Crossness Pumping Station — industrial heritage site
Ethan Doyle White · CC BY-SA 3.0

Crossness Pumping Station

  • 2 min read
  • 51.509° N 0.138° E

Interesting facts

  • At 11 strokes a minute, each engine lifted about 6 tons of sewage per stroke into a reservoir that held some 27 million gallons.
  • The engines survived because removing them would have cost more than their scrap value, though brass fittings and even stair handrails were stripped out.
  • When the station closed, the pits and culverts under the engine house were packed with sand against methane, and about 100 tons had to be dug out.
  • The restored Prince Consort is now driven by a small off-the-shelf boiler, enough because the engine no longer has to pump against a load.
  • For its first decades the works simply sent raw sewage seawards; sedimentation tanks came only in 1891, and the sludge was shipped out to sea.
  • In 1888 the chemist William Webster tested an early electrolytic method of purifying sewage at the works his father's firm had built.
  • The engine house is designed in a Romanesque style, its brick exterior giving little hint of the painted ironwork inside.
  • Besides Sherlock Holmes, the interiors have stood in for other worlds in The Crimson Petal and the White and the 2020 musical Jingle Jangle.
  • The station sits beside Erith Marshes, where the Crossness Nature Reserve shelters water voles, amphibians and many species of moth.

Why it is worth it

Crossness Pumping Station looks from outside like a sober brick engine house on the marshes of south-east London, but inside it hides one of the most exuberant interiors of the Victorian age. At its heart is the Octagon, a central space framed by elaborately patterned and painted cast-iron columns, screens and galleries, beside which the four giant beam engines still stand. Nikolaus Pevsner called it a masterpiece of engineering and a Victorian cathedral of ironwork.

The station was part of Sir Joseph Bazalgette's response to the Great Stink of 1858, when raw sewage in the Thames made the river unbearable. As chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works he designed a network of intercepting sewers that carried waste east, away from the city. Crossness, at the end of the Southern Outfall Sewer, was designed with the architect Charles Henry Driver and built between 1859 and 1865 by the contractor William Webster. On 4 April 1865 Edward, Prince of Wales, opened it in the presence of other royals and both archbishops, turning the wheel that set the engines in motion.

The four engines, built by James Watt & Co. and named Victoria, Prince Consort, Albert Edward and Alexandra, lifted sewage some 9 to 12 metres into a reservoir from which it was released into the river on the ebb tide. Twelve boilers burned around 5,000 tons of Welsh coal a year to drive them. They were converted to compound working around 1899–1901, and are thought to be the largest surviving rotative beam engines in the world, with flywheels of 52 tons and beams of 47 tons.

Diesel engines took over gradually, and by 1956 the beam engines had been retired; Prince Consort was briefly fired up in 1953 to help drain floodwater. The building was then left to rust and vandals until it was listed at Grade I in 1970. The Crossness Engines Trust, founded in 1987, spent fifteen years bringing Prince Consort back into working order by 2003, and the restored station opened to the public in 2016. Its interiors have since appeared in films including Sherlock Holmes (2009).

Getting there

Crossness Pumping Station stands on the south bank of the Thames by the Crossness sewage treatment works, about 1.4 km from Thamesmead. The closest station is Abbey Wood (Elizabeth line, Southeastern and Thameslink), about 40–45 minutes away on foot. The nearest airport is London City Airport (LCY), on the opposite bank of the river, about 6 km away in a straight line.

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in England 93The Most Beautiful Places in the United Kingdom 154The Most Remarkable Industrial Heritage Sites 8

From the encyclopaedia

Crossness Pumping Station is a former sewage pumping station designed by the architect Charles Henry Driver for the Metropolitan Board of Works's chief engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette. It is located at Crossness Sewage Treatment Works, at the eastern end of the Southern Outfall Sewer and the Ridgeway path in the London Borough of Bexley. Constructed between 1859 and 1865 by William Webster, as part of Bazalgette's redevelopment of the London sewerage system, it features spectacular ornamental cast ironwork, described by architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner as "a masterpiece of engineering – a Victorian cathedral of ironwork". It was decommissioned in 1956. Subsequently the building has been extensively restored and was opened to the public in 2016.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

51.50910, 0.13833per Wikidata