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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.
The last of London's hydraulic power stations, 1890, its pumps still in the engine house, coming back as a house for experimental art.
Engines & pumpingEngineering landmarksOpen days only
For ninety years London ran on water under pressure. The London Hydraulic Power Company pumped it at 800 pounds to the square inch through 180 miles of mains under the streets, and the customers plugged in: the lifts of the West End, the cranes and capstans of the docks, the safety curtains and revolving stages of theatres, the organ at a cinema, and Tower Bridge's bascules if the bridge's own engines failed. Wapping, built by the water engineer Thomas Hawksley and opened in 1890 to serve the London Docks and the warehouses along the river, was the biggest of the stations and the last to close, in 1977, and it closed with the company.
The engine house, the boiler house, the accumulator tower and the 1950s ram pumps all survive, historically protected at the higher grade, and for twenty years the building was the Wapping Project, a gallery with a restaurant among the machinery. It has been shut for a decade. The Glass Castle Foundation now holds it and is restoring it as a centre for experimental performance, and the first way in is the open days and events it runs meanwhile. The network's other survivor is Renforth Pump House, across the river in Rotherhithe.
Open for events and open days only; the foundation's site says when.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.