Sunday 22 July 2001: The Cathedral of Sewage ride
Introduction
In mid-May Paul Bartlett of Thames Water’s marketing unit in Reading phoned me. Sutrans had put him onto me. Thames Water wanted to do something to promote their huge Crossness water and sewage-treatment works and the £1m riverside route through it...could Greenwich Cyclists help?
We immediately said yes and agreed that a ride from the Cutty Sark along the river to an open day there would be excellent. We agreed 22 July as a date to go for.
At a quick and early meeting in the sun a few days later on the benches outside Euston station over a coffee we agreed the basics: GC to lead a stewarded etc family ride to an open day at the Crossness works. GC to be responsible for everything up to the TW gates, TW responsible thereafter. TW would pay GC’s expenses. Budget can only run to £500. Yup? Yup. GC would draft a press release for co-use. TW would buy ad in local papers and tell all 5,000 London staff. GC would push via its newsletter and email groups.
At a later formal meeting in Elsie (East London Sludge Incinerator, she handles 4 million loos) at Crossness we agreed the details. Interesting meeting of Head Office Marketing and the local operational team....TW’s nature reserve on the eastern edge of the site would be open and that their nature warden would introduce the waterfowl and the voles (loads, no mink), that (sadly) the main plant and Elsie would stay closed but that Joseph Bazalgette’s magnificent sewage pumping station of 1865 would be open and staffed by volunteers from the Crossness Engines Trust – who have been restoring the Grade 1 listed Victorian Romanesque buildings since 1987. And who saved it. Refreshments would be on sale. We’d arrive at 1pm on the day.
All flowed surprisingly smoothly. GC agreed details at their July meeting.
Despite my chasing, Thames Water never managed to get an advert out or tell their London staff, which was a pity.
Despite a dozen calls a day about the ride, I got worried the night before....the weather forecast was bad, no one was going to turn up. Not enough publicity for novices, too short for many of the usual Greenwich suspects.
The ride
Early morning on the day was beautiful, then rain. But by 11am it dried up and there was a crowd of about 90 bikes at Cutty Sark Gardens....
...I spoke to almost everyone, we hardened a few tyres and handed out our newsletters. About half the crowd had never been on a GC ride before. The rest knew us well. Most of the newcomers had seen a small article the News Shopper free-sheet had made from our press release.
We agreed to try and ride together as one bunch, much more fun. Man, Simon and Nick were back-markers to sweep up problems. No Thames Water people, and only good ole Andrew Stern from the Council.
It was a sunny and exciting start. The Royal Naval College opened up specially and the first treat for many was the ride down their main drag – College Way. Because it was a sort of official ride, I’d decided to use the Mayor’s Ride route......through the backstreets east of the RNC, along the Old Woolwich Road, over the horrible Blackwall Tunnel Approach flyover and then onto the Thames path. Shame to skip some river and The Dome.
It was a good big bunch of very mixed cyclists.......a 4 year-old, an 85 something.
We cleared the Naval College, crossed Park Row, onto Old Woolwich Road, and my better judgement snapped in. We turned left into Eastney Street and hit the river by the Cutty Sark pub. (1 mile).
There were no problems despite the narrowness of the path......great to hear people saying they didn’t know all this was here. Soon got to the Victoria Deep Water terminal and the desert-like mineral mounds....then the fence round the Dome. We explained the sad facts of English Partnerships continuing path closure here.........despite the open-it-by-end-June-2001 planning condition....
For many the ride round the inside perimeter of the Dome ticket area was a revelation. (2 miles).
Then the new river path, the reberthed yacht club, more mineral depots, Riverside street. (3 miles). ....and then the shiney Thames Barrier. (The floods of 1953 that drowned 300 people in sinking south-east England prompted the 1965 decision to commission a barrier. The 520 metres barrier was ready in 1984......is the start of the westbound 180 mile Thames Path. Fascinating concrete etched Thames profile here by Simon Read).
The path east of here won’t be ready for two years but the Westminster Industrial Estate let us through as agreed.......much better than the motorway of the A206. Over the Warspite Road roundabout and through the sad dull new Fairview estate to the Thames again opposite Tate & Lyle’s huge sugar factory.
Through the still evocative remnants of the old Woolwich Dockyard (Henry V111’s Great Harry was built here, the biggest ship ever at that time) and onto the still new asphalt over Mast Pond Wharf. Past the Woolwich ferry approach, round the back of the Waterfront Leisure Centre (still one of the best pools in London for serious lane crunching), and onto dreadful Royal Arsenal Gardens. (4 miles).
