Established | 1975 |
---|---|
Location | Brentford, England |
Coordinates | 51°29′20″N0°17′25″W / 51.4890°N 0.2904°W |
Public transit access | Kew Bridge |
Website | waterandsteam.org.uk |
London Museum of Water & Steam is an independent museum founded in 1975 as the Kew Bridge Steam Museum. It was rebranded in early 2014 following a major investment project. [1]
Situated on the site of the old Kew Bridge Pumping Station in Brentford, near Kew Bridge on the River Thames in West London, England, the museum is centred on a collection of stationary water pumping steam engines dating from 1820 to 1910. It is the home of the world's largest collection of working Cornish engines, including the Grand Junction 90 inch, the largest such working engine in the world. The site is an anchor point on the European Route of Industrial Heritage (ERIH).
The museum reopened on 22 March 2014.
Kew Bridge Pumping Station was originally opened in 1838 by the Grand Junction Waterworks Company, following a decision to close an earlier pumping station at Chelsea due to poor water quality. In the years up to 1944 the site expanded, ultimately housing six steam pumping engines as well as four Allen diesel pumps and four electric pump sets. The steam engines were retired from service in 1944, although two were kept on standby until 1958, when a demonstration run of the Harvey & Co. 100 inch engine marked the final time steam power would pump drinking water at the site.
The Metropolitan Water Board decided not to scrap the resident steam pumping engines and set them aside to form the basis of a museum display at a later date. This action bore fruit in 1974 with the formation of the Kew Bridge Engines Trust, a registered charity, by a group of volunteers previously involved in the restoration of the Crofton Pumping Station.
Today the site is an internationally recognised museum of working steam pumping engines, a reminder of the many pumping stations spread throughout London and the UK. In 1999, the United Kingdom government Department for Culture, Media and Sport described Kew Bridge as "the most important historic site of the water supply industry in Britain". [2]
The Kew Bridge Engine Trust and Water Supply Museum Limited, a registered charity, has three aims:
In 1997 the museum was awarded an Engineering Heritage Award by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and Britain's Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE). A second IMechE Engineering Hallmark was awarded in 2008 for the restoration of the Bull engine, making the museum one of only 12 sites to achieve more than one of these awards.
The museum houses the world's largest collection of Cornish cycle beam engines, including the largest working beam engine, the Grand Junction 90 inch, [3] which has a cylinder diameter of 90 inches and was used to pump water to London for 98 years. This machine is over 40 feet high and weighs about 250 tons. It was described by Charles Dickens as "a monster".
The museum also has several other working Cornish cycle beam engines, and other working steam engines, as well as a three-cylinder Allen diesel engine which is also on public display and frequently run.
A complete list of the pumping engines at the museum is as follows:
The museum also operates an 1860 Shand Mason Fire Engine on selected event days.
The museum runs a 2 ft (610 mm) narrow-gauge railway which in 2009 saw the introduction of a new-build Wren Class steam locomotive, named for the engineer Thomas Wicksteed. The railway had previously been operated by visiting loan locomotives. The line runs for 400 yards around the Kew Bridge site, and passenger trains are operated at weekends and on other special event days.
Although not an original feature of the waterworks at Kew Bridge, the railway was inspired by similar facilities provided at major waterworks in the UK, notably the Metropolitan Water Board Railway that originally ran between Hampton and the Kempton Park waterworks. A small part of that railway is now operated as the Kempton Steam Railway, comprising the only other site in London where rides can be taken on steam trains of such a large size; it has benefitted from some very generous assistance, in its restoration, from the London Museum of Water & Steam.
When working as a pumpworks, the site had a tunnel with an underground railway, to move coal from a private riverside wharf to the boiler houses. The tunnel is still present, but not accessible to the public. [4]
Locomotive Name | Locomotive Type | Year Built | Builder | Works Number | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Thomas Wicksteed | 0-4-0 ST | 2009 | Hunslet | 3906 | Steam locomotive, of Kerr Stuart Wren class. |
Alister | 4w DM | 1958 | Lister-Blackstone | 44052 | Diesel locomotive, previously at Bala Lake Railway. |
The museum site contains a number of Grade I and Grade II listed buildings. The original engine house, home of the Bull, Boulton & Watt and Maudslay engines, was built in 1837 and is Grade I listed, [5] as is the Great Engine House, [6] housing the 90 inch and 100 inch engines, which was constructed in two parts in 1845 and 1869.
The Boiler House, which now houses the rotative steam engines, was built in 1837, and along with the ancillary buildings and Gatehouse and Boundary Wall, is Grade II listed. [5]
The ancillary buildings, which include a fully working forge and belt driven workshop, [7] are used by a number of independent artists and creatives.
The museum's most striking feature is its 200 ft high Victorian standpipe tower. This is not a chimney stack; it houses two systems of vertical pipes through which water was pumped before it entered the mains water supply. The brick tower, of Italianate design, was constructed in 1867 to replace an earlier open metal lattice structure. It is a Grade I listed building. [8] The tower is rarely open to the Public. [3]
The museum has been a filming location for episodes of TV serials including EastEnders , The Bill , Doctor Who ("Remembrance of the Daleks") and Industrial Age . As well as many music videos and feature films, including Jude Law's The Wisdom of Crocodiles , it was also used as the location for the 1991-1995 title sequence of the BBC music show Top of the Pops . [9] After relaunching in 2014, the museum became a filming location for the fourth episode of the TV series PREMature .
The Smethwick Engine is a Watt steam engine made by Boulton and Watt, which was installed near Birmingham, England, and was brought into service in May 1779. Now at Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum, it is the oldest working steam engine and the oldest working engine in the world.
