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OF BRENTFORD |
in the street, as early as the 16th century most villages relied on
springs and wells or else brought water from a water carrier until
the 19th century. From the early 1840s Brentford began to receive
direct supplies from the Grand Junction Waterworks Company. We
learn from the minutes of the Brentford Local Board that during the
year 1882, this company newly supplied 117 houses with water, making
1154 Brentford houses (about half the number of inhabited houses)
receiving supplies this way. Other houses were supplied by water
from artesian wells, or from surface wells.
The Grand Junction Waterworks Company was yet another utility
company to base itself in Brentford. Its premises are now occupied
by the Kew Bridge Stream Museum. It was the third attempt to
provide clean water for the Paddington, Kensington and Ealing
areas. The first waterworks, built in 1811 near what is now
Paddington railway station took water from the Grand Junction
Canal (from which the water company got its name) but the water
turned out to be unsuitable so the company built a new waterworks
at Chelsea in 1820. Here the water became polluted, hence the move
to Kew Bridge in 1837 where pumping began in 1838. In 1845 water
from the Thames was pumped into filter beds, which lay where the
Brentford Towers Estate is now and the clean water was then pumped
into a covered reservoir at Campden Hill before gravitating to
individual streets and houses.
Until new technology was installed water was pumped by the
majestic stream engines, which can still be seen at the Kew
Bridge Stream Museum. Charles Dickens visited the Grand Junction
Waterworks in 1850 and wrote an account of it in his magazine
Household Words. In Dickens's day, the standpipe tower was not
the handsome brick campanile we see today but a flimsy lattice
structure that was damaged by frost the present standpipe tower,
197ft (60m) high and a local landmark, was built in 1867. The
standpipe was a safety device to guard against damage to the
engine should mains pressure be lost by breaking of the main.
Dickens was told that the waterworks was supplying three and
a half million gallons every day (except Sunday) to 14,058 houses
in the Oxford Street, Paddington, Bayswater areas. The delivery
area eventually extended from Sunbury to Kensington with 30
million gallons being pumped each day In 1904 all London's
private water companies were absorbed into the Metropolitan
WaterBoard. The MWB added diesel pumps at Kew in 1934, and
electric pumps in 1942. These operated until 1986 when a new
electric pumping station was built on the site of an old filter
bed next to what is now the Kew Bridge Stream Museum, so water
is still pumped from Kew. Getting rid of waste and excess water
was a great problem until underground sewers were built in the
19th century. With no means of pumping, waste drained sluggishly
into open channels and streams that transported it to the Thames.
A newspaper article condemned Brentford's lack of a sewerage
system in 1873 when Brentford was associated with everything
stagnant and disgraceful. In 1883 a sewage system to serve both
New and Old Brentford was put in place. Underground sewers were
built to collect the sewage and transfer it to the pumping
station in Town Meadow from where it was pumped into treatment
tanks in Clayponds Lane on land adjoining the Ealing Sewage
Works. When the water was sufficiently pure it was discharged
into the Thames. The base of the pumping station's engine house
and some associated buildings can still be seen in Town Meadow.
After the introduction of the West Middlesex Sewerage and Sewage
disposal scheme in 1936. Brentford's waste was sent to the central
works at Mogden, Isleworth
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