Crossness

Before our visit to the Crossness Pumping station, I had no idea what to expect. I knew that it was a sewage pumping station, but I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant; I knew that it was a feat of 19th century engineering, but I didn’t have a whole lot with which to compare it; I knew that it would be ornamented in a typically Victorian fashion, but wasn’t sure how that would translate into something inherently involved with human excrement; finally, I knew that it would have smelt, but I didn’t know how much would linger a century and a half later.

With such conflicted expectations (can those even rightfully be called expectations?), I arrived at Crossness and was completely blown away. The sheer size of each engine was far beyond the scale that I had imagined, let alone seeing four of them in the same room. The decoration of each engine was equally incredible, with the restored engine painted in vibrant greens and reds. When the four beam engines worked to pull the city’s sludge up from far below the ground where it had settled and bring it up to be dumped into the Thames, they must have been quite a site. Although it at first seemed odd to name anything to do with sewage after members of the royal family, seeing just the single engine in action and fully painted seemed to earn it the title.

What Crossness made real for me was the amount of pride the Victorians put into their work. Every task was a feat but simultaneously no detail was ignored. They not only overcame the problem through their engineering but did it in style. The dignity that they clearly felt spread over society so completely as to include even the sewage pump station. And the fact that it still smells 150 years later is only a testament to the Victorian work ethic, which created something that is still used today, at least in part.