The following discussion centres mainly on the external architectural treatment of pumping stations. However, it must be borne in mind that the architectural elaboration and decoration which was applied to these buildings was not confined to the exterior; their interiors were also designed and fitted out to a very high standard. The following extract from Hawksley's obituary in ‘The Engineer’ (29 September 1893) may serve to indicate the degree of care that was exercised over the interior details:

There seem to have been three principal types of column: fluted neo-classical as at Ryhope (Fig 6); tapered ‘gothic’ of square cross-section with blind tracery in the four side panels; and plain round section with open gothic tracery in the spandrels, as at Little Eaton (Plate 37).

As John Heskett points out the use of these stylistic forms can hardly be seen as an inevitable expression of mechanical function. Rather they were used quite simply because these were appropriate decorative forms to be found on columns in other contexts, and it was natural that they should also be chosen for column-like like elements in an engineering application.

It would not appear that there was any attempt to integrate these features with the style of the engine itself, or indeed with the exterior style of the engine-house. The ‘classical’ columns at Ryhope are in a ‘Jacobean’ building, whilst the ‘Italianate’ extension of 1878-80 at Norwich still retains its round columns with gothic spandrels.

Unfortunately, however, only four of the works listed in Appendix I retain their original equipment intact, and a few others have been adapted to accommodate modern plant whilst retaining some of their original fittings. Most of the buildings which survive at all have been gutted and totally redecorated inside. There are few drawings of internal details, other than the strictly architectural ones of window frames and doors, and it seems likely that most of the instructions for the original decorative features were contained in the written specifications which have not survived. In view of these difficulties it has been decided to concentrate on the exterior architecture of Hawksley's pumping stations, with only occasional reference to internal features.

Fig 7

Trent Bridge Waterworks, Nottingham

Thomas Hawksley's first pumping station was that built for the Trent Water Works at Trent Bridge, Nottingham between 1830 and 1832. This building was demolished before 1900, but an engraving of the site showing the buildings, was published in the Report of the Health of Towns Inquiry (Fig 7), and one elevation survives at Watson Hawksley. These drawings show a relatively plain building, with rectangular windows under unadorned lintels, and the absence of any indication of quoining or of voussoirs in the elliptical arch to the boiler-house suggests that it was perhaps stuccoed. The blank end wall of the engine-house was relieved by a concentric pair of shallow recessed round-headed arches, presumably reflecting a doorway of similar form at the opposite end. No side elevation of the engine-house appears to survive, but it would seem that it was of three bays, the central bay slightly advanced under a cross-gabled roof which was treated as a pediment on all four sides of the building.

Thomas Hawksley was still primarily an architect at this time, and the pedimented elevations, the recessed blind arches and the stuccoed walls were all conventional motifs of the all-pervading Classicism which still dominated English architecture. However, considerable ingenuity was employed in fitting the building round the rotative engine it contained. The thickening of the walls to support the off-centre entablature was achieved by ‘overlapping’ the walls of the centre bay and the end bays, as shown in the plan.

Although it is known that Hawksley had been called on to advise both Newcastle and York by 1845, neither of these two undertakings retained him to carry out the schemes he proposed, and the next building of which there is a record was designed for the Spon End site of the Coventry Water Works in 1846. This followed the Trent Bridge pattern fairly closely, although the cross-gabled roof was replaced by a hipped roof over a modillioned cornice. The windows and doors were given much more architectural treatment with corbelled sills, flat architraves and, on the main floor, entablatures supported by consoles. The central window and the doorway also carried depressed pediments. When Coventry needed additional capacity in 1857 a duplicate of this building was constructed alongside, an instance of what was to become a fairly common practice.

