The Thames from Hampton Court to Sunbury Lock

Hampton waterworks

The 1852 Metropolis Water Act made it illegal to take drinking water from the tidal Thames below Teddington because of the amount of sewage in the river.

 

So three companies set up waterworks at Hampton by 1855—The Grand Junction, Southwark & Vauxhall, and West Middlesex water companies. The rectangular reservoir just south of the Upper Sunbury Road is still called the Grand Junction Reservoir.

 

The ones closest to the river, just upstream of Platt’s Eyot—the largest is called Sunnyside reservoir—were built by the Southwark & Vauxhall Water Company.

 

Because of its previous contaminated water supplies in Battersea, the Southwark & Vauxhall Company had a particularly bad reputation—John Snow’s ‘Communication of Cholera’ (1855) said “in every district to which the supply of the Southwark and Vauxhall Water Company extends, the cholera was more fatal than in any other district whatever”.

 

 

 

METROPOLITAN WATER BOARD LIGHT RAILWAY

There was a two foot narrow gauge steam railway from 1916 to 1945 that delivered coal transported by barge to the Metropolitan Water Board wharf at Port Hampton to the pumping engines at Hampton and Kempton Park waterworks. It also had a siding at Sunbury Station so coal could be delivered by trains on the Shepperton line.

 

There were three locomotives (built by the Kerr Stuart Locomotive Company) called Hampton, Kempton and Sunbury, operating on three and a half miles of track.

 

The railway crossed the Lower Sunbury Road, went under the Upper Sunbury Road, alongside the Shepperton railway line, then underneath it and over a level crossing at Kempton Park Lane to Kempton pumping station and Sunbury Station.

 

The Metropolitan Water Board Railway Society aims to rebuild the railway.

MORE RESERVOIRS

Even though water could only be taken from the Thames above Teddington, it was only after legislation came into effect in 1869 that raw sewage stopped being discharged into the river between Lechlade and Putney.

 

Another pair of reservoirs, Stain Hill East and Stain Hill West, raised up behind a high bank, was built by the Southwark & Vauxhall Water Company to the west of the existing reservoirs and filter beds, between the Upper Sunbury Road and Lower Sunbury Road in the 1890s

 

The three companies merged in 1903 to become the Metropolitan Water Board, later Thames Water Authority and now Thames Water plc.