Worksop Waterworks Company, its predecessors and successors have provided a public water supply, together with sewerage and sewage treatment facilities to the town of Worksop since the mid-19th century. Unlike many towns, the sewerage network was constructed before the water supply network, and there was official opposition to the idea of providing a water supply network.
History Britain in the 1830s and 1840s faced a time of considerable political upheaval. The passing of the Reform Act 1832 (2 & 3 Will. 4. c. 45) had begun the process of giving votes to at least part of the population, while the Municipal Corporations Act 1835 (5 & 6 Will. 4. c. 76) had replaced self-perpetuating corporations in towns and cities with democratically elected councils. Following a serious outbreak of typhus in 1838, the reformer Edwin Chadwick had spent three years compiling his report on The Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Classes in Britain in 1842, which had caught the public imagination, and became an unexpected best-seller for Her Majesty's Stationery Office. The Health of Towns Commission was set up in the wake of this, while Chadwick campaigned vigorously for a system where every house would have a constant water supply and adequate sewerage. He was convinced that the introduction of water closets only made matters worse if they resulted in cesspools overflowing, rather than the waste being carried away to be treated elsewhere.
In 1847, Lord Morpeth had introduced a bill to Parliament, which would have required all town councils and town commissioners to ensure that every house had a water supply, and that issues of drainage, sewerage and street paving were addressed. There was opposition to the proposals, and by the time it became the Public Health Act 1848 (11 & 12 Vict. c. 63), many of its key proposals had been diluted. Nevertheless, it created a Central Board of Health, and the powers required to implement water and sewerage schemes could be obtained by a town requesting that an inspector from the board carried out a survey, rather than requiring a local act of Parliament, which was a much more costly exercise. The process was still not straightforward, as there were disagreements between men such as Chadwick who advocated glazed pipes for the sewers, and engineers such as Thomas Hawksley who advocated brick-built sewers, and there was no real agreement on what to do with the sewage once the pipework had been installed. Water supply produced a product which could be sold to households, and so private enterprise could finance many of the initial schemes, but sewerage did not produce anything that had a similar saleable value. Local authorities therefore had to fund the works themselves, and rates were generally not sufficient to fund such capital work.
Under the terms of the Public Health Act 1848, local boards of health could be created in towns or villages where the death rate exceeded 23 per thousand, or where more than one tenth of the population requested a board. Worksop's death rate was 26.6 per thousand in 1847, and a petition signed by the required number of inhabitants was sent to the Central Board of Health. However, a number of prominent people within the town felt that such a board was unnecessary, and submitted a counter proposal. This objection did not stop William Lee visiting the town on behalf of the board to prepare a report. He arrived on 3 July 1850, and his report stated that there was no public water supply, no drainage system, unpaved streets, the town was uncleansed, there were many dilapidated privies with open cesspools, and some housing suffered from bad ventilation and overcrowding. Despite these findings, it was another two years before elections took place for the local board of health, when nine of the 29 candidates standing for positions were elected on 5 August 1852. The nine consisted of the Duke of Newcastle and eight prominent tradesmen. There were some difficulties in the early years, with members unused to the idea of ordered debate, and the financial position proving to be confused. The clerks resigned on 8 December 1856, citing "ungentlemanly conduct" by other members of the board, and in 1857 a petition was submitted requesting that the board be disbanded.
Sewage disposal Joseph Garside, a local entrepreneur who owned a large wood yard in the town and subsequently ran the Worksop and Retford Brewery Company, had stood for the board initially, but failed to get elected. However, he had more success in 1856, and became its chairman in 1857, a position which he held for 19 years. Like many towns, the poorer areas of Worksop were often affected by outbreaks of cholera, typhus and typhoid, and under Garside's leadership, construction of a main drainage scheme for the town began in 1859. The engineer was Robert Rawlinson, whose report on sewerage schemes in several towns, including Worksop, was presented to the Society of Arts in 1862, and published in The Engineer. The details of the scheme are presented in two tables, but it is not clear why they differ so much. Both show that there were some sewers constructed of brick, and much longer lengths constructed using earthenware pipes of , and diameter. Cast iron pipes of the same sizes were used where the sewers had to cross the Chesterfield Canal, the River Ryton, and the canal feeder. The main brick sewer ran from Bridge Street to Beaver Place, and was of egg-shaped construction, with an overflow to the River Ryton where it ended, and the earthenware pipes to the outlet works began. The system included 75 manholes and 48 lampholes, to allow the sewers to be inspected, together with 51 ventilating shafts. The upper ends of the sewers were provided with flushing tanks, and the outlet works consisted of six trenches, about long and deep, where lime water was added for disinfection and moveable screens removed solid matter. The filtered sewage was then discharged into the Ryton, and although Rawlinson believed that the works were efficient, he suggested that the liquid would be better filtered by applying it to vegetable soil under full cultivation. His two tables show that the total length of sewers was or , and that installation costs were £5,871 or £3,107.