Fig 8

Early Pumping Stations for Lincoln and Sunderland

Two more pumping stations designed in 1847 are both derived from this type although one, at Humbledon for the Sunderland Water Company, is very simple indeed. It was built of brick with stone details to contain a Cornish engine, and follows Cornish mining practice in supporting the beam, or ‘bob’, on a massive ‘bob-wall’ rather than an entablature^**, and this wall, of ashlar blocks, plastered inside the house, was freely expressed externally as an asymmetrical buttress (Fig 8b and Plate 2). The door and window surrounds are simple, but they could have been even simpler: a drawing of September 1847 shows the windows to the main floor with flat lintels and keystones similar to those on the beam floor. The round-headed windows which were finally used had appeared a few months earlier on a design for another Cornish engine house, at Lincoln, (Fig 8a). Here, however the windows to the beam floor were also round-headed, paired and with deeply channelled voussoirs. The engine-house was articulated with broad pilasters at the corners and in the centre of the two-bay side elevation and these, with the shallow hipped roof, give the building a slightly Italianate feeling, reinforced by the 80 foot high chimney. This is square in section and diminishes in three stages, the upper two being enlivened with recessed panels, round-headed niches and corner pilasters, with ramped scrolls at the junction. The whole is capped with a shallow four-way roof with wide bracketed eaves surrounding a cast iron smoke outlet.

These last two buildings were both for Cornish engines which, not having a flywheel, lent themselves to an arrangement in which the beam was supported in the centre of the engine-house. Subsequently, by giving more space round the steam cylinders Hawksley managed to obtain a symmetrical elevation to his rotative engine houses as well, with the external expression of the entablature support in a central position.

Architectural fashions were changing: Pugin's 'Contrasts’ had been published in 1836, and his 'Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture’ had followed in 1841. Pugin himself worked on the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Barnabas and the Bishops House in Nottingham between 1841 and 1844, and it is not inconceivable that he and Hawksley actually met. Certainly the influence of his ideas can be seen at Tees Cottage, (Plate 33) and even more strongly in the three pumping stations which followed: Little Eaton (Derby), Fulwell (Sunderland) and Park (Nottingham) (Plate 3, Plate 4, Plate 5, Plate 6 and Fig 9)

The form of Hawksley's earlier buildings had been closely dictated by their function, and he thus had no need to learn this lesson from Pugin, However, Pugin also stated that 'pointed architecture is most consistent as it decorates the useful parts of buildings instead of concealing them’, that no features should be introduced that were not essential either for convenience or propriety, and that ornament should be merely introduced as decoration to the essential construction of a building. Referring to railway architecture, perhaps the closest equivalent to the sort of buildings we are looking at, he wrote in 1843 ⁽²¹⁾: 'little more was required than buttresses, weathering and segmental arches, resistance to lateral and perpendicular pressure (to produce) grand and durable masses of building.’

Fig 9

Little Eaton Pumping Station, Derby

Hawksley seems to have taken this advice seriously and despite their rather ‘quaint’ appearance the rational simplicity of these next three buildings, clothed in pointed dress, is remarkable (Fig 9). Apart from the cusped lancets, ornamentation is confined to a few diaper patterns in darker headers together with such things as door looks and hinges (Plate 6), which Pugin had claimed could be ‘rich and beautiful decoration’ if they were treated as ‘the decoration of construction’⁽²⁶⁾. The stairs connecting the various floors were located in a stair turret, with a dainty pyramidal roof topped with a wrought iron pennant. The hipped roof of the engine-house was surrounded by a parapet (embattled at Little Eaton), and crowned by a slender lantern ventilator with a weather-cock. Nottingham Park and Fulwell have had their outlines simplified over the years as they have been adapted to other uses, but everything survives almost intact at Little Eaton, except for the chimney, whilst inside new plant has been fitted round the screen of columns supporting the entablature, with carved wooden tracery in the spandrels, and the network of cast iron joists which once carried the beam floor also remains (Plate 37 & Plate 38).

Simplified versions of the ‘pointed style’ remained in the Hawksley repertoire for the rest of the century, reappearing at Lichfield (Fig 18) and Bridgwater in the 1870s, and again at Hinckley around 1890 (Plate 31), In addition the normal procedure where extensions were required on an established site was to build in a similar style to the existing works - the surviving building at Little Eaton is in fact a ‘mirror’ copy of the 1849 building, erected some years later, and even the 1900-04 engine-house at Tees Cottage (Plate 34) is, in all important particulars an enlarged replica of the buildings of the 1840s. In contrast to this however, a second and rather more surprising principle seems to have been established, that new works on a new site should not be in the same style as existing works for the same undertaking.

