THIS WEEKEND, once you have finished lining the streets on that finest of all Greenwich occasions, the Marathon, I strongly recommend travelling a few miles east for an event that is almost as rare, just as interesting and much less well known.
Sunday is one of only three days this year when you can see in action what is possibly London’s most spectacular piece of Victorian machinery: the Prince Consort Engine at Crossness, a stupendous, steam-driven beam engine that once sucked up all the sewage in London, then pumped it out into the Thames estuary.
I went last summer, and it was fantastic – especially, I suspect, if you are a man. The beam alone is 43 feet long; it rolls up and down like a vast armadillo, gently rooting around for food. It has a 27-foot flywheel, which spins around mesmerisingly. There is a gratifying smell of steam and grease. The whole thing lives in its own special Romanesque Grade I listed cathedral, four storeys high and decorated with – well, yes, industrial quantities of magnificent ornate ironwork. You can climb up and down staircases and see it from every possible angle.
The Prince Consort. Image by Alan Turner-Smith
Back in the day, the Prince Consort had three other equally-impressive beam-engine friends sitting alongside him to help – Victoria, Albert Edward (the Prince of Wales), and Alexandra (the Princess of Wales). They’re still there too, but not yet restored. It’s hard, these days, to imagine machinery with such an unglamorous task being named after the top four members of the Royal Family – but those were different, more serious times, they were not unglamorous machines, and they were of fundamental, transformative, life-saving importance to London.
In the mid-nineteenth century, all the sewers just emptied straight into their nearest bit of the Thames, effectively itself a giant open sewer. In summer, the river stank so badly with the waste of two million people that Parliament famously had to be suspended. The answer, from the famous engineer Joseph Bazalgette, was to build new main drains, one concealed under huge new embankments running along the north bank, collecting up the brown stuff before it got into the river and taking it all away to the unpopulated marshes in the city’s far south-east.
To Crossness, in fact, just north of Abbey Wood – which is where the beam engines and their cathedral still stand today. They went out of major use as early as 1913, replaced by diesels, but Prince Consort was returned to service between 1953 and 1956 to pump out floods in the Royal Arsenal. After that, the engines and their equally stunning building were left, for around thirty years, to the mercies of vandals and the weather.
Much remedial work has already been done, but the Crossness Engines Trust has just got a large National Lottery grant to build a proper visitor centre and access road, so 2009 might be your best chance to see the Prince Consort for a while. There are three steaming days this year – 26 April, 28 June and 23 August.
The day I went, they had various vintage vehicles there, including a steam-driven van, still licensed for the public roads, that had come (at about 10mph) all the way from somewhere in rural Kent. The site is still rather isolated, with terrific views of the river and marshland.
There’s an enjoyable exhibition with lots of loo handles and chains for the kiddies to pull, and an explanation of what happens to all the waste now. It still comes through Bazalgette’s main outfall sewers, and is still collected at Crossness – though now in the modern Thames Water sewerage works next door. It’s treated now, rather than being pumped out into the river – until very recently, it was put on special ships, taken out to sea and dumped.
You get to the heritage part of the site through the modern waterworks, on a slightly tricky-to-find road from somewhere north-east of Thamesmead. The Engines Trust website has a map here, click the “Visits” tab. It’s open from 10.30 until 4.30 and there is also a half-hourly minibus from Abbey Wood station.
And to the delicate question – is it smelly? – I can only answer: not when I was there. Perhaps I got lucky with the direction of the wind.
More information on Crossness is available at the website or by calling 0208 311-3711
[…] given the context (in case you weren’t aware it’s a sewage pumping station) but as Andrew Gilligan assures us, Crossness is actually a beautiful building, Grade 1 listed and noted for its Romanesque […]