Despite Rawlinson's assurances, the scheme was not wholly successful, and the inadequacy of the outlet works was brought into focus by new legislation to prevent the discharge of sewage into rivers, following the findings of the River Pollution Commission. The issue was resolved on 19 August 1881, when a new pumping station at Bracebridge was switched on, to pump the effluent to Kilton Forest Farm, owned by Mr F. J. S. Foljambe of Osberton, where it was discharged onto the fields. The cost of the scheme was nearly double the original estimate of £8,000. The engine house, offices and a house for the attendant cost £7,000, another £4,500 was spent on the engines, boilers and pumps, while repairs to the existing system and the new pipeline to Kilton cost £3,500. The revised scheme, including the design of the Italianate pumping station, was the responsibility of the local board of health's surveyor, John Allsopp. The engine house contained two beam engines, connected to double-acting pumps. They were manufactured by Joseph Clayton of Preston, and were rated at . Each could pump per day along the pipeline to Kilton, around twice the volume actually required at the time.
At the opening ceremony, John Mapson, the chairman of the board of health, and John Thornton each started one of the engines. They were then stopped for Mapson to address the gathering. To express their gratitude that the scheme had been completed, he invited all the workmen who had worked on the scheme to dinner at the Golden Ball on the following Monday. The party then went to Kilton Farm, but arrived before the sewage started to discharge, and because the weather was inclement, left straight away. By the time the new works were completed, Worksop had borrowed £37,000 to fund improvements to the town, and most of it had been spent on the sewerage system. Bracebridge pumping station, together with its chimney, is now a grade II listed structure. It was built in the Italian Romanesque style, of red bricks and ashlar with dressings of gault and blue brick, and a hipped slate roof. Allsopp became the engineer and surveyor for the board in 1876, having previously worked on the Settle and Carlisle Railway, the Duffield and Selston branch of the Midland Railway, and then for four years on drainage and sewerage projects. He resigned from the board in 1884, to follow a career as a freelance architect and surveyor.
Development By 1932, the pumping station had been operating for over 50 years, without any major issues. However, the amount of effluent being pumped each day had risen from to , and while the pumps could easily handle this volume, being capable of dealing with twice that amount, the council were concerned that failure of the pumps would lead to severe pollution of the Ryton. In addition, the receiving tanks at the pumping station were not really deep enough, resulting in sewage backing up in the sewers. Finally, because the hours when pumping was allowed were restricted, the tanks would often be overflowing into the river by the morning, particularly if there was rainfall during the night. This had resulted in complaints being made by the Notts County Health Department and the Trent Fishery Board. The council met in December 1932 to consider two schemes, one to refurbish the pumping station, and the other for an extension of the main drain to a site near Manton railway viaduct, where a new pumping station would be constructed. Although the cost of this option was £45,596, almost five times the cost of refurbishment, the council voted for the more costly scheme, as it would enable land to the east of the current site to be developed, without having to pump sewage back to Bracebridge.
In November 1962, Charles Allsopp, the borough engineer, delivered a lengthy paper to the council's Health and Sewerage Committee, which was printed in full in the local newspaper in early 1963, by which time Allsopp had retired. Some minor changes had been made to the original scheme, to make the removal of sludge and screenings easier, and in 1939, the steam-driven pumps had been replaced by vertical spindle pumps, driven by electric motors. The 1932 scheme for a new pumping station had not gone ahead, because although approval had been sought from the Ministry of Health, a "Worksop Industrial Scheme" was proposed, which might have seen the population of the town increase to 100,000 in under five years. The pumping station scheme was deferred until the uncertainty could be resolved, and the onset of the Second World War brought further delays. Post-war shortages prevented any progress, and the system continued to serve the needs of the town. There were some difficulties, caused by the inability of the farmer to cope with the steadily increasing volumes of liquid pumped to the farm. This was allowed to flow into Thievesdale Lane, where it created a hazard, and small quantities of zinc and nickel in the effluent, derived from talcum powder, oxidation of water tanks, and industrial discharges, were thought to be responsible for crop failures at the sewage farm.