Fig 10

Basford Pumping Station, Nottingham (1857)

The Nottingham Waterworks Company (into which the Trent Water Works Co had been absorbed in 1845) already had a pumping station in each of the styles mentioned so far when it needed additional capacity in the mid 1850s. By this time Hawksley had moved to London but he remained Engineer to the Company, and it would appear that he again found inspiration from current architectural publications. Joseph Nash’s ‘Mansions of England in the Olden Time’, published between 1838 and 1849 was one of a number of works which according to John Steegman⁽²⁷⁾, ‘held up to public admiration the architecture of two or three centuries earlier; with moreover, the further implication that such styles were most worth emulating’. The works at Basford (Fig 10, Plate 7), opened in 1857. and extended in identical style in 1868, can be seen as a manifestation of this taste for the picturesque ‘Olden Time’ which ran in parallel with Pugin’s more earnest Gothic. Not only did the engine and boiler-house roofs have curly ‘Jacobean’ gables but the broad pilasters with which the elevations were articulated terminated in similar features, with pointed finials and balls scattered along the parapets. The more important of the mullioned and transomed windows had corresponding motifs in their surrounds, whilst the doorway was an essay in the 'artisan mannerist' style. Sadly Basford was demolished in the late 1960s, but a larger example in the same style was built at Ryhope, Sunderland in 1869, closely following the date of the Basford extensions, and this works, complete with its engines, in now preserved and operated by a voluntary trust. (Plate 8, Plate 9, Plate 10, Fig 3, Fig 6, Fig 21 and cover).

As noted in Chapter 2, Hawksley was appointed Engineer of the Norwich Waterworks Co in March 1858, and on 18^th June he was requested to prepare the drawings, specifications and estimates for a new engine to be installed at Heigham. For the architecture of the engine-house he may have taken his cue from the Lynde buildings already on the site§ , but the style chosen seems also to look back to the Lincoln works designed ten years earlier (Fig 8a). This time however, the round headed windows are paired on both the main floor and the beam floor, and instead of the neo-classical treatment they received at Lincoln, they are now surrounded by alternate blue and white bricks which read against the red stocks of which the building in constructed (Plate 11, Fig 11). Again the building looks Italianate although the lozenge and diaper patterns, also in blue and white bricks, refer back to the Gothic style of Little Eaton etc. The same bricks are used in imitation of quoins on the pilasters, the use of stone being limited to the window sills and the weathering course on top of the plinth.

Fig 11

Heigham Pumping Station, Norwich (1858-59)

Perhaps Hawksley had in mind Ruskin’s ‘Lamp of Truth’⁽²⁴⁾, in which he says that ‘In flat countries, far from any quarry of stone, cast brick may be legitimately, and most successfully used in decoration, and that elaborate and even refined’. Ruskin was here referring to cast or moulded ornament in brick, which he felt to be acceptable because it does not pretend to be anything other than it is, but the statement could be, and frequently was, extended to cover the use of brick in the type of ‘constructional polychromy’ he had advocated when using the ‘true colours of natural stone’.

Almost exactly contemporary with this Norwich building was the Broken Scar pumping station of the Stockton and Middlesborough Water Works for which tenders were invited in May 1859. This was on a site adjoining the Tees Cottage works of the Darlington Company; both extracted water from the Tees at the lowest point possible before it became contaminated by the industry of Darlington, and they were separated only by the main road up Teesdale. All the Victorian buildings at Broken Scar have been demolished, and the only record of the 1859 works appears to be a contractor’s water colour of the site (Plate 13). It shows the River Tees on the right, with the two chimneys of Tees Cottage in the background. The central building is the 1859 'East engine-house' of Broken Scar, and its similarity with the Norwich building is evident. All that does survive is the boundary wall of the site, in polychrome brick, and from the style of this it is reasonable to infer that the quoins and other details shown on the painting were again in coloured brick rather than stone. Darlington cannot be described an ‘far from any quarry of stone’, and one can only suppose that Hawksley’s office was very busy (they also invited tenders for Stockholm in May 1859), the design was to hand, and they used it with only slight modifications and the addition of a boiler-house which Norwich had not required.

