Good news on the Guardian website on Sunday 10th July by Maev Kennedy: Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s Crossness Pumping Station is reopening after a £2.7m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The restoration project has added a new museum display and café, and they are planning to make it more accessible by opening to the public more often. Here’s an excerpt but see the full story on the above page, which describes what the pumping station was intended to do and how it worked and has other fabulous photos:
The Crossness Pumphing Station. Photograph on the Guardian website, by Felix Clay.
A glorious monument to the towering genius of Victorian engineering reopens this week, complete with a smart new cafe and a distinctive whiff of sewage drifting across from the working side of the Crossness sewage pumping station, south-east London.
The astonishing building, described as “a cathedral on the marsh”, was the first of its kind in the world, designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer of the Metropolitan board of works, to awe and inspire visitors from across the UK and Europe. They came to marvel at his solution to the appalling problems caused by untreated sewage and contaminated water supplies in a rapidly expanding city, which led to epidemics of killer diseases including cholera.
The Port of London Study Group 
Excellent news. I have wanted to see it for a long time. Fran
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