1 February 2026 | Author/Destination: Great Britain / Großbritannien | Category: General, House of the Month, London
Reading Time: 11 minutes
The Octagon © geograph.org.uk – Christin Matthews/cc-by-sa-2.0
Crossness Pumping Station is a former sewage
pumping station designed by the architect
Charles Henry Driver for the
Metropolitan Board of Works‘s chief engineer
Sir Joseph Bazalgette. It is located at
Crossness Sewage Treatment Works, at the eastern end of the
Southern Outfall Sewer and the
Ridgeway path in the
London Borough of Bexley. Constructed between 1859 and 1865 by
William Webster, as part of Bazalgette’s redevelopment of the
London sewerage system, it features spectacular ornamental cast ironwork, described by architectural historian
Nikolaus Pevsner as “a masterpiece of engineering – a Victorian cathedral of ironwork”. It was decommissioned in 1956. Subsequently the building has been extensively restored and was opened to the public in 2016.
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