Cosford Water Pumping Station

Cosford Water Pumping Station is a water pumping station built in 1857 and extended in 1889 to designs by JF Bateman for the Wolverhampton Waterworks Company. The building is constructed in red Flemish bond brick with sandstone dressings and a hipped slate roof.

The plan comprises one and two storeys with a basement. The central entrance and staircase hall is flanked by a southern entrance and engine halls to the east and west. The earlier 1857 phase included the eastern engine hall and entrance hall, with the western engine hall added in the 1889 extension.

The exterior is designed in Italian Renaissance style with round-arched openings. A plinth of rock-faced stone supports brick walling above. Projecting ashlar bands run across the front at the level of arch springing and between floors. A bracketed cornice with dentils to its lower body crowns the wall, above which sits a brick parapet with stone coping.

The south-facing road front is symmetrically composed of five bays. Each contains a tall opening with stone surrounds, comprising pairs of half-glazed doors to the lower body and windows above. Paired windows rise above each bay. The keystones to the lower arches are carved with rope knots. The second bay from the right bears a stone inscribed with the date 1857, while the second bay from the left is inscribed 1889.

The sloping site creates a deep exposed basement storey on the other three faces. The east flank has two pairs of windows to the upper wall, divided by a later twentieth-century square chimney stack. Blocked openings to the lower walling probably led to the original boiler house, now demolished, with brick walling at basement level. The north face has rock-faced rusticated sandstone at basement level. The bays above resemble those on the southern entrance front but without doors. The west face has two bays with windows set in the pattern of the south and north fronts.

Inside, the entrance hall contains a screen of two Roman Doric columns with full entablature supporting iron roof beams. Both engine halls extend through the full height of the building. The western basement is accessed by an open well in the centre of the floor in the western engine hall. The original western exterior wall now forms the interior east wall of the western engine hall.

Immediately in front of the southern front is attached roughly rectangular walling forming an enclosure with low stone walls to its flanks. The eastern wall ramps upward where it joins the main building. A wide driveway cuts into the east side of the enclosure and leads down to the basement level. The southern side of the enclosure has low ashlar walls supporting moulded iron railings with ball and spike finials. Two gateways have square piers with domed caps.

The area to the east of the engine house formerly occupied by the boiler house and currently partially occupied by mid-twentieth-century buildings associated with the conversion to electric pumping in the 1940s, and the lowest stage of the former chimney to the east of the pumping station, are not considered of special architectural or historic interest.