Waterworks at Blagdon: Pumping Station with Receiving Tanks

Waterworks at Blagdon: Pumping Station with Receiving Tanks

This is a pumping station in Jacobean revival style with two receiving tanks, built between 1902 and 1905 to designs by T & C Hawksley of Westminster, with Charles Hawksley as chief engineer. The station houses two beam engines by Glenfield & Kennedy Limited of Kilmarnock, Scotland.

The building has brick walls with ashlar dressings and flush quoins. The pitched roofs are plain tiled with horizontal strip roof lights to each slope, now boarded up, and small louvered ventilation dormers.

The plan is U-shaped, embracing a free-standing central square chimney stack. Projecting engine houses face the front, attached to a lower rear range containing a central boiler house flanked by coal stores, further stores, a dynamo house and a smith shop.

The tall gabled engine houses on the east front, with kneelers and ball finials to the apex, are of two storeys with attics. They have segmental headed entrances with nook shafts, foliage capitals and hood moulds with globular leaf stops, and two-leaf studded wooden doors, part-glazed, reached by a series of steps with moulded copings to the side walls. The windows are three and four-light cross-mullions with Caernarvon and Tudor-arched heads containing plate glass casements. Stepped buttresses mark the bays to the returns, which have three and four-light mullions with hood moulds.

The central square-shaped chimney has a decorative bronze plaque set into its front wall commemorating the opening of the water works. It reads: 'Bristol Water Works Company - These Works were completed 1905 - Edward Bush Chairman - T&C Hawksley Engineers'. The stack reaches the height of the engine houses to either side. Its top half, removed in the 1960s prior to listing, had decorative tri-partite round arched louvres and cast-iron cresting to the ridge of a tiled roof.

The single storey west range to the rear, with attic, is seven bays wide. The projecting twin outer bays to either side are gabled with kneelers and ball finials to the apex. Segmental headed entrances, with late 20th-century replacement doors, give access to the coal stores. Above each entrance is a three-light mullion window with decorative hood mould. Wagons formerly dropped off coal here, as the railway branched out to lead right up to each of the entrances. The three central bays each have four-centred arched entrances with late 20th-century replacement doors set in flat surrounds with hood moulds, giving access to the boiler house. The central opening is now obscured by a single storey flat-roofed red brick extension added in the late 20th century.

The side elevations consist of three bays with stone mullion windows, including one to the projecting gabled bays of the stores, which have three segmental arched entrances with wooden doors to the side, and linking to the side elevations of the engine houses.

The interior contains a number of original and bespoke fixtures and fittings, with original carpentry mostly surviving. The highly decorative interiors of the engine houses retain their large cast iron ceiling beams, the stairs leading to the mezzanine level with overhead gantry cranes by Stothert & Pitt to inspect the beam engines, the intersecting tracery to the tall windows, and the two trefoil-panelled piers with lotus-type capitals. The two beam engines by Glenfield & Kennedy in the south engine house survive.

Two rectangular shaped, stone-lined suction tanks, now used for fish rearing, hold a maximum of 567,000 gallons of water. They are designed as decorative formal garden ponds in Baroque style with curved stone edging and rounded corners, positioned symmetrically to the east front of the pumping station. The metal security railings surrounding each tank were introduced in the late 20th century.

The pumping station and receiving tanks are situated in triangular shaped grounds approached by a drive from the south and planted with mature specimen trees. To the north are the outlet and by-wash with decorative woodland beyond. To the east it is enclosed by the steeply rising grass bank forming the dam at Blagdon, with the reservoir behind.