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From the beginning of my project my aim has been to capture some of what remains of the architecture of the industrial era in an attempt to represent this period of time through modern digital technology and in this way make a connection between our current digital revolution and the industrial revolution of the 19th & 20th century.
This essay is a reflection on my two year journey into the project, on my learning, development and contextualization of ‘Industrialism brought forward’.
This is the link to the PDF file of my essay
I have the contact details for the Film Officers of the boroughs where the locations I want to photograph are located. The locations are:
- Abbey Mills Pumping Station in Newham : Abbey Lane, Stratford, London E15 2RW
- Crossness Pumping Station in Bexley: The Old Works
Crossness S.T.W., Belvedere Road, Abbey Wood, London SE2 9AQ - Ladywell Baths, Ladywell, Lewisham
I have composed a letter to send to this different locations. I will also try to get them trough the phone and see if I can get any closer to access the locations. The letter goes as follows:
Dear ………..
I would like to introduce myself, my name is Esmeralda Munoz-Torrero and I am student at Camberwell School of Arts, currently studying an MA in Digital Art.
I was kindly given your email address by the Film Officer for City of London, and believe that you are the best person to contact with regard to acquiring access to Crossness Pumping Station. (The Old Works, Crossness S.T.W. , Belvedere Road, Abbey Wood, London SE2 9AQ)
In my project I am attempting to capture through photography some of what remains from the functional architecture of the industrial era. I am documenting buildings, constructions and machines whose development followed a historical thread and also represented the various technical achievements of their time.
Because of this I am therefore writing to you to ask for your help in gaining permission to take photographs inside Crossness Pumping Station. It seems to be a perfect environment and an ideal space for me to capture some truly interesting work for my MA project.
I would like to assure you that this is purely for artistic purposes and not commercial in any way.
If you would like to see the progress of my project and some examples of my work, then you can view my academic blog at http://esmuto.wordpress.com.
Could you please reply to me and let me know if this is acceptable. Naturally I would be bringing photographic equipment with me, such as camera and tripod.
Thank you very much for your time and consideration.
Yours truly,
Esmeralda
Low Hall Pump House is a Grade II listed building constructed in 1885 it houses Marshall C Class engines from 1896.
Information from www.leavalleyexperience.co.uk
The building was constructed of London stock brick with blue engineering bricks around the doors and windows.
The two Hayward Tyler steam pumps that moved the effluent were situated in a pit at the front end of the building. The steam power was generated by two boilers situated in the left bay.
It is also recorded in the Councils minutes of 1885 that Tangyes of Birmingham also installed a single horizontal engine for the cost of £420 which was situated next to the pit, however, what this engine was installed for still remains a mystery today despite research.
Accommodation for the chief engine room attendant was provided in No. 1 Farm Cottages in Acacia Road at a rent of 10/- per week.
The pump pit was filled in during the 1970s and is currently being excavated
The Pump House 1896
In 1896 the two 1885 bays were enlarged and a third bay was added to the left of the building. The Marshall C class steam engines, boilers, and plant equipment were also added at this time; however no plans of the 1896 extension have been found to-date.
Tenders were invited by the Council in early 1896 for designs on a way to connect the new Marshalls engines with the original 1885 Hayward Tyler steam pumps.
We have presumed that this must have been successful and the engines did in fact power the pumps via overhead line shafting, of which can still be seen today.
In addition to this various pieces of workshop equipment were placed in the pump house. The engines also provided the power to drive these machines. Originally fuelled by coal, the steam plant was converted in the early 1900s to work from domestic refuse which was burnt elsewhere on the site.
However, by the early 1970s the general state of the boiler made the raising of steam then a rather haphazard affair. The installation of electrically powered pumps then sealed the engines’ fate, and a large part of the 1885 buildings was demolished The Great Eastern Railway also provided a connection to the site from Lea Bridge Road. The site also had a small locomotive shed and locomotive at one. From 1928 the pumps moved sewerage directly into the LCC sewerage system. time.
The Pump House Today
The pump house today contains what are believed to be the only surviving pair of “C” class horizontal steam engines built by the Lincolnshire firm of William Marshall Sons & Co.
• The engines are also Grade II listed along with the steel beams within the building.
• The installation of these engines and a boiler cost £220.
