Steam-Powered Pumping Stations and the Sanitary Crisis of Victorian Cities

Responding to a sanitary crisis

Accurately pinpointing the historical value of fairly uncommon buildings like steam waterworks can be puzzling, especially when, as in this case, an apparently common-place purpose is contradicted by architectural drama. Three research projects, two national and the other global, helped to establish and demonstrate the importance of this particular class of industrial building.

Steam waterworks were built all over Britain from the 1840s as sanitary improvements became identified as the solution to the drastic urban health problems associated with the Industrial Revolution. American environmental historians named this the Victorian Sanitary Crisis, and it is associated globally with the rapid urbanization and inmigration that accompanies industrialization.

Providing clean drinking water, and later removing sewage and waste, became intense social problems to which the steam-powered pumping station was the critical technical solution, and they were built throughout the country up until the 1920s. By then, improved sanitation and drainage and compact electric pumps made them obsolete, and they began to disappear from the landscape.

Research in Britain

In the 1990s, the Listing Department of English Heritage (now Historic England) under Dr Martin Cherry ran a series of thematic projects to clarify the significance of some of the more unusual building types which were coming under the scrutiny of his department.

Among these were military or military/industrial buildings, notably barracks and the historic naval shipyards, as formerly classified sites were opened or sold following the end of the Cold War.

Another strand was waterworks, prompted by the privatisation of the regional water authorities, and their transfer to new private water companies. The national pumping stations list review aimed to apply the listing criteria on a consistent basis across England. In this way, individual examples of this frequently overlooked architecture, which might have been missed or under-appreciated in the previous local listing process, were recognised and given statutory protection.

The listing project benefited from concurrent research by another team within English Heritage, when in 1995 the exhaustive Monument Protection Programme published its ‘Step 1 Report’ on the water and sewage industry.

The Monument Protection Programme approached the sector from an archaeological perspective, Step 1 identifying and distinguishing each component and site type and assessing their significance, and then suggesting priorities for statutory protection. This highlighted, for instance, the remarkable survival of in-situ steam plant, with many supply and treatment sites occupied by successive generations of pumps, tied to wells and boreholes dug by Victorian well-sinkers.

Another rare type identified by the Monument Protection Programme was the early pumping station in town centres close to rivers, most of which were abandoned after mid-19th century laws were passed banning extraction from the more polluted reaches.

International comparisons

I stopped working with English Heritage in 1996, but then became involved with TICCIH The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage.

It is also International Council on Monuments and Sites’ scientific adviser, as part of which it has coordinated and disseminated a series of international comparative studies whose purpose is to help assess nominations to the World Heritage list, which ICOMOS felt were not well understood. These studies include the railway industry, company towns, coal production and the oil industry, and they were joined in 2018 by ‘The Water Industry as World Heritage’.

The research methodology has varied, but in general each study starts with a summary of the global development of the sector under review, then plots the evolution of the main elements to identify key steps or gateway advances, and lastly highlights when the subject made a significant contribution to human development, using UNESCO’s criteria of Outstanding Universal Value.

It is obvious that water supply and waste treatment have been extremely important at different historical periods and cultural conditions, but the global contribution to solving the mid-19th century Sanitary Crisis of industrialising towns really stood out as having special significance. TICCIH's 2018 report immediately substantiated the nomination of the Water Management System in Augsburg, Germany, which dates from the 15th century and was inscribed in 2021.

At the conference in Barcelona to discuss the report, the combined sites at Kew Bridge and Kempton Park in west London, a Grade I listed building and a Scheduled Ancient Monument respectively, were tipped as the strongest candidate for a modern water supply World Heritage site.

A fresh evaluation of the water heritage

All three lines of my research came together in the publication by Historic England in 2023 of ‘The Architecture of Steam – Waterworks and the Victorian Sanitary Crisis’. This argued that pumping stations were consistently, and globally, treated as civic rather than industrial buildings, more like libraries or schools, a reading reinforced by the presence of powerful, symbolic figures at their inauguration.

The Prince of Wales was in Canada in 1857 to start the Hamilton waterworks and in south London eight years later to do the same for Crossness sewage pumping station. Their designers – almost exclusively water engineers not architects – were conscious of a crisis in public health enveloping European and American towns and cities as they were transformed by industrialisation and inmigration.

And this was the case all over the world: the designers of new waterworks made the same promise of health, hygiene and wellbeing as in Britain, for which they used the most potent architectural styles and symbols to transmit their message. For Dresden’s first modern waterworks, the 1871 Saloppe pumping station, the city architect drew on local medieval architectural traditions for his riverside design. The pumping station in Louisville, Kentucky, of 1860 is a magnificent neoclassical temple with a tetrastyle Corinthian portico and a huge Doric standpipe surrounded by a peristyle base, rebuilt in iron after the first wooden shaft burned down.

The British contribution to this international effort to improve urban living conditions was immense. The first pumping station in Paris in 1781 imported two Boulton and Watt pumping engines from Birmingham. The earliest steam pumping station in the United States in Philadelphia in 1801 was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe who had trained with the great British civil engineer John Smeaton (1724-1792), while his assistant had studied under Samuel Wyatt, architect and engineer (1737-1807). British sanitary engineers and specialist constructors built water and sewage systems all over the world, frequently using British-built pumping engines.

The international importance of England’s water industry heritage

The global viewpoint opened by the 2018 study of the monuments of the water industry stressed just how important the English evidence is. Water companies and local museums have conserved special engines and their buildings in other countries, a Cornish beam engine in Lyon, four in Lisbon, four horizontal engines in Barcelona, five triple-expansion engines in Melbourne, and around a dozen sites in the United States with big American-built steam pumps.

But the British water industry heritage is outstanding. There are more conserved steam waterworks in Staffordshire than in most European countries, and these waterworks, moreover, represent the full history of steam pumping from the earliest steam engines to the diesel and electric pumps that replaced them. This remarkable situation, which has a strong bearing on the protection and the interpretation of these sites, only became apparent after the international comparative research underscored their singularity.

Further information

Douet, J., 2018. The Water Industry as World Heritage. The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage Barcelona.

Douet, J., 2023. The Architecture of Steam: Waterworks and the Victorian Sanitary Crisis Liverpool University Press, Liverpool.

Hassan, J.A., 1985. 'The Growth and Impact of the British Water Industry in the Nineteenth Century'. The Economic History Review 38, 531–547.

Melosi, M.V., 2008. The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present. University of Pittsburgh Press, Philadelphia.

Wohl, A., 1983. Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain. Dent, London.

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