Copy of the original scheme for the pump house, boiler house, and coal store
Ashford waterworks was built by Bridgwater Borough Council in the 1870s, and was designed by Thomas Hawksley, the eminent Victorian water engineer. Built of Bridgwater brick in the Victorian Gothic style, the site comprised a coal store, boiler house and steam engine house. The beam engines were made by Boulton and Watt. On the other side of the yard was the ultra-modern water treatment works, built on the site of the original settling pond and filter beds. Water was drawn from springs on the Quantocks and used to be pumped to the covered reservoir at the top of Skimmerton lane, where it was fed by gravity to the town.
After the building of the water treatment work in the early 1990s, the engine pumping house was saved from demolition and converted to an education centre. It is one of a number Wessex Water has in the region. The only other dealing with history is at Sutton Poyntz near Weymouth.
The coal store became a classroom, catering for young teenagers, with displays about the science and chemistry of water, the boiler house became a display about the geology and ecology of the area,(and one of the diesel engines that replaced the beam engines in the 1930s) and the pump room became a display about the history of the local water supply and the present day service.
In the former Engine Hall
Tony Woolrich's N-gauge model of the pump house and adjacent buildings. The party saw two models that Tony had made, one a relief map of the water catchment, painted to show the underlying geology, and the other a scale model of the water works as built, detailed to show how the filter beds worked.
The history told the story from early times, and then the first water works of the late 1600s in the Town Mill, which pumped to a cistern on Cornhill. Public health and epidemics in the middle nineteenth century were followed by the construction of the waterworks for the town, then the Rural District supply, amalgamation and eventual privatisation. The displays concluded with the modern water supply. A number of artefacts were seen. These included chemical testing kits, various meters, and a section of a bored wooden water pipe from the first Bridgwater waterworks. Above: Elm pipe recovered from the Durleigh Brook
Norman Lewis explains how the elm pipes were bored. The jig is on the floor at his feet.
The party next visited the twenty-first century treatment works. Here, raw water from the Quantocks is chemically treated to remove impurities, before being pumped to reservoirs for distribution. It is all computerised and done by remote control from Bath, with no permanent staff on site. The treatment works automatically adjusts the rate at which it works to cater for the demand placed on it.
The tanks contain coagulated sludge above the water in the first part of the treatment.
The water industry is unique among the public services in that the privatisation legislation insisted that historic assets like pumping stations had to be recorded and where possible adapted and so preserved. This is in contrast to the gas industry where there was comprehensive destruction both of structures and also records.