9 hours ago
The London Museum of Water and Steam is firing on all cylinders
T he Victorians seldom made things that were blandly functional. A couple of minutes' walk west of Kew Bridge station stands an ornate 200ft brick tower, resembling a Venetian campanile, beside a grand post-Georgian manor house with arched windows and classical proportions. Inside, fluted Doric columns soar towards the high ceilings.
It looks like a museum, and for 50 years that is what it has been, but when these structures were built in the mid-19th century it was not to please public eyes, though it did benefit the masses in another way. Why should a waterworks not be beautiful?
I had come to Brentford to see the London Museum of Water and Steam at the old pumping station that for more than a century supplied clean water to the west of the capital. In 1975, the oldest of these steam engines, an 1820 Boulton and Watt, came to life once more as the site was reborn as a fascinating heritage centre that gets 30,000 visitors a year. After a recent £2.6 million grant the museum's director, Hannah Harte, next plans to restore the great engine house in which even bigger beasts once puffed and pumped.
