Glasgow Corporation Waterworks and its successors have provided a public water supply and sewerage and sewage treatment services to the Scottish city of Glasgow. There were several schemes in the early part of the 1800s, with the Glasgow Company which was established in 1806 pumping filtered water from the River Clyde into the city. The Gorbals Gravitation Water Company was established in 1846, and brought water from reservoirs to the south-west of the city. However, an outbreak of cholera in 1848/1849, in which 4,000 people died, concentrated the minds of Glasgow Council, and in 1855 a scheme to use water from Loch Katrine, to the north, was authorised. The work required at Loch Katrine was quite modest, and the major construction work was the building of an aqueduct to carry the water to the city by gravity.
The civil engineer John Frederick Bateman managed the contract, but the engineer for final section into the city was James Morris Gale, who became the Engineer in Chief for the Glasgow Water Commissioners when the project was completed in 1859. He oversaw the development of the system, with levels in Loch Katrine being raised and a second aqueduct being constructed, until he retired in 1902. Extra water was obtained from Loch Arklet in 1914, when a dam and tunnel into Loch Katrine were completed, but a similar scheme to impound water in Glen Finglas and feed it through a tunnel to Loch Katrine was delayed by the First World War, and was not implemented until 1965. A new treatment works at Milngavie costing £120 million was completed in 2008 and opened by Queen Elizabeth.
Glasgow also invested in sewerage, with sewage treatment works opening at Dalmarnock in 1894, Dalmuir in 1904 and Shieldhall in 1910. They carried out research into better ways to treat sewage, and until 1935 sold sludge cakes as "Globe Fertiliser". Surplus sludge was carried away by a fleet of sludge ships, to be dumped at sea, and the ships also took passengers along for the voyage, initially to help recuperating soldiers, but later for the general public. A major upgrade to the sewerage infrastructure took place in 2017, when a tunnel was completed, to provide storm water storage, a project which reduces flood risk, and should ensure that the River Clyde is not polluted by sewage overflows in storm conditions.
History
The earliest known records of activity concerning a public water supply in Glasgow date from 1805, when the civil engineer Thomas Telford produced a report on schemes for supplying Glasgow and its suburbs with water. In 1806 he produced a second report and an act of Parliament, the (46 Geo. 3. c. cxxxvi) was obtained to create the Company of Proprietors of the Glasgow Waterworks, also known as the "Glasgow Company". They took advice from the Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer James Watt, and plans for a water treatment works on the north bank of the River Clyde were drawn up by Telford. The company constructed filtering beds and ponds, and bought two Boulton and Watt steam engines, but the system did not work well, and a new works was constructed on the south bank. In order to filter water from the river, they constructed a tunnel below river level, with open joints between the bricks, which allowed water to seep through the river bank, which was formed of sand, and to be drawn off from the tunnel. Although the filtering was not particularly efficient, the system lasted for 30 years, and provided per day on average, with the amount available depending on the river level.
A second company, the Company of Proprietors of the Cranston Hill Water Works, was established by the (52 Geo. 3. c. lii). The civil engineer and statistician James Cleland produced a report in 1813, on a scheme for raising and distributing water, and building public baths, and there was a flurry of activity in the 1830s. James Jardine, who was engineer for much of the early work for the Edinburgh Water Company, was consulted in 1834, Thomas Grainger published a report on the Glasgow water supply in 1835, and Robert Thom, the designer of the self-cleaning sand filter used in water purification, produced another report in 1837. The Glasgow Company took over the other company in 1838, but the quality of the water they supplied was poor, and there was general dissatisfaction with their performance. This resulted in a number of alternative schemes being considered.
The first was a scheme to exploit the waters of Loch Lubnaig, in the River Callender catchment, some to the north of Glasgow. This was abandoned when it was discovered that more compensation water would be required than the loch could hold. The neighbouring Loch Katrine was also considered, but was not pursued at that time. The engineer Nathaniel Beardmore moved to London in 1843, where he collaborated with James Meadows Rendel on a project for the Glasgow Gravitation Water Company. The scheme was for a reservoir at Gilmerston, in the valley of the River Avon, and a aqueduct to transport the water to Glasgow. Some work was carried out in 1844, but the project was abandoned in early 1845.
One successful scheme was the Gorbals Gravitation Water Company, which obtained the (9 & 10 Vict. c. cccxlvii), allowing them to supply water to the population living to the south of the Clyde, obtained from a catchment of to the south-west of Glasgow. The engineer for the scheme was William Gale, who supervised the construction of the works and two earth dams to impound the water, at Waulkmill Glen and Ryat Linn. The initial phase was completed in 1848, and a second phase, which included the construction of a third reservoir at Balgray, was finished in 1854. The reservoir outlets were arranged so that water could be drawn off at several different levels, and the scheme produced about per day, of which were required for compensation water, to maintain flows in the river system, and the rest was available to the people of Glasgow. Some 75,000 benefitted from a constant supply of good quality filtered water, as Gale strongly advocated that water should be available all the time.