Pumping stations, also called pumphouses, are public utility buildings containing pumps and equipment for pumping fluids from one place to another. They are critical in a variety of infrastructure systems, such as water supply, drainage of low-lying land, canals and removal of sewage to processing sites. A pumping station is an integral part of a pumped-storage hydroelectricity installation.
Markfield Road Pumping Station, now known as Markfield Beam Engine and Museum or sometimes just as Markfield Beam Engine is a Grade II listed building containing a 100 horsepower (75 kW) beam engine, originally built in 1886 to pump sewage from Tottenham towards the Beckton Works. The grounds of the building now form a public park known as Markfield Park. The River Moselle joins the River Lea at this location.
Crofton Pumping Station, near the village of Great Bedwyn in Wiltshire, England, supplies the summit pound of the Kennet and Avon Canal with water.
A beam engine is a type of steam engine where a pivoted overhead beam is used to apply the force from a vertical piston to a vertical connecting rod. This configuration, with the engine directly driving a pump, was first used by Thomas Newcomen around 1705 to remove water from mines in Cornwall. The efficiency of the engines was improved by engineers including James Watt, who added a separate condenser; Jonathan Hornblower and Arthur Woolf, who compounded the cylinders; and William McNaught, who devised a method of compounding an existing engine. Beam engines were first used to pump water out of mines or into canals but could be used to pump water to supplement the flow for a waterwheel powering a mill.
The Crossness Pumping Station is a former sewage pumping station designed by the Metropolitan Board of Works's chief engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette and architect Charles Henry Driver. 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, that Nikolaus Pevsner described as "a masterpiece of engineering – a Victorian cathedral of ironwork".
Blagdon Lake lies in a valley at the northern edge of the Mendip Hills, close to the village of Blagdon and approximately 10 miles (16 km) south of Bristol, England. The lake was created by Bristol Water, when it dammed the River Yeo, starting construction in 1898, to designs by Charles Hawksley, and completing this in 1905. The Wrington Vale Light Railway was constructed primarily to bring building materials for the lake.
The Kempton Steam Museum is home to the Kempton Park steam engines which are two large triple-expansion steam engines, dating from 1926–1929, at the Kempton Park Waterworks in south-west London. They were ordered by the Metropolitan Water Board and manufactured by Worthington-Simpson in Newark-On-Trent.
The Westonzoyland Pumping Station Museum of Steam Power and Land Drainage is a small industrial heritage museum dedicated to steam powered machinery at Westonzoyland in the English county of Somerset. It is a Grade II* listed building.
Papplewick Pumping Station, situated in open agricultural land approximately 3 miles (4.8 km) by road from the Nottinghamshire village of Papplewick, was built by Nottingham Corporation Water Department between 1881 and 1884 to pump water from the Bunter sandstone to provide drinking water to the City of Nottingham, in England. Two beam engines, supplied with steam by six Lancashire boilers, were housed in Gothic Revival buildings. Apart from changes to the boiler grates, the equipment remained in its original form until the station was decommissioned in 1969, when it was replaced by four submersible electric pumps.
The Metropolitan Water Board Railway was a 2 ft narrow gauge industrial railway built to serve the Metropolitan Water Board's pumping station at Kempton Park near London. The line was opened in 1916 to deliver coal to the pumping engines and closed shortly after the Second World War. A short part is operating once again to give rides to the public, under a new name, the Kempton Steam Railway
The Ryhope Engines Museum is a visitor attraction in the Ryhope suburb of Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, England.
Prestongrange Museum is an industrial heritage museum at Prestongrange between Musselburgh and Prestonpans on the B1348 on the East Lothian coast, Scotland. Founded as the original site of the National Mining Museum, its operation reverted to East Lothian Council Museum Service in 1992.
Manchester's Hydraulic Power system was a public hydraulic power network supplying energy across the city of Manchester via a system of high-pressure water pipes from three pumping stations from 1894 until 1972. The system, which provided a cleaner and more compact alternative to steam engines, was used to power workshop machinery, lifts, cranes and a large number of cotton baling presses in warehouses as it was particularly useful for processes that required intermittent power. It was used to wind Manchester Town Hall clock, pump the organ at Manchester Cathedral and raise the safety curtain at Manchester Opera House in Quay Street. A large number of the lifts and baling presses that used the system had hydraulic packings manufactured by John Talent and Co.Ltd. who had a factory at Ashworth Street, just off the Bury New Rd. close to the Salford boundary.
The Pinchbeck Engine is a drainage engine, a rotative beam engine built in 1833 to drain Pinchbeck Marsh, to the north of Spalding, Lincolnshire, in England. Until it was shut down in 1952, the engine discharged into the Blue Gowt which joins the River Glen at Surfleet Seas End.
Tees Cottage Pumping Station is a Victorian pumping station complex at Broken Scar on the A67 near Low Coniscliffe just west of Darlington. The site dates from 1849, and was built to provide drinking water for Darlington and the surrounding area. It is a scheduled monument housing two completely original pumping engines in fully working order: a 1904 beam engine, built by Teasdale Brothers of Darlington, which is still steamed using its original 1902 Lancashire boilers; and a rare 1914 two-cylinder gas internal-combustion engine, the largest such engine surviving in Europe. Both engines can be seen in operation on certain weekends through the year, using their original pumps to pump water from the River Tees.
Worthington-Simpson was a British pump manufacturer. Many of their pumps were used in municipal waterworks in Great Britain.
The Hampton Kempton Waterworks Railway is a 2 ft gauge narrow gauge steam railway that opened in 2013, giving rides to paying visitors on a restored steam locomotive, with two back-up diesel locomotives. It is based on the site of an industrial railway that served Kempton Waterworks.
Sandfields Pumping Station is a disused pumping station in Lichfield, in Staffordshire, England. The engine house was built in 1873 and contains the original Cornish beam engine installed at that time. It is a Grade II* listed building.