City of Nottingham Water Department

City of Nottingham Water Department

Papplewick Pumping Station was the first to be built after the Nottingham Waterworks Company was taken over by the Corporation.
Industry	Water and sewage
Founded	1880
Defunct	1974
Fate	Taken over
Successor	Severn Trent Water Authority
Headquarters	Nottingham, England
Key people	Thomas Hawksley, Marriott Ogle Tarbotton

The City of Nottingham Water Department (1912–1974), formerly the Nottingham Corporation Water Department (1880–1912), was responsible for the supply of water to Nottingham from 1880 to 1974.^[1] The first water supply company in the town was the Nottingham Waterworks Company, established in 1696, which took water from the River Leen, and later from springs at Scotholme, when the river became polluted. Other companies were set up in the late 18th century and in 1824, while in 1826 the Trent Water Company was established. They employed Thomas Hawksley as their engineer, who became one of the great water engineers of the period, and Nottingham had the first constant pressurised water supply system in the country. The various companies amalgamated in 1845, and Hawksley remained as the consulting engineer until 1879.

Nottingham is located on top of a huge layer of Bunter sandstone, and Hawksley masterminded plans to extract filtered water from this aquifer. The Park Hill or Sion Hill pumping station was the first to be built in 1850, but was abandoned in 1880 as the water was too hard, and there were fears of pollution from the General Cemetery. Bagthorpe or Basford Works followed in 1857, and as the town expanded, further works were built to the north. Bestwood Pumping Station opened in 1871. The pumping stations were steam powered, and Hawksley also constructed a number of reservoirs to store the water, the final one under his jurisdiction being at Papplewick, completed just before water supply was taken over by the Corporation in 1880.

Acquisition of the water company by the Corporation was first considered in 1852, but the water company resisted the proposals, and when Marriott Ogle Tarbotton was appointed as Borough Engineer in 1859, he had more serious issues to contend with, including sewage disposal and upgrading the infrastructure of a town which had expanded very rapidly in a short period. Takeover eventually happened in 1880, when the Nottingham Corporation Water Department was created, and Tarbotton commissioned the building of Papplewick Pumping Station, which was completed in 1884. Boughton Pumping Station, which was opened in 1905, was the last to use large-diameter wells, as other sites used boreholes. The first of these was at Burton Joyce, started at a similar time to Boughton, but completed in 1898.

Nottingham became a city in 1897, and the water department was renamed as the City of Nottingham Water Department in 1912. The Corporation co-operated with Derby, Leicester, Sheffield and Derbyshire County, to create the Derwent Valley Water Board in 1899. Plans to construct reservoirs in the Derwent Valley in Derbyshire came to fruition in 1912 when Howden Reservoir was completed, although Nottingham did not use the water until 1917, due to quality issues. Derwent Reservoir followed in 1916, and Ladybower Reservoir in 1945.^[2] Five more borehole stations were built between 1945 and 1969, and steam engines were replaced by electric pumps in the 1960s. A new works and reservoir at Church Wilne on the Derwent was completed in 1967, but the planned reservoir at Carsington Water took until 1992 to complete. Meanwhile, water supply and sewerage ceased to be the responsibility of the City of Nottingham, and became part of the remit of the Severn Trent Water Authority in 1974. Following privatisation of the water industry in 1989, the responsibility passed to Severn Trent Water, one of ten water and sewage companies in England and Wales.