As seems to have been Hawksley's practice, subsequent buildings at both these sites maintained approximately the same style. The 'Middle engine-house' at Broken Scar followed around 1864 (Plate 14), and the ‘Patteson engine-house' at Heigham in 1878-81 (Plate 27 & Plate 28). This last building is also very similar to the Ormesby pumping station of the Great Yarmouth Water Company (Plate 29), which was built in 1882-84. It seems likely that the Ormesby design was deliberately based on the recently constructed Norwich works. There were close links between the Norwich and Yarmouth Companies at this time: John Ayris was the manager of both (and of the Lowestoft and Southend water undertakings), and he was personally responsible for supervising the building of the Patteson house, since he seems to have had a low opinion of local contractors. He was assisted by his son, Henry Crowquill Ayris, who subsequently became an employee of T.& C. Hawksley in which capacity he was responsible for the building and commissioning of the Ormesby works before returning to Norwich as Deputy Manager in 1885. Both these buildings were superbly constructed in the highest quality engineering brickwork.

This polychrome brick style, which emerged in the late 1850s, is difficult to categorise. If it was intended to be Italianate in character, it may perhaps be said that, although attractive, it was not unduly successful. For a more confident essay in the Italianate style⁽¹⁹⁾ one has to look again to Sunderland, and one of the most remarkable pumping stations which Hawksley's produced.

Fig 12

Cleadon Pumping Station, Sunderland (1863)

Cleadon (Fig 12, Plate 15, Plate 16, Plate 17, Plate 18) was opened in 1862, and its design period must therefore have followed closely after the early buildings at Heigham and Broken Scar. Unlike these, however it makes extensive use of stone, not only in the quoins and window surrounds, but also in the battered and heavily rusticated plinth and the band of guilloche which forms the string course. The style chosen does not allow pilasters or buttresses, and there is no external sign of the strengthening of the wall in the centre of the side elevation to support the engine entablature. Indeed, on the beam floor, above the entablature, there is a central window and this is echoed on the main floor by a tall niche with a carved stone urn (Plate 17). Unfortunately, as the works is built on a narrow shelf in the hillside it is not possible to get far enough away to appreciate these side elevations with their unusual 1:2:1:2:1 rhythm of windows. The narrowness of the site may also have dictated the use of a ‘roving chimney’, totally detached from the boiler-house, but can in no way explain the treatment that this chimney, or ‘smoke tower’ was given. A hundred feet high, on land which is the high point of the area it is a prominent feature from miles around, and an aid to navigation which appears on admiralty charts. The chimney shaft itself is surrounded by an enclosed staircase which gives access to a viewing balcony, 82 feet above ground level, and the whole structure is capped by a roof reminiscent of that designed for Lincoln fifteen years earlier.

The whole thing in undeniably impressive, and the view from the balcony is spectacular in all directions, but for whom was it intended? The engineman and stoker would hardly be expected to make much use of it, and as far as is known it has never been open to the public. There does, however, seem to have been considerable interest around this time in 'disguising’ the chimneys required by the steam age. In his ‘Encyclopaedia’ ⁽¹⁴⁾, J.C. Loudon said ‘The public have surely a right to expect that such conspicuous objects an engine chimney-shafts are, in the country, should be built in what is considered good taste, no less than spires of churches’. One of Hawksley's professional colleagues, Sir Robert Rawlinson, produced a book of ‘Designs for Factory, Furnace and other Tall Chimneys' in 1859§ . This book was apparently published privately, and copies are rare, but John Gloag, in "Victorian Taste"⁽¹¹⁾, reproduces two of Rawlinson's designs (Fig 13). One of these bears a certain resemblance to Cleadon, and the other is closely related to the chimneys at Bestwood Park and Dalton which were to follow a few years later.

Fig 13

Two examples from Sir Robert Rawlinson's

Designs for Factory, Furnace and other Tall Chimneys, (1859?)

In the late 1860s the Nottingham Waterworks Company again had to consider an increase in their supply capacity, and the site selected by Hawksley was at Bestwood, beside the Nottingham to Mansfield Road. This site was on the edge of the park surrounding Bestwood Lodge, the house which had only recently (1864) been completed for the tenth Duke of St. Albans by S.S. Teulon⁽⁹⁾. The lease agreement between the Duke and the Waterworks Company, dated 21st March 1870, contains a variety of restrictive clauses including the stipulation that

The effect of this clause hinges on the interpretation of the word ‘reasonable’, and although it would surely be unwise to assume that Teulon was in any way directly involved in the design of the pumping station, it is clear that Bestwood Lodge gives some indication of the Duke’s architectural taste at that time.

