The Arts Society Welwyn Garden visit to Crossness Pumping Station

On a chilly April morning members left Welwyn Garden City for south east London to visit Crossness Pumping Station. This has been described as one of the “Seven Wonders of the Industrial World” and it did not disappoint. It soon became apparent that we were witnessing the sheer brilliance of Victorian planning and engineering.

The River Thames had long been used as a means of disposing of London’s human waste but “the Big Stink” of 1858 prompted the government to take action. A rapidly growing population and increased outbreaks of cholera made it necessary to create a radical new way of dealing with ever increasing amounts of sewage.

 Joseph Bazalgette was chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works at the time and he designed a vast new underground sewer system for the city which is still in operation today. Crossness Pumping Station was a key element in Bazalgette’s planning to improve the health and sanitation of Victorian London, and such was the urgency that work started in 1859 and was completed by 1865. Amazing!

The sewers carried the sewage 14 miles east of London to the Erith marshes where the Crossness engines were built. Four huge beam engines were used to pump the sewage into a reservoir before it was discharged into the Thames on ebbing tides. However, a major disaster occurred in 1887 when a pleasure boat, The Princess Alice, returning upstream to London collided with a cargo boat, resulting in the loss of 650 lives. Those thrown into the river found themselves fighting to swim and breathing in raw sewage.

This tragedy resulted in the decision to stop discharging directly into the river and to divert the sewage to settling beds to dry out. The dry waste was then loaded and transported out to sea on “sludge vessels”. This system was still in use until recent times.

After the Second World War the Crossness engines had reached the end of their working life and the site was decommissioned in the 1950s. In 1987 the Crossness Engines Trust was formed to preserve the now listed buildings and return these unique pumping engines to their former glory.

www.crossness.org.uk