PUMPING ENGINE ROOM (CMT Trail stop 2)

For the trail of the Cambridge Museum of Technology, we've divided the spaces into eleven stops. Each stop is offered as a transcription (see below) illustrated for those who are not able-bodied to see the details of the site through descriptions and photography.  You can use the audio guide online or in situ which is provided freely here, stop by stop, starting with PUMPING ENGINE ROOM (CMT Trail stop 2) AUDIO.

CMT TRAIL STOP 2 WORDS SPOKEN BY CAMBRIDGE MUSEUM OF TECHNOLOGY'S CURATOR, PAM HALLS: Welcome to the Pumping Engine Room!  We sometimes call it the Main Engine Room, the Pump House, the Pumping Room or even the Steam Engine Room.  Considering what the job was in here which was basically moving huge amounts of poo every day it really is rather lovely.  You can see there are tiles of different colours on the walls so on the lower part you have the lovely olive green tiles then a section of white and then a lovely band of blue  across the top and then above us as there is a rather spectacular roof with, they call it a lantern, which means there’s little windows up there and when you just think that underneath this is 40 foot of poo and above us is this beautiful building and that is because the Victorians liked to cover up things that they weren't very keen on, things that they were squeamish about so often they used to cover-up piano legs because they thought legs were a bit risqué we didn’t want to see them and they certainly wanted to cover up lots and lots of sewage with a beautiful building just to pretend it wasn't really there.

Also when you're looking high up at the far end you can see what's called a gantry crane.  You needed to be able to pick up, to do maintenance on these engines, pick up big lumps of metal so you needed a very, very powerful crane to do it and if you look high up you can see there are rails along each side of the room so they can shift that beam across to wherever they need to be then drop down the chains and lift something up and we still use it today.  We have to have it checked every year to make sure it works properly.

Up until the time that this place was built Cambridge’s sewage was generally discharged into the river. You wouldn’t really have wanted to go punting on a river full of sewage, or boating.  It was smelly, it was unpleasant but worse than that it was dangerous. It meant people were drinking and washing in water contaminated with sewage and if you do that you can get some very unpleasant diseases such as cholera and there were outbreaks of cholera throughout the 19th century in Cambridge which killed people.  During the  19th-century Cambridge was growing quite rapidly there were more people coming to Cambridge living in quite overcrowded accommodation producing more sewage or rainwater all of this was going into random drains around town which eventually just seeps into the river, so the local council decided they had to do something about it and they came up with this wonderful pumping station,  created a whole new set of drainage around town, new sewers and  brought by gravity all of the sewage to 40 foot beneath where we're standing now.  Underneath us would have been a 40 foot well full of the town’s sewage, so quite a smelly place to work and you can see here on either side there are two engines they are called Hathorn Davey engines and they were installed in 1894 when the pumping station was built and they spent every day pumping sewage out to Milton which is a village a couple of miles away from Cambridge where it was used on the land as a fertilizer. The engines didn't both work at the same time they used to work one week on and one week off so one would be pumping away whilst the other one would be serviced having a rest, making sure everything was working fine because no way could they ever stop if these engines stopped working then sewage would start backing up, going into the river, into people's houses.  Catastrophe in Cambridge!

ILLUSTRATIONS: PICTURE OF BRASS TAP MACHINE & LIFT THE FLAP SAFETY BOARD

EN-ROUTE TO GAS ENGINE ROOM (stop 3)

 Let’s walk through to the Gas Engine room now,  but have a look at this object on your left as we go, a rather interesting machine with beautiful brass taps, it’s all very shiny and gorgeous and we’ll be taking more notice of it later on because it's rather an interesting item in the story the pumping station.  Head off towards the Gas Engine Room now but just pause at these dials on the left and  right behind us we can see that the engine has had a bit of a modification.  If you look down you'll see there's a panel which is a later addition to the engine.  I’ll lift it up, it's a wooden board.  Just lifting it up now and you can see there are some holes in there and on one occasion in the past one of the cleaners at the pumping station was cleaning the engine, he stood with his feet in those holes and unfortunately part of the engine cut of his feet. But we think that’s about the only industrial accident that ever happened in 74 years of the pumping station but in order that no one ever did that again they included this panel.

TRAIL STOP PHOTOS & SELFIES: Please do use social media to submit an arty photo or a selfie taken at this stop.  Have a go to take an arty photo of an object.  Or fit in your entire family with the chimney! Historyworks will upload photos to the trail stop to share with others! All you have to do is share on twitter using @historyworkstv and @CamTechMuseum or email your photos to the team at historyworkstv@gmail.com HAPPY SNAPPING :-)

HAVE A LOOK AT PHOTOS AT THE CAMBRIDGE MUSEUM OF CAMBRIDGE MOSTLY TAKEN BY THE HISTORYWORKS TEAM SHOWING DETAILS OF MACHINES TO ILLUSTRATE THE TRAIL STOPS, BUT PLEASE SEE THAT THESE NOW INLUDE SELFIES AND ARTY PHOTOS FROM THE STOBBS IP PARTICIPANTS, ADDED TO PHOTOS TAKEN BY HELEN WEINSTEIN & MARIO SATCHWELL & JON CALVER OF HISTORYWORKS: