovative feature that meant customers only had to turn a tap for the water to flow, whereas previously they had only been able to fill their tanks during a limited part of each day. Hawksley went to great pains to ensure that the iron pipes were strong enough to withstand the necessary water pressure, supervising the plumbers closely as they constructed the mains. He also helped to design new screw-fittings and valves.
Hawksley went on to become one of the most prolific and successful of Victorian water engineers. In 1872, as President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, he gave an address that set out the skills needed for his job. As well as a knowledge of geology, chemistry, and the applied sciences, he listed the ability to distinguish good tradesmen and workmanship from bad, a facility with mental arithmetic to make rapid cost calculations, and ‘not to be afraid of soiling hands and boots’ while always ‘in thought and conduct to be a gentleman’. He also emphasised a knowledge of French and German – acknowledging the fact that Continental engineers were leading the way in developing innovative water-supply and sewage-disposal solutions. The first integrated system designed to separate the supply of clean water from the disposal of sewage was built in Hamburg after the city was rebuilt following the great fire of 5 May 1842.
He might have added to his list some skill in architectural design and building construction, for many of the municipal authorities who began to take control of water supply from the mid-1850s wanted their new waterworks to be monumental expressions of civic pride, industrial prowess, and modernity. Some of the earliest of the new breed of waterworks coincided with the Gothic Revival, a movement promoted by Augustus Pugin and others that argued on religious and moral grounds for a return to ‘Christian’ architectural styles rather than the Classical styles of the ‘pagan’ Greeks and Romans. Among the rising industrialists of Britain were many people with religious convictions who argued that clean water was crucial for the health and well-being of working people (not least because consumers had turned to beer and gin rather than risk drinking poisonous water), and that neo-Gothic architecture was an appropriate expression of this ‘moral’ dimension.
Thus the pumping stations built by Thomas Hawksley for water companies in Nottingham, Little Eaton (Derby), Tees Cottage (Darlington), and Fulwell (Sunderland and South Shields) all had pointed arches for the doors and windows, stepped buttresses, steep roofs, and diaper brickwork decoration. At Tees Cottage, Early English lancet windows lit the engine house, which was ventilated by a steeply pointed spire-like flèche.
Italian influences
The new waterworks and river intakes were often sited away from urban centres to avoid sewage contamination, and so accommodation was provided at Tees Cottage for a resident engineer and his family, employed to maintain the boilers, steam pumps, and beam engines. There was a blacksmith’s forge, too, for repairs and maintenance to the machinery, and a weighbridge to check the supplies of coal being purchased to fire the boilers.
Gothic did not enjoy a monopoly, however. Others looked to Renaissance Italy for a building style that was appropriate for an age of science and rationalism. Warehouses, textile mills, railway stations, shop parades, gentlemen’s clubs, and learned institutions in Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow and Edinburgh, and Belfast were all adopting the style of the Tuscan or Venetian palazzo, encouraging Victorian merchants and entrepreneurs to ‘flatter themselves that they were the heirs to the Florentine Medici’, as James Douet puts it.
Among the first of the waterworks engineers to turn to the Renaissance for inspiration were Joseph Quick and Alexander Fraser, who worked for three of London’s leading water companies. The pumping station they built at Hampton in 1855 has the large semi-circular windows and the mouldings, the rusticated masonry, and the rooftop balustrade that help to define what became known as the ‘Italianate’ style. Chimneys to vent the smoke from boiler furnaces were a prominent feature and the Italian campanile (bell tower) was, as James Douet observes, a gift to architects struggling to accommodate the chimney within historically inspired designs. These same engineers then went on to build another Italianate pumping station at Campden Hill whose massive tower, based on the 13th-century campanile at Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice, was a much-loved local landmark until its demolition in 1970.