Residents in other parts of the city were not so fortunate, as the insanitary conditions led to an outbreak of cholera in 1848/1849, in which around 4,000 people died. In 1852 there was an attempt to revive the Loch Lubnaig scheme, but this was opposed in Parliament by Glasgow Council, and in this they were assisted by the civil engineer John Frederick Bateman. Having defeated the bill, they asked Bateman for advice on a suitable water supply, and he favoured the Loch Katrine scheme. The council then sought advice from other engineers on that and other schemes, but both Stephenson and Brunel supported Bateman's proposal. The council therefore sought authorisation for it, and the (18 & 19 Vict. c. cxviii) was obtained on 12 July 1855.
Loch Katrine
Compared to the massive earth dams that were being built to supply Edinburgh with water at a similar time, the reservoir works for the Loch Katrine scheme were rather modest. Water was stored in the loch by allowing the water levels to vary between above the normal level and below it. The Glasgow Corporation Waterworks Act 1855 allowed per day to be taken into the water supply, but in order to maintain flows on the river system below it, the outlet of Loch Venachar was also modified, so that it could be controlled to supply of compensation water per day. The water level of Loch Katrine is above sea level, and water for Glasgow is conveyed by gravity along an aqueduct to a reservoir at Mugdock, some from the city centre. The aqueduct is long, of which is tunnel, consists of an open channel or bridges, and the rest is made from pipelines. The tunnelled sections and cuts were designed to carry the maximum allowed by the act, but the pipelines were only sized to allow half of that volume initially. The service reservoir at Mugdock held , and from there it was conveyed into the city through twin pipes. The scheme was completed in 1859 and was formally opened by Queen Victoria, having cost £918,000.
The aqueduct includes 70 tunnels, with one just south of Loch Katrine being long and below the land surface at its deepest point. Twelve access shafts were constructed to allow work to proceed at multiple faces. 25 bridges were needed to carry the aqueduct pipes over depressions. That across the Duchray valley is long, and its masonry piers are up to high. It originally carried a single pipe, but a second was added above the first in the 1860s. A third pipe was added in 1881, carried by a steel trussed girder bridge on sandstone piers. The longest bridge is at Corrie, and is long. Castle Burn is crossed by a bridge long, and there are three bridges at Couligarten, with lengths of , and . The masonry was built of dry stone, but mortar was added in the 1860s.
While Bateman had managed the main pipeline, James Morris Gale became the resident engineer for the city section of the project. After it all opened in 1859, he became Engineer in Chief for the Glasgow Water Commissioners, a post he held for over 40 years until he retired in 1902. By 1882, the supply from Loch Katrine was no longer sufficient, and he suggested a scheme to double the pipeline, raise the levels in Loch Katrine a little more, and to obtain further sources from other lochs in the vicinity of Loch Katrine. The (45 & 46 Vict. c. lxxxvii) and the (48 & 49 Vict. c. cxxxvi) were obtained, which allowed the level of Loch Katrine to be raised by . This required the construction of a new dam, which was located just downstream of the first dam, and had nine sluices to control compensation water, rather than the four of the original dam. This work was carried out using direct labour between 1886 and 1896, and an official opening took place on 21 June 1901. Gale chose a more direct route for the new aqueduct, which involved more tunnelling, but by this time pneumatic drills and better explosives were available, and he felt that the long bridges such as that at Duchray were the least satisfactory element of the original design. Friction in the tunnels of the first route had reduced the throughput below what had been expected, and the new tunnels were lined with concrete to improve flows. The revised route for the second aqueduct was shorter, and the possible throughput with both aqueducts in use increased to per day.
At Milngavie, Mugdock Reservoir was built as a holding reservoir for water arriving from Loch Katrine. A number of buildings with rubble walls and slate roofs dating from this first phase survive. In the 1890s when the pipeline was doubled, Craigmaddie reservoir was built to act as a second holding reservoir. Work started on 1 May 1896 and it was completed on 11 June 1896, but there were problems with leakage, and a deep trench was cut to resolve the issue, so it was not operational until 1 January 1897. A causeway and dam, which is faced with rubble, separates the two reservoirs. Both reservoirs have a draw-off tower and straining well, to remove debris from the water supply. The straining wells were decommissioned in 2007 as part of the construction of a new treatment works.