Last week, I was lucky enough to visit the Crossness Pumping Station in South-East London. It is variously known as the "Cathedral in the Marshes" or, more bluntly, the "Cathedral of Sewage". It is a former Victorian sewage pumping station, opened in 1865; it continued to operate to the benefit of Londoners into the 1950s. It is a wonder of steam-age engineering and Victorian design and architecture. It is currently under restoration, and a team of volunteers maintains the site, as well as guiding and informing visitors.

In the wake of the industrial revolution and the growth of trade with the world, London's population boomed in the first half of the nineteenth century. Devastatingly, there was no proportionate provision for human sanitation. This culminated in the great stink of 1858, which came after various outbreaks of cholera. The stink prompted such an outcry that the Metropolitan Board of Works commissioned the great civil engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette to develop a system to move human waste eastwards along a system of pipes for eventual disposal into the River Thames. His achievements were so important that more than 100 years later, I remember hearing his name in history lessons when I was much younger (the topic of the great stink and human sewage has great stickability in the mind of an 11- or 12- year old!)

Bazalgette's system required that the sewage could be stored before disposal. Huge pumps raised raw sewage into a vast elevated reservoir; from there, it could be discharged into the Thames. In the original design, raw sewage was released on a falling tide to take the effluent away from London and into the Thames estuary, although later improvements resulted in better treatment before disposal. I've never seen an account of what the residents further downriver thought of this - the experience in, say, Gravesend can't have been pleasant. Incidentally, the prevailing wind across London is from west to east: moving the sewage from the richer areas of London eastwards was also of olfactory benefit to those who commissioned it.

The architect tasked with designing the great pumping station was Charles Henry Driver, famous for his use of intricate wrought-iron metalwork: his imprint is visible all over the pumping station. He seems to me to have been fastidious about symmetry and echoing shapes - and it was this that I felt drawn to photograph.

Crossness represents the southern outfall of Victorian London’s sewage system. Driver was also the architect of the northern outfall pumping station, Abbey Mills by the River Lea, near Bromley-by-Bow. Even if the West End of London benefited, the East End must still have stunk.

The Crossness Engines Trust website has links if you wish to visit. There is an excellent article about it in Wikipedia that covers the history in great detail, so I won't rehearse that here, but just let the pictures below do the talking. (And yes - it was another grey day…)