Liverpool Corporation Waterworks and its successors have provided a public water supply and sewerage and sewage treatment services to the city of Liverpool, England. In 1625 water was obtained from a single well and delivered by cart, but as the town grew, companies supplied water to homes through pipes. There were two main companies by the 1840s, but the water supply was intermittent, and there was general dissatisfaction with the service. Liverpool Corporation decided that such an important service should be provided by a public body, and sought to take over the water supply companies.
A series of acts of Parliament were obtained, the first being the Liverpool Act 1846 (9 & 10 Vict. c. cxxvii), which created three key posts, the Medical Officer of Health, the Inspector of Nuisances, and the Borough Engineer. The latter post was filled by James Newlands, a visionary man who defined the role of the Borough Engineer, to be copied by many other towns and cities. He set about creating large scale maps of Liverpool, building a water-based sewerage system, making provision for bath houses, wash houses, swimming lessons, minimum sizes for rooms, paving and street lighting. The sewage was emptied into the River Mersey for the tides to take away, but he saw this as an interim measure, with a sewage treatment works being required. This part of his vision was not implemented until the 1980s.
The second act was the Liverpool Corporation Waterworks Act 1847 (10 & 11 Vict. c. cclxi), which allowed the corporation to buy out the private water companies, and subsequent acts authorised the construction of reservoirs, initially on Rivington Pike, where a total of eight reservoirs were eventually completed, most of the work being overseen by the engineer Thomas Hawksley. The work included sand filters to treat the water before it entered a pipeline to Liverpool. The volume of water that this scheme supplied was rather less than that estimated, and the promised constant supply of water to residents reverted to an intermittent supply, as the population expanded and the volume of water used by households increased. This issue was eventually resolved by building the Vyrnwy Reservoir in Wales and a aqueduct to convey the water to Liverpool.
Following the Water Act 1973 (c. 37), both water supply and sewerage services were taken over from the corporation by the North West Water Authority, which subsequently became United Utilities. Newlands' vision for a sewage treatment works was realised in 1991, when a works was completed in Sandon Dock, which was extended by a £200 million upgrade in 2016, utilising the adjacent Wellington Dock. Hawksley's sand filters for the Rivington chain of reservoirs were replaced by a £38.9-million water treatment works in 1994, although the water is now used to supply Wigan rather than Liverpool. The Liverpool Act 1846 (9 & 10 Vict. c. cxxvii) became the model for the Public Health Act 1848 (11 & 12 Vict. c. 63), which saw many other towns benefit from the reforms Newlands introduced. He reduced mortality in Liverpool significantly, and crowds lined the streets for his funeral in 1871.
History
The city of Liverpool sits on a bed of lower new red sandstone, which is covered by a layer of clay, up to thick. Early water supply was from wells dug down into the sandstone aquifer. The principal supply in 1625 was Fall Well, near St John's Lane, from which water was supplied to the seven or eight streets that formed Liverpool by cart. The first known commercial supply of water was in 1694, when a company was granted permission by Liverpool Corporation to supply Liverpool with water from springs at Bootle. The permission was passed to Sir Cleave Moore in 1710 by the (8 Ann. c. 21 ), and construction of a masonry culvert began, but was abandoned. The engineer Thomas Steers was associated with the waterworks in 1720, as were Sir Thomas Johnson and Sir Cleave Moore. The company had a reservoir and a steam engine which pumped the water into wooden pipes. Duncan, writing in 1853, suggests that the Bootle company combined with another company, known as the Liverpool and Harrington Company, in 1799, to more effectively supply Liverpool with water. Thomas Telford was linked to the Bootle Waterworks between 1799 and 1802, and Thomas Simpson was linked to the Harrington Waterworks in 1799. However, Sheard, writing in 1993, suggests that the Bootle company, formally known as the Liverpool Waterworks Company, was formed by the (39 Geo. 3. c. xxxvi), while the Harrington company, which was officially the Liverpool Corporation Waterworks, although it is unclear whether there was any formal link with the corporation, was formed by the (3 Geo. 4. c. lxxvii). These dates were also quoted in the preamble to the Liverpool Corporation Waterworks Act 1847 (10 & 11 Vict. c. cclxi). The two companies agreed to divide up Liverpool and each supply their own area, rather than competing. The Bootle company had obtained acts of Parliament, the (50 Geo. 3. c. clxv) and (53 Geo. 3. c. cxxii) allowing them to supply water to Bootle, Linacre, Kirkdale, Everton and West Derby.
