Late C19 engine house at Trowse Sewage Pumping Station, Thorpe Hamlet, Norfolk

Summary

A former steam-powered engine house at Trowse Sewage Pumping Station, built around 1869, possibly to designs by Alfred Morant, city engineer to Norwich Corporation, with Daniel Balls of Norwich as the main contractor, with later alterations.

The adjoining ancillary buildings, comprising a boiler house, coal store, smithy and workshop, are not of special interest and are not included in the listing.

Description

MATERIALS: of red brick with dressing of yellow and blue engineering brick and a slate roof.

PLAN: the building is rectangular-on-plan, aligned north-west to south-east. It stands immediately to the north-east of the replacement engine house (Grade II) which was built in 1909.

The adjoining ancillary range to the east, comprising a contemporary boiler house, workshop, smithy and coal store are not of special interest and are not included in the listing.

EXTERIOR: the engine house is of three storeys above a deep basement in which the compounding chamber was accommodated. Its treatment is defined by clasped corner pilasters that define single recessed panels to the north and south elevations, while the east and west elevations have two recessed panels formed by the introduction of a central pilaster; the east elevation is now obscured by a multi-storey addition to the boiler house. The recessed panels all have flat heads with corbelled brackets as does the eaves cornice to the oversailing hipped roof. All windows and door openings are round headed with keystones decorated with a carved scrollwork motif and surrounds of alternating red and yellow brick to the front and rear elevations and alternating red and blue engineering brick to the returns. The windows are iron-framed with rectangular-panes, radial heads and concrete sills.

The principal (south) elevation is expressed as two storeys with the main entrance on the first floor accessed by a dog-leg staircase to a double doorway flanked by paired windows. The second (beam) floor windows are taller and consist of a wide central window flanked by paired windows, all spanned by a braketed cornice. On the ground floor, to the right-hand side of the staircase, there is a tall carriage arch with double doors.

The rear (north) elevation has an identical architectural treatment to the south façade; the exception being a ground-floor window and a tall window taking the place of the doorway.

The left-hand (west) return is expressed as four storeys with a moulded plinth and a central doorway above which is a weatherboarded lucarne. Each floor is of four window bays with the first-floor windows being taller. On the third floor, a bracketed cornice spans the width of each recessed panel at sill level.

The right-hand (east) return is now obscured by a late-C20 additon above the boiler house, but the symmetrical detailing shown on the west side probably exists within this later range, though the windows have been infilled.

INTERIOR: not inspected but photographic and documentary evidence has confirmed that all the building has been stripped of its original machinery; the exception being an air receiver tank situated under the main staircase. An original spiral staircase rises from the first floor to the second (beam) floor.

History

In 1851, William Lee (1812-1891), a civil and sanitary engineer working as an inspector for the General Board of Health, compiled a report on living conditions in Norwich. As well as drawing attention to many public deficiencies affecting the city, including an inadequate water supply and insufficient privies, Lee highlighted the problem caused by the large number of drains discharging waste directly into the River Wensum. Although Lee's report tentatively broached the idea of a sewer, nothing was done until 1856 when Ernest Benest, the city surveyor for the Corporation of Norwich, proposed a sewer to alleviate the problem. However, with the proposed scheme estimated to cost some £7,893, considerable public opposition rose up against its worthiness, and it took the Corporation until 1858 to finally agree to the work, by which time the cost had risen to around £9,000.

