Originally published in Blueprint issue 368 and online at designcurial.com
The opening in April 1865 of the Crossness Pumping Station, a sewage processing plant on the south-east edge of London, was a surprisingly fancy affair. An etching of the event published in the Illustrated London News depicted a gathering of besuited and top-hatted dignitaries, the Prince of Wales among them, beneath an arched colonnade decked out with what appear to be Industrial Revolution-edition fairy lights. The gathered company was witnessing the newest addition to London’s landscape of ornate infrastructural marvels, masterminded by civil engineer Joseph William Bazalgette and his architect Charles Driver, as part of the development of the city’s sewage system. With its spiralling balustrades and Romanesque windows, Crossness was described by architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner as a ‘Victorian cathedral of ironwork’…
Originally published in Blueprint issue 368 and online at designcurial.com
