Crossness Engines, 1: The Background

Most people don't think of sewage pumps as objects of great wonder and beauty. But then most people have not seen the Crossness Engines. The novelty of the subject, the excellence of the presentation, the scale of the great engines themselves, the historical context, and more, all combined to make this one of our best tours ever. It is not something on your standard London tour. Probably not on your second or third standard London tours, either, unless you have a civil or mechanical engineer, or historian, in your party. Credit Vicki for finding it.

By the middle of the 19th century, London was awash in sewage. Literally. The city had grown exponentially in the previous hundred years, the world's first mega-city--consequences of the Industrial Revolution and of empire-building--and the Thames and some 200 public cesspits were the only outlets for said sewage. The successive cholera epidemics and the Great Stink of 1858 added to the impetus. Forward stepped Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who advocated and then designed a system of drainage tunnels, apart from the Thames, that would empty the untreated sewage way down the river, beyond Abbey Wood, there to be consolidated and dumped into the lower Thames during its tidal outflows. To facilitate this ambitious scheme, great pump engines would be needed to draw the sewage and then to empty it into drainage ponds, awaiting the outflowing tides. Thus the Crossness Engines, among the most impressive artifacts of the Steam Age and of Victorian engineering. The engines were abandoned many decades ago, but a dedicated group of volunteers has for many years now seen to their reconstruction and renovation and to the tours on which we were about to embark. Our tour itself lasted more than two hours, and the fascination and enlightenment never let up. 

The tour begins with a train ride from the perimeter to the facility itself

Actually it began with a 45 minute cab ride across much of central and
eastern London

The main facility: the three frontal buildings originally housed the
14 giant boilers powering the engines (these frontal buildings are
now the assembly/display halls and the cafe and gift shop); the larger
building behind them housed the great engines

In the gift shop, a line of products from Thomas Crapper, Ltd.;
Crapper improved but did not invent the flush toilet, although
he is now widely credited...see Wallace Reyburn, Flushed with
Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper...

Crapper paper

All kinds of relevant history books

Poo Corner, in the bookstore

Now in the display area

More of the display/education area

Including many fascinating topics

Classroom

Now briefly outside looking at the location of the huge smoke stack 
(now gone)

Now back in the classroom; our guide explaining photos from the
opening banquet at Crossness--attended by royalty--a retired plumber,
he upheld the best traditions of British humor and learnedness

Model of the great Victorian smokestack

Model showing the location and disposition of the 14 boilers;
tons and tons of coal were shipped daily from Newcastle and
up the river...

Part of the display of Victorian toilets and related apparatus

"Le Symphonic"

The "Deluge"

And, of course, the Crapper

Now in an adjacent building and a bit of the shop where the volunteers
continue the work of restoring and maintaining the engines

And later in yet another building, formerly the schoolhouse where
children of the workers were educated; now displaying a variety of
pumps and models...

Including the Broad Street water hand-pump which was
identified by physician John Snow as the source of one of the
cholera epidemics, and which led to the identification of
germs, and not "miasma," as the cause of the disease