Victorian sewage (and a very grey Thames)

As if I hadn't had enough of plumbing yesterday, I headed off today to somewhere I've been greatly looking forward to seeing ever since a student of mine did a presentation on it in class a few years back ... Crossness Pumping Station, designed and built between 1859-1865 by the chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, Joseph Bazalgette (and architect Charles Henry Driver) and built by William Webster, it's one of the stars of Bazalgette's works to clean up the smelly Thames by redeveloping the London sewerage system - never more obviously in need of reform than after the Great Stink.  It housed four huge steam driven pumps which raised the incoming sewage - called, inevitably, "Victoria," "Prince Consort," "Albert Edward" and "Alexandra," - and at the center is the Beam Engine House, with elaborate painted wrought iron.  Alas, Prince Consort weren't running, today (I knew that before I went - but the whole site only open at all one day a month - and on some other occasions for guided tours) - but he, and maybe in time the other pumps, are being lovingly restored by volunteers who manage the whole site.  The pumping house was finally decommissioned in 1953 - abandoned, vandalized - so it's been a long long journey of restoration.  And yes, there's still a sewage plant there, and it was so useful to be wearing a sturdy mask.

The Pumping Station is at the edge of marshland - shades of Great Expectations, although the marshes that were actual inspirations are further east - now a nature reserve, but under grey dank skies looking like the kind of sullen and hostile place that bodies are dumped.  It was a complicated journey, since the train to Abbey Wood, the nearest station, wasn't running (hey, it's an English Sunday! Line repair time) - two tube rides, a long bus ride through the Olympic Village, and Woolwich, and Plumstead, and out to Thamesmead, site of much rather grim (and some ok) social housing from the 1960s onwards.  Then just over a mile to the Pumping Station - I walked out through the nature reserve, and back, in part, along the Thames, which was magnificently muddy and sullen.