Crossness Engines Greater London hotels:

The Crossness Pumping Station was built by Sir Joseph Bazalgette as part of Victorian London's urgently needed main drainage scheme. It was officially opened by the Prince of Wales in April 1865. The Beam Engine House is a Grade 1 Listed building in a Victorian Romanesque style, which features some spectacular ornamental ironwork. It still contains the four original pumping engines, (though the cylinders were upgraded in 1899). The engines represent the largest concentration of rotative beam engines in the world, with 52 ton flywheels and 47 ton beams. The installation was taken out of service in the 1920's, although one of the engines was run in 1953, when there was a risk of flooding nearby. Between the 1950's and 1985 the engine house was systematically vandalised which has greatly impeded the progress of the restoration of the engines. The Crossness Engines Trust, a registered charity, was set up in 1987 to restore the installation which represents a unique part of Britain's industrial heritage and an outstanding example of Victorian engineering. All the restoration work so far carried out has been done entirely by an unpaid volunteer workforce. In the early nineteenth century, London's water supply and the Thames were heavily polluted with sewage. This resulted in several cholera outbreaks during which up to 20,000 people died annually. In 1858, Parliament instructed the newly formed Metropolitan Board of Works to remedy this situation. Joseph Bazalgette, the then Engineer of the MBW, was charged with finding a solution to these problems. He built 85 miles of new sewers which intercepted the many smaller sewers that ran into the Thames, and took the effluent to the East of London where it was discharged into the Thames and flowed out to sea. This required a number of pumping stations. The shell of the pumping station at Abbey Mills, North of the river, still exists but none of the original pumping plant remains. South of the river there was a pumping station at Deptford, which has essentially disappeared, but the station at Crossness remains relatively untouched except for the ravages of time.