In Liverpool, Thomas Duncan sought to combine Italianate with Gothic Revival influences. The Liverpool system drew water from a series of reservoirs in the Pennines (supplemented from 1892 by water from the Lake Vyrnwy reservoir in North Wales). Arriving in the city, the water was raised to covered reservoirs for onward distribution; here the engine houses had Gothic plate tracery and blind brickwork panelling, while the campanile again provided the model for the square chimney.
Unplanned overflow
One consequence of a much-improved water supply was that there was now much more waste water to be dealt with. Traditional methods for the disposal of ‘human slurry’ depended on the solid parts being collected from privies and cesspits by night-soil men and sold for use as fertiliser, while the liquid part was theoretically absorbed by the subsoil or carried to the sea by rivers and streams.
By the middle of the 19th century, London had 1.5m inhabitants and 100,000 horses and other animals; many streets were now paved and impermeable, their gutters and storm drains inadequate to cope. New drainage systems were proposed, but without a consensus on appropriate solutions. Engineers argued over the correct diameter for pipes, the optimal cross section (round, egg-shaped, flat-bottomed), the material from which they should be made, the gradient and the angles of the pipe junctions, and the ultimate question of what to do with the sewage once it had been piped to its destination– usually into a river or the sea, which then as well as now was blithely regarded as one vast natural system for diluting and breaking down the waste. Some argued for continuing to collect solid human waste as an agricultural resource, but failed to attract investors for their schemes, while others came up with rival schemes for purifying the waste. In their efforts to avoid potentially costly mistakes, local boards of health struggled to understand the options and did nothing.
It took the Great Stink of 1858, when the stench from the Thames was so great that Parliament was prevented from sitting, to inject a sense of urgency. London’s response was to create the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) and appoint Joseph Bazalgette (1819-1891) as the chief engineer. Bazalgette’s comprehensive plan was a synthesis of numerous earlier proposals, and he drew together a distinguished group of engineers with tunnelling, railway building, and steam-engine expertise to help him. In essence, his Main Drainage plan involved intercepting all the existing streams and culverts and sewers, and carrying their contents well away from populated districts of London using 82 miles of tunnel, with a minimum gradient of 2ft per mile.
Such a gradient was not possible without occasionally elevating the sewage as it flowed through flat and marshy landscapes, so four large pumping stations were incorporated into the scheme: at Chelsea, Abbey Mills, Deptford, and Crossness. The specification that Bazalgette drew up and sent to 16 leading foundries asking them to tender for the supply of boilers, engines, and pumps gives a flavour of the challenges involved: ‘the engines must be capable of raising 10,900 cubic feet a minute 18 feet high. The sewage to be raised is intermixed occasionally, but more especially during heavy rains, with the detritus of granite, stones, brickbats, pieces of wood and other heavy bodies’ (the list itself is an interesting insight into the consequences of the building boom of mid-19th-century London).
Thirty schemes were submitted by the tender deadline of 1 February 1859, and after detailed scrutiny, Bazalgette’s team rejected them all and produced their own solution. The first to be built was the Grade II-listed waterworks at Deptford (now known as the Greenwich Pumping Station), which opened in 1865 to relatively modest designs. The two Italianate engine houses are built of yellow-grey Gault brick with Portland limestone dressings. Each is of three by five bays, with giant Tuscan pilasters rising to the moulded stone cornice.
The listing description ascribes the design to Bazalgette, but James Douet thinks not. It might have been the work of Frederick Marrable, the MBW’s superintendent architect, but he resigned in 1862, complaining that his work was too boring and the pay insufficient. It seems more likely that the design came from the company that won the contract for the supply of the pumps and engines, the Bristol-based firm of Slaughter, Stothert, Gruning and Co.
An ornate industry
Deptford is a good industrial building, but it has none of the exuberance of the next two pumping stations, built at Crossness and Abbey Mills to the designs of Charles Driver (1832-1900). The Buildings of England volume for London 2: South says of the ornamental galleries and central octagon at Crossness that ‘all was originally brightly coloured’ but that ‘rust now prevails’. That was in 1983, before the site was adopted by the Crossness Engines Trust, a registered charity set up in 1985 to restore this outstanding example of Victorian engineering.
