Science & Engineering

The museums, the machines and the men and women who worked it out: laboratories kept as they were, beam engines under steam, the tunnel, the barrier, the roofs, and the plaques on the houses where the ideas came.

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Abbey Mills Pumping Station

Bazalgette's cathedral of sewage, 1868, seen from the Greenway that runs on top of the sewer it pumps.

Engines & pumpingEngineering landmarksFree

Photo by Simon from London, United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Also in Architecture.

Abbey Mills lifted the whole of north London's sewage forty feet into the Northern Outfall Sewer so that it could flow by gravity to Beckton, and Bazalgette and Charles Driver dressed the engine house as a Byzantine cross with a lantern, Moorish ironwork and a mosque's worth of ornament; the beam engines have gone, the modern station alongside does the work, and the old building is used for the Thames Water pumps and for film sets. It is not open except on Open House days, but the Greenway - the embankment of the great sewer - passes its front gate, and the exterior is the visit.

Where
Abbey Lane, Stratford, E15 2RN
Nearest station
West Ham · 6 min walk

Not open except on Open House days; the Greenway path passes it at any hour.

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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