Chimney To Beckton Sewage Works

Chimney to Beckton Sewage Works

This is a chimney, built in 1887-9 by Sir Joseph Bazalgette for the Metropolitan Board of Works. It has undergone minor later alterations.

The chimney is a round, tapering brick structure with a limestone cap designed in an Egyptian style, featuring fluting and a patterned frieze. Originally one of two chimneys, it once had steps beside it providing access to the inside, though these have since been covered or removed.

Historical context

When the Metropolitan Board of Works pioneered London's sewage system from 1848 onwards, Beckton was designated as the drainage outfall for sewers north of the Thames, with equivalent works at Crossness serving the area south of the river. Built between 1859 and 1868 to designs by Joseph Bazalgette, the new sewage system was one of the foremost engineering achievements of the Victorian era. It included the construction of the Thames Embankment with a tunnel for the Underground, an extensive system of cross-metropolitan drains, and a series of pumping stations, all designed to remarkably high architectural and technical standards.

North of the river, all of inner London's sewers met at Abbey Mills pumping station near Stratford, from where waste was pumped to a sufficient height to allow gravity to draw it away to Beckton. Here, waste was released untreated into the Thames at high tide, or stored in a reservoir at low tide. Beckton was ideal for the Northern Outfall, as it was known, because it was quite far downriver from the capital and relatively uninhabited.

In the two decades after the works opened in 1863, however, London expanded geographically and demographically. The volume of raw sewage being poured into the Thames, not even separated into liquid effluent and solid waste, increased, and responsibility to remedy the problem fell to the Metropolitan Board of Works. In 1887, Bazalgette therefore designed sewage treatment works for Beckton comprising a liming station and precipitation channels to separate liquid from solid, settlement channels to consolidate sludge, storage tanks, and a jetty in the Thames from which solids were transported to be dumped out at sea, while the cleansed liquid was discharged into the Thames. The pumping station at Crossness was adapted for this process at around the same time. The work was completed by 1889.

At the centre of operations on the Metropolitan Board of Works' Beckton site were the engine house, two boiler houses, and two chimneys which powered the machinery involved in moving the sludge through the treatment process. There was also a workshop, attached to the engine and boiler houses, also dating to the 1887-9 phase of work. In the 1890s an overhead storage tank was built above the settlement channels, and in the Edwardian period an additional boiler house was constructed, both likely responding to a need to increase capacity at the works.