The Harrington Company extracted their water from boreholes, of which they had 17, varying in depth from to . The water was pumped into a network of iron pipes by three steam engines, and some was stored in four reservoirs. They supplied per day, and the reservoirs could hold a total of . Liverpool experienced a number of fires in 1840, and the failure of the water companies to supply sufficient water to extinguish them resulted in widespread damage. Consequently, an independent water supply for fighting fires and flushing sewers was proposed by the Highways Board, for which the engineer was James Simpson. Work on a well at Green Lane, deep, began in 1841, from which the water was pumped by a steam engine and stored in a reservoir at Kensington Fields holding . A network of cast iron pipes conveyed the water through the city, and the system was completed in 1847. The reservoir was subsequently covered, to reduce the growth of green algae, and was extended to hold . The scheme provided a constant water supply, although Simpson stated that a constant supply for the whole city would be useless, a view for which he was attacked in the Liverpool Post newspaper.
Water supply was intermittent, in some cases only being available for a short period three times a week, and there was dissatisfaction with the service provided. In 1845, the Liverpool Guardian Society for the Protection of Trade demanded that an inquiry be held, as the water companies' shares were over-valued, and they thought that the water supply was "not only miserably inadequate but the most expensive in the country." A special committee of the Highways Board sat to consider the evidence, and concluded that such a vital resource as a clean water supply ought to be managed by a public body, rather than private companies. At the time, the mechanisms by which water-borne diseases such as cholera and typhoid were transmitted was poorly understood, but the theory that they were miasmic, that is, spread by airborne smells, at least meant that the action to deal with the smells actually resolved the problem. Engineers were in short supply, as most were occupied by the railway mania, but the corporation obtained the services of the Scottish engineer James Newlands, who became the first Borough Engineer. He produced a detailed report on sewerage in April 1846, which the corporation adopted in July.
They obtained the Liverpool Act 1846 (9 & 10 Vict. c. cxxvii) to allow work on the construction of sewers and other works to begin, but the city was struck by another epidemic of cholera in 1847. A second enquiry was held in February 1847, to consider how Liverpool Corporation might take over the private water companies, and having valued the companies at £537,000, they sought an act of Parliament to authorise their actions. The (10 & 11 Vict. c. cclxi) was granted in July of that year, and the transfer took effect immediately. The water engineer Thomas Hawksley worked on the water supply schemes, while Newlands worked on the sewerage system.
The 1847 act was amended by the (10 & 11 Vict. c. cclxi), the (15 & 16 Vict. c. xlvii) and the (18 & 19 Vict. c. lxvi).
Water supply
There was initially some disagreement between the two engineers over how to secure a reliable water supply. Newlands and James Simpson, who had some success in constructing wells in Liverpool during the 1840s, recommended an extension of the system of wells, whereas Hawksley favoured bringing water into the town by gravity from a network of reservoirs in the Rivington Pike area. Although the estimated costs of this scheme had risen from £200,000 to £450,000 between 1847 and 1850, there was a majority within the council who supported it. The Liverpool Corporation Waterworks Act 1847 had previously authorised the Rivington Pike scheme, but a change in the makeup of the council resulted in a majority being against building it. However, they discovered that the contracts for the Rivington Pike Waterworks had already been awarded, and despite the legal obstacles, convened a court of enquiry to see if it was possible to reverse the decision. The council asked Robert Stephenson to arbitrate, and agreed to abide by his decision. He reported that the well scheme would be cheaper if less than of water per day were required, but that the Rivington Pike scheme was better for larger volumes, and he therefore recommended that option. His estimate that it could easily supply per day was over-optimistic, as Parliament decided that the scheme should also supply of compensation water per day, to maintain flows in the rivers.
The Rivington Pike scheme gathered water from of moorland, in an area which supplied the River Ribble and the River Douglas. Hawksley planned to build five dams to impound his reservoirs, each with a central clay core and an earth embankment, with a slope of three-to-one on the upstream side and two-to-one on the downstream side. The upstream faces were protected by stone pitching, to prevent wave action eroding the dam, with supply shafts and a shaft to allow the release of compensation water constructed of blue brick upstream of the clay core, but within the structure of the dam. These linked to horizontal culverts, which passed beneath the dam. Although other schemes of the period assumed that spring water could be used untreated, Hawksley constructed of slow sand filters to effectively filter the water before it entered a pipeline which was long and in diameter. At the time it was the longest water supply pipeline to have been constructed. Three of the reservoirs, at Lower Rivington, Upper Rivington and Anglezarke, were used to hold water for consumption. Compensation water was stored in two further reservoirs built at a higher level, at Rake Brook and Lower Roddlesworth, and linked to the first three by an open channel called the Goit, which ran for , and also served to collect water from the area between the two sets of reservoirs. The scheme as built impounded a total of of water.