Prickwillow Engine House

The Prickwillow Engine House is a drainage engine house and Mirrlees engine with pump, which has been converted into a museum of industrial archaeology. It consists of a single remaining bay from the original 1842 structure, which was rebuilt in 1880, and the engine and pump were opened in 1923. The building was constructed by the Middle Fen and Mere Board, and the initials of its Clerk, Goodwyn Luddington Archer, can be found on a stone on the inside of the west wall.

The building is made of brick in English bond and features a gable-facing roof of the 1880 block covered with corrugated metal, including metal ventilators at either end of the ridge. The earlier structure has a lean-to roof with a parapet. It is a single-storey building with a two-window range, while the earlier block has one bay set back from the main elevation and features a one-window range. The main elevation has round-arched openings in round-arched recesses, and a roundel on the facing gable has been bricked in. Below this is a datestone with the initials W.H. and J.S., likely those of the builder. The gable eaves have purlins and a simply moulded barge board, with common rafter ends on the left return cut as volutes.

Inside, the original roof is supported by a grid of steel "I" beams set in interior buttress strips. The trusses consist of strutted king and queen posts carried on a continuous brick corbel table. Documentary evidence suggests that the structure was built on timber piles overlaid with a concrete base, and there is a brick-lined well for the pump on the west side. In 1923, the original beam engine was replaced by a five-cylinder Mirrlees diesel engine, which drives a centrifugal pump.