Today, Marshall’s are best remembered as builders of traction engines, but in their nineteenth century heyday the firm produced an extraordinarily diverse range of products, from threshing machines to tea plantation equipment.
The two engines bear the makers’ numbers 27834 and 27835 and were installed in the pump house during the spring of 1897, being steamed for the first time in May of that year.
The engines were not designed to (and cannot be) run together – rather, one engine would have worked for two weeks running continuously whilst the other received maintenance.
It would have taken about forty minutes to disconnect one engine from the flywheel and to connect the other. This process was generally carried out in the early hours of the morning when the sewerage flow was at its slackest.
The Low Hall Manor and the Farm
The area now occupied by the Museum was purchased from the Bosanquet family in 1877 by Walthamstow Urban District Council.
Prior to this, the 200 acre site had been farmed from at least the early mediaeval period (traces of a moat which surrounded the mediaeval manor house and farm survived until comparatively recently).
Although the site is therefore of considerable antiquity, today nothing remains above ground of the original seventeenth century manor house and farm as they were both completely destroyed by a flying bomb in 1944.
In 1997 the site was excavated by MOLAS (Museum of London Archaeology Service), and a number of interesting artefacts were found. It is proposed to display some of these at the museum in the future.
My practice
This is a close up of a valve from William Marshall Sons & Co. “C” class horizontal steam engine. I took three different exposures and using Photomatix – for info on this technique see my high dynamic range post – I created a tone mapped image, which I then converted into black&white.
Looking at this picture and thinking about the New Objectivity movement, I should mention in this post Wolfgang Sievers (1913 -2007), a german industrial photographer which work followed these set of aesthetics. At the start of his career, his photography was imbued with the Bauhaus ethos and philosophy of the New Objectivity he had learned in Berlin, combined with a socialist belief in the inherent dignity of labour. His photographs were often quite theatrical, as he commonly photographed industrial machinery at night, isolating details with artificial light and posing workers for heightened effect. This can be seen in ‘Gears for Mining Industry’ (1967), perhaps his most well known single image. This approach was extraordinarily influential in Australian post-war commercial photography.
Gears for mining industry. 1967
Aluminium ingots, Alcoa of Australia at Point Henry near Geelong, Victoria, 1970
Associated Pulp and Paper Mills, Burnie, Tasmania, 1956
Largely self-taught as a photographer, Wolfgang Sievers lived in Portugal from 1934 to 1935 and his early work was commemorated by a retrospective exhibition in Lisbon in 1999. He returned to Germany in 1936, and studied at the Contempora School for Modern Applied Arts (a successor to the Bauhaus), and also taught there briefly. He left Germany in June 1938 and by October had set up as a photographer in Melbourne, attracting influential patrons such as Maie Casey. Talking about photographing architecture he said: “The task of a responsible photographer is not to discover some bits and pieces or some interesting perspectives but to interpret a great work of art in his own way”.
Joseph Bazalgette (1819-1891) was appointed as a chief engineer to London’s Metropolitan board of works in the mid 19th century (1856).
In the mid 19th century London saw a major expansion of urban population. This created a new problem; London’s ancient sewer system wasn’t ready for the amount of waste that the city produced, particularly from the new fashion of water closets. In 1858 a hot summer made the situation worse and created the ‘Great Stink of London’. The Thames was little more than an open sewer. The city was in trouble, suffering recurring epidemics of cholera.
Joseph Bazalgette was asked to find a solution to these problems and he created a new sewerage system which was 85 miles long. The new sewer system intercepted the old foul waters and diverted them down stream into the Thames. This system involved three major pumping stations, at Abbey Mills (in the Lea Valley), at Deptford, and at Crossness on the Erith marshes.
I would like, if possible, to get permission to visit these pumping stations to view this architecture through the lenses of my camera and explore the intricacies of these buildings. I would like to capture these spaces, experimenting with long exposures. And some of these stations still have the steam engines inside, which would make for involving subject matter.
For the Deptford Creek pumping station I will contact the Greenwich Industrial History Society and see if they can help. The Crossness pumping station has been closed for renovation and will not open till April. I have a contact number which I will use to try to get special permission to photograph the station. I haven’t located a contact number for the Abbey Mills pumping station yet – I only have one for a film location company as this space has already been used for filming – but I will try to find out a means of contact, most probably through Thames Water.