Pevsner said of Bestwood Lodge ⁽¹⁶⁾ that ‘There is no desire for symmetry or indeed balance’: Bestwood Park pumping station exhibits the concern for symmetry which seems to have been almost an obsession with Hawksley's. The material is brick with stone dressings in several contrasting colours, but their effect has been obscured by time and by the neglect from which this fine building has suffered since ceasing operation in 1967 (Plate 20, Plate 21, Plate 22). In order to obtain a clearer idea of the architect’s original intentions it is necessary to refer to the watercolour at Watson Hawksley (Plate 19), which may, perhaps, have been executed in order to obtain 'the reasonable approval of the Duke or his Agent’. Some details were not built as shown in the painting, but even taking this into account the polychromy is much more striking than the present appearance of the building would suggest. The stripey porch was modified in drawings dated 1875, two years after the works had supposedly come into operation. Areas of wall which would otherwise be blank are punctuated with blind arrow slits or 'bullseyes' of contrasting stone, and all the roof lines bristle with elaborate iron cresting rails from Macfarlane's catalogue. The most remarkable and memorable feature is however the chimney, or ‘chimney tower’, clearly derived from the same prototype an Rawlinson's plate, if not taken directly from his book.

Pevsner described the style as ‘Italian Gothic’§ and the building is such a prominent landmark that other writers also refer to it, labelling it either Florentine or Venetian Gothic. Whether or not one can trace the influence of Teulon in this design, it in clear that both he and it drew their inspiration from Ruskin in such works as ‘The Stones of Venice'. The varied designs of the capitals to the four columns of the arcaded coal stores have already been mentioned, and this too would seem to be in line with Ruskin's precepts about the Gothic workman ‘left free to represent what subjects he chooses’ and the joy he could thus take in his work. Unfortunately, however, the drawings for Bestwood carry the injunction ‘All carving to be modelled and submitted for approval before execution’, and even the stone bullseyes mentioned above were felt to be sufficiently important for their exact profile to be the subject of a full-size drawing - so much for the freedom and joy of the craftsman.

Fig 14

Dalton Pumping Station, Sunderland (1873-79)

The same injunction about carved work appears on some of the drawings for Dalton, the next works designed for the Sunderland and South Shields Water Company, which is in a style very closely related to Bestwood. The earliest drawings for Dalton are dated 1873, and hence, although it was not commissioned until 1879. it is clear that the two jobs actually overlapped in Hawksley's drawing office, (Fig 14, Plate 23, Plate 24, Plate 25, Plate 26). The most striking similarity is in the chimney tower or rather it was: catastrophic mining subsidence has necessitated the removal of the upper portions of the chimney, and demolition of the rest of the building within the next few years is probably inevitable. Whereas, however, Bestwood made use of polychromy, with relatively little carving, Dalton has a wealth of carved detail, the buff stone making little chromatic contrast with the brownish local stocks. All the main window openings in the engine-house have colonnettes with floriated capitals of differing designs (Plate 26), and a similar variety is found in the label stops and other details. Again however, Ruskinian precepts can only be carried so far: the engine-house is one of the earliest to have been designed with an overhead crane (of 20 tons capacity), and the tracks for this run directly over the side windows to the beam floor, requiring the internal structure of these windows to be in cast iron, with cast iron capitals of mechanical uniformity (Plate 39).

Dalton must surely be one of the most extravagant pieces of architecture to come out of the Hawksley office, and this extravagance is continued in the site layout, with a service reservoir and no fewer than three cooling ponds, all of complex outline (Fig 14). Whereas Bestwood was built on the estate of a wealthy and aristocratic landowner Dalton was (and is) surrounded by collieries with its site bounded on two sides by a ‘Turnpike Road’, (the A19). and the ‘South Hetton Railway’. Also, while Bestwood was aligned with the adjacent road (the watercolour view across the pond is in fact the view from the road), Dalton turned its back on the passing traveller; all he could see was the blank buttressed wall of the coal store - and, of course, the chimney.