Ever since it opened in April 1865, commentators have used religious analogies to describe the works: the Trust calls it ‘the cathedral in the marshes’, and others have called it a temple or shrine. The interior is a tour de force of wrought and cast-iron pillars, capitals, screens, beams, and stairs, all painted red, green, white, and gold. The virtuoso display of ironwork, says James Douet, served no practical purpose and must have got in the way for the engineers caring for the four massive James Watt engines, but it ‘did justice to the high social purpose of Bazalgette’s great project’.
As for Abbey Mills, the authors of The Buildings of England – London 5: East no doubt enjoyed summing this up with the epigrammatic comment: ‘exciting architecture applied to the most foul purposes’. Only graded at II* (perhaps because it now lacks its original beam engines), this is a distinctively cross-shaped building, each of four identical wings under mansard roofs housing pairs of engines – eight in all – that pump sewage up into massive outfall pipes that lead out of the central octagon with its domed lantern.
The polychromatic brickwork (yellow, red, and blue) and elaborately dressed doors and windows of stone are described in The Buildings of England as ‘an unorthodox mix’ of Italian, Gothic, and Byzantine, with the dome of the central octagon adding a ‘gracious Russian flavour’. Missing today are the two huge octagonal chimneys, resembling Moorish minarets, that once vented the smoke and gases from the boilers. The interior once again features a rich display of wrought and cast-iron decoration, in which flowers, fruit, and foliage form the predominant theme.
Bazalgette liked to take the credit for these designs (and the listing description and the Pevsner volume both ascribe the design of Crossness to the engineer), but as early as 1865 The Building News was asking ‘who supplies Mr Bazalgette with his architectural ideas’, adding: ‘we fear that, though put forward as his own, the merit of them is due to another’. In addition to the evidence from the MBW accounts that Charles Driver was paid £35 in 1865 for his designs, they bear strong similarities to the railway stations that Driver designed at Denmark Hill and Leatherhead, where he deployed the ‘cheerful polychromatic brickwork and decorative ironwork considered attractive to train passengers’.
Whereas waterworks in the past had largely been designed by the engineers, who understood what was needed to house massive steam-driven beam engines, it seems that Bazalgette decided to employ a professional architect for two of the four pumping stations. This was, says James Douet, the earliest instance of independent design input being sought for a British steam pumping station, and it resulted in ‘two of the liveliest and most admired works of High Victorian architecture’.
For whatever reason, Bazalgette chose not to use Driver’s services for the last of the four pumping stations, located on Chelsea Embankment, which is a dull building (Grade II- listed) described as ‘Italian of simple character’ in The Builder when it reviewed the design in 1873, two years before what is now known as the Western Pumping Station came into use. In fact, the main building is more French in character, with its mansard roof covered by copper scales and pierced by oval louvres, but the impressive detached chimney (172 feet in height and still used as a sewer vent) does indeed resemble the civic campanile of a city like Siena.
James Douet describes and celebrates the many brave and handsome waterworks that were constructed to house steam pumping engines over the next 75 years, though as electricity, gas, and diesel power began to take over, steam-driven pumps became obsolete, and many were cut up and melted down during the Second World War to meet Britain’s desperate need for steel. However, the idea of conserving historic waterworks dates from the same era: in 1942, the MBW decided to turn Kew Bridge and its various engines into a heritage centre (now the London Museum of Water & Steam).
Kew, together with Kempton Park (now the Kempton Steam Museum) are, Douet concludes, ‘comfortably the most significant sites of the water industry in the world’. They serve as a reminder that we must not take for granted the achievements of 175 years of progress towards urban health and clean waterways at a time when Westminster is once again debating the discharge of raw sewage into rivers and the viability of the current system of private water-company ownership.
Further reading: James Douet (2023) The Architecture of Steam: waterworks and the Victorian sanitary crisis (Historic England, ISBN 978-1802077537, £30.40).
