‘The great Crofton campaign’ to secure the pumping station for a hundred more years

The Kennet and Avon Canal Trust’s council has agreed to launch a bid for funding to restore Crofton pumping station and enhance the canal as a major tourist attraction and educational resource.  

Announcing the bid in the Trust’s magazine, the Butty, the canal is described as “a wonderful 100-mile ‘linear park’.”

The campaign will involve a bid by the end of the year for a large Heritage Lottery Fund grant.  The bid could total £1.5 million of which fifteen per cent would have to be raised by the Trust.

A main aim of the project is to provide better access to the historic station and its unique steam engines.  The trust and Crofton’s volunteers also want to make it a centre for education.

Restoration work at Crofton itself could cost around three quarters of a million pounds and include repairs to the roof, skylights, windows, repointing the brickwork and replacing some of the wooden beams.

Crofton is already developing the old smithy building at the station (which is owned by the Canal and Rivers Trust) as an educational centre for young visitors.

And there is one ‘blue sky’ notion that would really give the station a boost.  There is a plan to install an inclined lift to bring people up the steep bank from the canal to the pumping station buildings:  “A modern lift would echo the original lift that brought the coal from the canal boats up to the engines.”

This lift would certainly help make the site more accessible to disabled visitors which is a main aim for the whole project.

The Crofton pumping station enabled the canal’s original engineers to raise the canal forty feet above the nearest water source – and so avoid an expensive tunnel.  In modern money Crofton saved the engineers about £8 million.

Now Crofton is famous for having the world’s oldest working steam driven beam engines.

Crofton Pumping Station was built in 1807. Its first beam engine was a Boulton and Watt which had a wooden beam and began working in 1809. In 1812, a larger bore Boulton and Watt engine was installed beside it.

In 1846, the first engine was replaced by an engine with an improved technology: a Sims Combined Cylinders Engine constructed by Harvey of Hayle.  

Both the 1812 Boulton and Watt and the 1846 Harvey engine are in working condition, and are steamed publicly on several weekends through the summer months from a coal fired boiler. When the pumping station is in steam, it does the job for which it was built and the electrically powered pumps are switched off.

Crofton is next in steam at the Easter weekend – April 19, 20 and 21.  Times of opening are on the Crofton website.