This was, perhaps, the last major style Hawksley's designed: it was used again at Springfield, Southport, in 1877, with a much simpler chimney in the same position, and there were echoes of the style in the pumping station at Whitley, Coventry, of 1893, although here the chimney is detached behind the boiler-house. The plan of the 1878 extensions to the Norwich works may be seen an derived from the Bestwood/Dalton/ Springfield layout, although the style is, of course, totally different (Fig 15). At Norwich, as elsewhere, the rule was still applied that new buildings should be sympathetic to those already on the sites and this seems to have held whether or not the existing buildings were of a Hawksley design.

Fig 15

James Simpson, another celebrated water engineer, had erected works for the York Waterworks Company in about 1846 on the site at Acomb recommended by Hawksley in his report of 1845. These buildings are in a vaguely Tudor style, with rectangular mullioned and transomed windows and heavy drip mouldings, but with irregular fenestration and a doorway uncomfortably squeezed into the centre of a four bay elevation. The new works which Hawksley’s designed in 1877-78, at the height of the Dalton and Springfield phase, had 3- and 6-light mullioned and transomed windows in rectangular surrounds but with four-centred heads to the individual lights. Stairs were in a turret attached to one side of the engine-house, as at Little Eaton etc, but instead of a pyramid roof, the York turret had not only battlements but also machicolations. Sadly, this building, much admired by members of the British Association on the occasion of their visit to York in 1881, was demolished a few years ago. Their description of it as ‘in the Tudor style’ is the only contemporary reference to the style of a Hawksley pumping station building so far uncovered© .

Even though new types of engine which were easier to install were beginning to be available, Hawksley's continued to specify house-built beam engines for the rest of the century. Apart from works on existing sites, most of the later buildings were in a simplified version of either the pointed Gothic or the rectangular Tudor styles - the only difference between the two being the window shape. Although containing house-built beam engines and therefore coming within the scope of this project, some of them were quite small, as smaller towns gradually caught up with their larger industrial neighbours in the provision of services.

Some of these buildings, such as Snarestone (Plate 31), were so small that the only lighting to the beam floor came from windows in the gable ends of the engine-house, and external expression of the entablature support was neither necessary nor practicable on such a small scale. The plans of these small stations are of some interest (Fig 16); the very small works at Snarestone has an identical plan to the somewhat larger station at Fulbourn (Cambridge), and both are closely related to the much larger works at Whitley (Coventry).

Fig 16

Comparative Plans of Pumping Stations

Symmetry of plan seems to have been something to which Hawksley’s attached considerable importance - excluding the chimney most plans exhibit perfect symmetry, and much ingenuity must sometimes have been employed to achieve this. The Pugin Gothic group of Little Eaton etc. had an element of asymmetry in the external stair turret (surely in line with Pugin’s views on the additive combination of components), and the York works of 1878-80 shared this feature. Despite this, York in fact gives a rare example of this obsession with symmetry in action (Fig 17).

Fig 17

The initial plan of 1877 had no provision for an office, which the company must presumably have requested; the revised plan of 1878 shows how this difficulty was overcome. The office was placed between the engine-house and the boiler-house with two additional and surely unnecessary stores to balance it. Since the river intake remained in the same place this had the effect of pushing the far wall of the boiler-house back so that there was no longer room for the chimney on the centre line between the boiler-house and the railway, and it was thus re-located. One can only speculate about the reasons for switching the w.c, and the ‘Gardeners Tool Place’ at the same time.

Given the widespread Victorian distaste for symmetry and love of the picturesque outline, it is surprising that only one Hawksley pumping station seems to have been consciously designed with a picturesque grouping in mind. The little works at Walsall Road, Lichfield of 1873 had a deliberately irregular plan (Fig 16), and the elevations (Fig 18) show that this irregularity was accentuated by the varying roof levels; the treatment of the store room as if it was the main entrance porch is a rare and engaging touch of whimsy.

Fig 18

Walsall Road Pumping Station, Lichfield (1873)

There can have been few, it any, house-built beam engines for waterworks service installed after this date. There had, of course, been other types of pumping engine available for many years, and these made far fewer demands on the buildings which enclosed them. From the turn of the century engines of other layouts were built in ever larger sizes, and the beam engine became obsolete although a few continued working into the late 1960s, almost as late an any steam pumping engines. They left behind then a specialised and distinctive building type, of which few people can have produced more interesting examples than Thomas Hawksley and the partnership he founded.