Once again, very little happened, and by the early 1860s the local newspaper was filled with correspondence from concerned residents upon the foul state of the rivers Wensum and Yare. Consequently, in 1865, several residents with riverside premises presented a petition to the Corporation urging them to take action to stop the pollution, stating that they were ready to take legal proceedings. The petition was referred to the Sanitary and River Committees who recommended the throwing down of lime and carbolic acid as a temporary measure prior to taking steps to divert the whole of the sewage from the Wensum. To achieve this objective, the Board of Health approached Joseph Bazalgette (1819-1891), chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, whose major achievement was the creation of a sewer system for central London, which was instrumental in relieving the city from cholera epidemics. In response to a request for a similar scheme for Norwich, Bazalgette's report, which was presented to the Corporation in October 1865, proposed to utilise two intercepting sewers to dispose of the sewage: the first was a ‘high-level’ sewer serving the south-west side of the city; and the second was a ‘low-level’ sewer from New Mills that ran parallel with the Wensum to a pumping station at Whitlingham. From Whitlingham the sewage would be pumped onto farmland on the Crown Point estate of Sir Robert Harvey MP (1817-1870), or, if land was made available, it could be discharged straight onto the riverside marshes, thus avoiding having to pump it uphill. Bazalgette estimated that the ten miles or so of branch sewers that were required to complete the drainage of the streets could be undertaken for £30,000, while the main intercepting sewers, pumping engines, and distributary main would probably cost a further £50,000, giving an overall cost of around £80,000.

While the Corporation provisionally accepted Bazalgette's report, the Board decided not to proceed with the application for an Act of Parliament for the necessary powers to carry it into effect, mainly due to its high cost. Other, cheaper, schemes were subsequently investigated, and in February 1866 they entered into a contract with a Mr Hope, of the International Financial Society, who proposed to take a 31-year lease of the city's sewage for irrigation at Crown Point. However, in the face of strong local opposition, primarily on the grounds that the delivery of sewage was only scheduled to commence on 1 January 1868, and that something had to be done sooner, the contract was rescinded the following month. On 4 May 1866, the residents of Thorpe St Andrew won an injunction in the Court of Chancery to stop the Corporation from putting sewage into the river. However, the Corporation was given a stay of execution, with the injunction being deferred until 2 November 1867 providing that they mitigated the sewage problem according to Bazalgette's plan. After many years of procrastination, the terms of the injunction meant that the Corporation had to proceed with a suitable sewage disposal scheme. Alfred Morant (1828-1881), the then city engineer, subsequently presented a scheme which was decidedly similar to Bazalgette's; the only differences being that the 'low-level' sewer was located on the opposite side of the Wensum, running to a pumping station at Trowse Millgate. From Trowse two steam-powered beam engines would force the sewage up a rising main to a sewage farm on the high ground at Crown Point, where the Board had taken on a lease of 1,290 acres from Sir Robert Harvey. At a Corporation meeting in December 1866, the necessary steps were taken to procure a Bill, which was duly obtained with the passing of an ‘Act for the Better Sewering of Norwich’ in June 1867.

Once the Act was obtained, Morant proceeded with the preparation of the necessary drawings and specifications for the drainage works, and entered into contracts with the following: John Clayton of Preston for steam engines and boilers (£6435); the Staveley Iron Company for iron pipes (£3500); John Downing of Norwich for laying such pipes (£549); Daniel Balls of Norwich for the erection of the engine houses (£6988); and Thomas Wainwright of London for the construction of the main intercepting sewers (£28,830). However, as the overall cost of the scheme came to around £60,000, with additional expenditure required for the construction of drains, sewers, penstock chamber and other subsidiary works, local opposition once again rose up against the project. Although a petition was presented to stop the project, condemning it as unnecessary, expensive and likely to be a failure, the Board were determined to proceed, and in March 1868 authorised the Sewerage and Irrigation Committees to negotiate a loan of £60,000 (later raised to £75,000) to cover the cost. In the same month a contract was entered into with Messrs W Shrimpton and Co of London for the construction of the principal sewers for the sum of £23,874. Three months later, with the work still incomplete, the contract was taken over by Mr Thomas Wainwright of Dalston, London. However, when work started on the low-level sewer an enormous quantity of water was met with in the tunnels. Consequently, in March 1869, Mr Wainwright found it impossible to fulfil his contract and after considerable discussion, with no alternative being available, the Corporation agreed to take over the project under Morant's supervision.

