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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Kempton Steam Museum

The largest working triple-expansion steam engine in the world, sixty-two feet tall, run on steaming weekends at the Kempton Park waterworks.

Engines & pumpingOpen days onlyGo inside

Photo by Kempton Steam Museum, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Sir William Prescott engine of 1927 lifted nineteen million gallons of Thames water a day up to the reservoirs of north London, and it still turns, the volunteers having brought it back to steam in 2002 after thirty years cold: three cylinders the size of rooms driving a shaft through a Grade II* engine house with two chimneys called King and Queen. Its twin, the Lady Bessie, is being restored beside it. Steaming weekends are the days to come, when the engine runs and the building shakes; static Sundays are cheaper and quieter.

Where
Snakey Lane, Hanworth, TW13 6XH
Nearest station
Kempton Park · 8 min walk

On here now

Coming up

March to November: steaming weekends 10:30–16:00, £12; static Sundays 11:00–15:00, £7

Under-18s free. The calendar on the museum's site says which Sundays are which.

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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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