Overlooked Britain – a heavenly pumping station
Who knew sewage could produce such beauty? An 1865 architectural masterpiece in south-east London has been magnificently restored
It is huzzahingly true to say that there can be few destinations more invigorating than the newly restored splendours of Crossness Pumping Station at Bexley in south-east London.
Even Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, always somewhat low-key in his praise for 19th-century architecture, described it as ‘a masterpiece of engineering – a Victorian cathedral of ironwork’.
And so it is, quite magnificently so, with a complexity of naturalistic forms that have recently been restored from a rottingly ruinous state into an assembly of beautiful blooms painted in rich hues.
These were designed in the 1860s by Charles Driver, a pioneer of ornamental ironwork, while the pumping station was created by Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the heroic civil engineer saviour of London’s appalling sanitary woes, who masterminded the capital’s much-needed new sewage system.
He devised 1,100 miles of underground drains, with 82 miles of brick-lined tunnels built of 318 million bricks by thousands of labourers and all by hand. They survive intact to this day, with their multitude of arches giving a most ennobling sense of architectural – even ecclesiastical – beauty.
Strange to say, there is no hint of an aroma; rather the air is particularly cool and fresh. I have plodded though the sewers – with water up to the thighs. Apart from the quantity of vile, unperishable unmentionables, my soul has been sent soaring by Bazalgette’s design of this subterranean world.
There were many such heroes in the world of 19th-century sanitary reform: engineers, inventors and manufacturers, not to mention all the politicians, who had to fight through the clogged inertia of sanitary reform.
For centuries, the Thames had been ‘the great sewer, or Cloaca Maxima, for two millions of citizens and for as many more of the population inhabiting the paternal stream and its tributaries’. So fulminated The Builder in May 1861. Under the heading ‘Noisome reek of the Thames’, we are swept into the horrors of its waters: ‘Our tea is infused with it, our viands cooked, our toddy mixed; our milk watered with it, our beer brewed of it; and every liquid ailment commingles
with the filthy exuviae of the foul and ever more foully increasing tide: we lave in it; the body linen of the multitude is steeped therein, and when wrung out the desiccated essences of poison envelope the breathing pores of the wearers. In fact, this corrupt element – which in the dread epidemic, bore disease in its course, enters into every modification of our sustenance and we are, despite ourselves, enveloped in its influence, so that the water of life is not the tributary of life but death.’
The writer goes on to describe ‘other excremental canals which yield their rich tributaries to the tide’. He writes, too, of Fulham Reach, where ‘all the horrors of Pandora’s box seemed to be amalgamated in one steaming vapour’.
The stench, or rather the grimly named ‘miasma’, overpowered life in London. During the famed ‘Great Stink’ of 1858, the curtains of the Houses of Parliament were steeped in chloride of lime in a vain attempt to dull the asphyxiating odours.
That same year, the Metropolitan Board of Works was founded, with Sir Joseph Bazalgette at the helm. And so began the enormous undertaking of laying the sewage system beneath London.
There were three main routes to the north of the Thames and three to the south, all converging in the East End of London. The Byzantine splendours of Abbey Mills Pumping Station ennobled the streets of Bow. In Bexley, adjacent to Erith Marshes, the Romanesque Crossness Pumping Station greatly enhanced the area. We should cheer ourselves hoarse at such triumphs of civic pride.
Crossness was opened in 1865 by the Prince of Wales, addressing an assembly of ‘persons of rank’ – according to the official programme – including the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.
All of them were dressed up to the nines: the gents in waistcoats, stocks and top hats; the ladies in silks and satins, with parasols and huge, bowed, muslin bonnets.
As well as coming to see the beauty of the building, they would have marvelled at the four largest rotary beam engines in the world, pumping through six tons of sewage a minute. They were named after members of the royal family: ‘Victoria, Prince Consort, Albert-edward and Alexandra.’ The Illustrated London News eulogised that when the Prince first turned their giant wheels into motion, ‘A sensible vibration was felt throughout the building, showing that the enormous beams, lifting rods and flywheels were in operation.’
The beams each weighed 47 tons and the flywheels 52. Always smooth as silk as they hauled themselves forth, they remained in sterling service until 1956, when they were tragically abandoned and left to rot wretchedly away. Scrap-metal thieves ran rampant, ripping out every vestige of brass. Pigeon droppings thickly covered all the dust and decay. It got so sad and so bad that Thames Water was threatening its demolition.
Step forward a host of heroes. It was thanks to the Greater London Industrial Archaeological Society that Crossness was given a Grade-i listing and thereafter thrived, with the Crossness Engines Trust being established in 1987.
Through various and excellent routes, along with grants galore, many millions of pounds have been raised to restore the building and its machinery. The trust is now a 500-strong, unpaid workforce of saintly men – as is so often the case with steam volunteers. It was thanks to their tireless endeavours that, in 2003, one of the engines, ‘Prince Consort’ (pictured), was declared fully operational.
Today, the once-great hulk of a ruined building is abuzz with activity. Further restoration is underway and exhibitions are organised, as are open ‘public steaming days’, and a train has been built to ferry visitors to and fro. There is a visitors’ centre and the website is second to none. I have no claim prouder than that of my being an honorary vice-president of the Crossness Engines Trust.
Bazalgette’s building of London’s sewers was the biggest civil-engineering project in the world at the time. Miraculously, his network of sewers is still in use, handling up to 400 million gallons of sewage a day. When planning the network, he designed his pipes to have particularly generous dimensions, declaring in the 1850s that ‘we are only going to do this once and there is always the unforeseen’.
Bravo to Bazalgette.
‘The stench, or rather the grimly named “miasma”, overpowered life in London’