Then the new stretch through the Woolwich Arsenal. Why is the regeneration of this great site taking so long? Some wonderful buildings in here but the new lands is clumsy, crude and catalogue.
I like the derelict piers here...big reminders of the long gone heavy metal weaponry of old.
The new stretch of greened brown post-industrial landscape is going fast...Barrett’s "Royal Artillery Quays" (yuk) is on its tower block way. Watch out for the Sustrans napalmed scarecrow at Tripcock Ness, and motorbike brats here. (6 miles). Second world war gun pillbox here too as the concrete of Thamesmead starts. More dull housing.
The Thames really starts to open up into estuary mode here. Bexley starts just before the tatty netting of the golf-range.....and suddenly here’s Thames Water’s bit with the Crossness Pumping Station first. (www.tanton.ndirect.co.uk/crossness.index.html). (9 miles).
This is a massive site that’s grown from the 1865 start. That was built soon after the invention of flush toilets that sent everything into the Thames rather than leaving it under your backyard privy. The Thames become a huge open sewer. Great stink right under Parliament’s nose. Gladstone had to tell Queen Victoria what all those little bits of paper etc were.
The great Bazalgette was taken on to pipe it all away from London in 85 miles of sewers. There’s a good bust of him at Embankment, he built that too.
Crossness’s four pumping engines with 52 ton flywheels are the biggest concentration of such in the world, and London’s finest Victorian iron-work, in great colours. A cathedral indeed seen only by sewage workers. Those engines drove pumps that lifted 6 tons of the stuff at each stroke.
(Squidgy bit: South London’s sewage arrived here by pipe and was stored in a huge tank under the engine-house. Twice a day, just as the tide started to go out, the mighty pumps emptied it all into the Thames......to let the river take it all to sea. Every now and then mistakes were made and the incoming tide took it all back into London.
In about 1920 people realised that this was killing what little life remained in the river.........the now treated sewage was therefore put into barges and dumped out in the North Sea. Fortunately, but to Mrs Thatcher’s horror, those bossy Europeans decided in the early 1980’s that countries around the North Sea must stop such crude dumping, because the sea was starting to die too. The shiny incinerator was built and started work in the early 90’s. Treated sludge is burnt to produce clean electricity and a lorry load of ash a day. The rest is filtered and treated and clean water is put into the Thames. Now, as TW always say, the cleanest major urban river in the world and home again to loads of fish and birds).
Elsie, designed in-house by TW, could have been just another square shed, but I like its perky maritime curves a lot. Echoes of the Flood Barrier, the Bilboa Guggenheim, Sydney Opera House, Salford’s new Lowry Centre and War Museum North....note the peregrine nest-box up the chimney.
Anyway......we arrived by bike, not pipe. I counted 78 on the railings. Thames Water provided loads of free sandwiches and the inevitable group photo was taken. The Engines Trust volunteers seemed genuinely pleased to see such a good crowd.....and were excellent guides. We loved it. The huge building is a great mix of lovingly restored bits, work in progress and untouched jumbles. The whole was much vandalised in between the 1950’s and 1985. They turned one of the fly-wheels and said that an engine will be steamed for the first time since 1953 in a year or so.
(Bazalgette foot-note..the great man’s great-grandson of that name is a volunteer here too.............but his day job is much less useful.......he makes some TV show called Big Brother. Grandad treated it, kid makes it).
It’s an amazing place........the engines are huge, the decorative detail beautiful. (Keep up.....Crossness, not BB). There’s even a little museum of toilets through the ages to gaze at. And all the while over the background pong from the newer plant next door.
The nature reserve to the east was great for its fresh air and news of a sand bank being planned for martins, more ponds and release of more water voles. Lots of good birds on the Thames mud. And of course the concrete Thames path is impressive here.........this section was a huge leap forward....the way round used to be on the main road and over the always locked right-of-way golfcourse gates past mouthy putters.
A quick post-mortem of the ride revealed that we split in two groups of around 60 and 20. One puncture. No problems at all really.
People started drifting away around 3pm and I detected no grumbles. Thames water thanked us profusely…….we must do it again.
A bunch of us were the last to leave..and hit the Richard 111 up Maze Hill.
Barry Mason
21 August 2001