Above: View of the remarkable building from Green Lanes at sunset.
Every now and then, as you walk around London, you find something so unusual that you just could not make it up. This is one of those buildings. The original route of the New River had been conceived when water-pumps had not been invented. The New River delivered water from its source in Hertfordshire by using gravity. The water from Ware travelled nearly 40 miles with the slightest incline so that it flowed to its destination in Finsbury.
By the 1850s, several amendments to the course of the New River had been made and more water was being taken from the source than when it had first been built. This required pumping stations which were in common use by Victorian times. The New River Pumping Station at Green Lanes – also known as the Stoke Newington Pumping Station – was designed by William Chadwell Mylne, the engineer for the New River Company. The remarkable brick building was erected 1854-56.
In those days, nobody wanted to see a huge ugly building on the horizon and so the design ‘camouflaged’ the actual function by making it look like an imposing castle. These days nobody wants to see an ugly building either but the public are seldom consulted and even if they complain they are told that it is the best solution for the money that has been allocated.
By 1942 the building was no longer required and the three beam engines inside it were removed. The amazing folly, looking like a huge castle, was then owned by the Metropolitan Water Board.
The round tower with a square top was built of brick with a spiral staircase running around the interior extending to the top, about 100 feet above floor level, where there is a tank which once held water which was used to prime the steam engines. The water entered the building about 40 feet below floor level. The beam-engines had flywheels which extended beyond the outer walls. To accommodate them ‘compartments’ were built out from the main walls which, on the exterior, were made to look like buttresses.
In 1994 the building was acquired for use as an indoor climbing facility. The conversion was carried out to designs of Nicholas Grimshaw and partners. The enormous building stands on the east side of Green Lanes, south of the East Reservoir for the New River.
-ENDS-
Know Your London 
Nice item – I grew up in the Finsbury Park area and was appropriately impressed when I first discovered the pumping station in the 1960s. The two reservoirs were needed to even out the supply and demand to the New River Head at Clerkenwell and were completed in the 1830s. The pumping station came about because of the growth of London and a change in regulations requiring filtration treatment (following a Cholera outbreak in London). The company was able to build some filtration beds at the New River Head, and constructed a covered supply reservoir (still there) nearby in Claremont Square to which the filtered water was pumped by a local engine, but they also built new filtration beds on the other side of Green Lanes from the west reservoir (the filtration beds are now built on), and built the pumping station there to send the water up to new covered supply reservoirs on high ground which can still be seen at Dartmouth Park Hill, Hornsey Lane and Ferme Park Rd from where a good deal of new Victorian north London property could be supplied by gravity.
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