By December 1869, when the progress of the sewerage system was reported on in the Norfolk Chronicle, the whole of the high-level sewer had been finished while several sections of the low-level sewer still had to be completed, largely as excavations were taking place below the level of the water table in a porous soil that was saturated at all times. The pumping station at Trowse also appears to have been completed, with it being described as "a massive building, with a magnificent chimney shaft 150 feet in height, and other low buildings adjacent". It is recorded that the engine house contained three rotative beam engines, each provided with "one high lift pump to force the sewage on to the Crown Point farm, and one low lift, to pump the water from the sewers in heavy floods of rain". The boiler house is described as containing "four Lancashire boilers, each 27ft in length and 7ft in diameter", along with a "workshop, in which will be a small steam engine for feeding the boilers and working the necessary machinery for repairs, and a smithy fitted with a forge". After an initial test in which sewage was delivered to land at Crown Point on 17 April 1871 with the whole system opening the following August, at which time it is estimated to have cost around £110,000.

After a relatively short time, however, it was evident that the volume of wastewater arriving at Trowse was nearly double (5 million gallons) than had been anticipated (2.5 million gallons). Subsequent inspections revealed that the cause was the inward leakage of a large amount of groundwater through the brickwork of the low-level sewer. Consequently, the pumps at Trowse were being overloaded, running at 9-11 rpm rather than at the recommended 5rpm. The Corporation's new engineer, Christopher Thwaites, recommended lining the worst sections with iron plates, which was completed in February 1872, but with very little effect. Over the next five years the Corporation sought advice from several engineers on what could be done, including Thomas Hawksley in 1872 and Joseph Bazalgette and John Hawkshaw (1811-1891) in 1874. It was the latter's recommendation for the further lining of the worst affected areas that the Sewage and Irrigation Committee eventually backed, with the work being completed in 1877.

Over the next few years leaks were still being reported, and the situation showed no sign of stabilising. By 1885, Peter Marshall, Thwaites replacement, was recommending the installation of new pumping engines at Trowse along with further sewer lining. Neither of these actions were undertaken, the Corporation finally agreeing, in 1888, to the construction of a new main sewer to replace the problematic low-level one. As the new sewer would not be able to collect the sewage from the lower-lying parts of the city by gravity, a pneumatic system, a series of buried sealed tanks called Shone ejectors, were proposed to raise the effluent into the new sewer. A new pump house for this purpose, housing a compressed air generator station, was built at New Mills in 1897 (opened in 1899), with the purpose of keeping the sewage moving on its way to Trowse.

In 1909, the sewage works was upgraded when a new engine house (accommodating two horizontal compound pumping engines) with a combined boiler house and coal store, was erected immediately to the south-west of the de-commissioned late-C19 engine house. A new rising main to the farm at Whitlingham was also installed, where the sewage was treated in hydrolytic and hydrolising tanks and filter beds on the Travis system.

In 1960, a new electric-powered pumping station was erected at Trowse to replace the early-C20 building. At around the same time a three-storey range was placed on top of the boiler house. A new 48-inch diameter replacement pumping main was also installed from Trowse to Whitlingham, taking a more direct line beneath the farmland of the Crown Point estate, bisecting the route taken by the 1871 original and its 1890s replacement.

Reasons for Listing

The late-C19 engine house at Trowse Sewage Pumping Station, built around 1869 by Norwich Corporation, with later alterations, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:

* its restrained Italianate style is accomplished and well-realised, reflecting the high value placed on its important municipal function;
* with its early-C20 replacement to the south, it acts as an architectural barometer, illustrating how different architectural solutions were required to meet advances in engine technology.

Historic interest:

* as a public response to the problems of sewage disposal caused by the rapid suburbanisation and industrialisation of Norwich in the C19.

Group value:

* with its early-C20 replacement to the south, it forms a rare combination of two engine houses from two technological generations on one site.

External Links

Historic England Listing

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