August 1867: ‘A dainty palace of machinery’

We East London commuters are a blasé lot. Travelling past the Olympic Park at Stratford doesn’t even merit a glance out of the train windows these days. But one nearby structure still has the power to draw the eye: an ornate Orientalist cupola seemingly floating above the flat estuary landscape atop an elegant building which climbs in tiers like a masonry and iron wedding cake.

This fantasia hides a prosaic purpose: it’s the Abbey Mills Pumping Station, an integral part of London’s sewerage system, part of one of Victorian England’s emblematic and heroic engineering projects. Joseph Bazelgette’s great London sewers changed the face of the Capital, embanking the Thames and preventing raw sewage from being pumped into the river in the centre of the city, banishing the pestilential ‘Great Stink’ which had sent Londoners fleeing to the countryside and prevented Parliament from sitting. Abbey Mills and its partner south of the river at Crossness (which is being restored by enthusiasts, as we have detailed in The Engineer) provided the power to lift the sewage so that it could be pumped into new outfalls downriver of London.