Members visit masterpiece of 19th-century engineering, architecture, and design.
Photo: Summer Visit: Cambridge Philosophical Society members outside the Crossness Pumping Station in London.
Our 2023 summer visit for members of the The Cambridge Philosophical Society was to the Crossness Pumping Station in London, a masterpiece of 19th-century engineering, architecture, and design.
The Crossness Pumping Station, situated on the river Thames at Abbey Wood in South London was constructed between 1859 and 1865. The guided tour took members around the pumping station which was designed by Sir Joseph William Bazalgette (1819–1891) and architect Charles Henry Driver (1832–1900). The station was constructed as part of Bazalgette's redevelopment of the London sewerage system, after the 'Great Stink' of 1858.
The pumping station was decommissioned in the 1950s, but contains the four original pumping engines, although not in their original 1864 configuration. At Crossness, the four beam engines built by James Watt and Company in Birmingham each drove eight pumps which lifted the sewage another 21 feet for disposal into the river or into a holding reservoir, if the tide was coming in.
After 15 years of restoration, only one of the pumping engines 'Prince Consort' is working. The pumping station became a Grade I listed building in 1970 and was has slowly been restored since.
As testament to the build quality of Bazalgette's sewerage system, in 2015 there were 8.6 million Londoners using the 150 year old system. Although the pumping station is no longer in use, parts of the original site are. The Crossness holding reservoir is still used as a back-up to the main site, now owned by Thames Water and known as the Crossness Sewage Treatment Works.
As a benefit of membership of the CPS, members take part in free visits throughout the year to various science related locations across the UK. To join the Cambridge Philosophical Society visit our membership page here
Photo: Elaborate decorative ironwork in the Octagon.
Photo: Cambridge Philosophical Society with one of the Crossness Engines Trust guides.
Photo: Detail of the The Prince Consort pumping engine.
Photo: Demonstration of the London sewage system
Photo: Unrestored fly wheel
From Darwin’s paper on evolution to the development of stem cell research, publications from the Society continue to shape the scientific landscape.
Mathematical Proceedings is one of the few high-quality journals publishing original research papers that cover the whole range of pure and applied mathematics, theoretical physics and statistics.
Biological Reviews covers the entire range of the biological sciences, presenting several review articles per issue. Although scholarly and with extensive bibliographies, the articles are aimed at non-specialist biologists as well as researchers in the field.
The Spirit of Inquiry celebrates the 200th anniversary of the remarkable Cambridge Philosophical Society and brings to life the many remarkable episodes and illustrious figures associated with the Society, including Adam Sedgwick, Mary Somerville, Charles Darwin, and Lawrence Bragg.
Become a Fellow of the Society and enjoy the benefits that membership brings. Membership costs £20 per year.
Show All
Volcanoes are hazardous and beautiful manifestations of the dynamic processes that have shaped our planet. Volcanoes impact our environment in numerous ways. Over geological time volcanic activity has resurfaced the Earth and provided life with a terrestrial substrate upon which to proliferate. Volcanic degassing has shaped our secondary atmosphere and as part of the process of plate tectonics, maintained just the right amount of water and carbon dioxide at the surface to produce a stable and equitable climate. Magma in the subsurface in volcanic environments today gives Society geothermal energy. The fluids degassed from magmas in the plumbing systems of volcanoes give rise to hydrothermal ore deposits, the source of much of our copper and other metals, critical to the energy transition. In this lecture I will describe the nature and importance of magma degassing for our atmosphere and oceans, as a source of both pollutants and nutrients, and in the formation of mineral deposits. I will describe my own research in carrying out measurements of volcanic gases (using a range of spectroscopic methods, from the ground and using drones), and analysis of erupted lavas, to understand the chemistry and physics of volcanic outgassing and its role in sustaining our planetary environment.
One of the many outstanding achievements of G I Taylor was the discovery of relatively simple statistical laws that apply to highly complex turbulent flows. The emergence of simple laws from complexity is well known in other branches of physics, for example the emergence of the laws of heat conduction from molecular dynamics. Complexity can also arise at large scales, and the structural vibration of an aircraft or a car can be a surprisingly difficult phenomenon to analyse, partly because millions of degrees of freedom may be involved, and partly because the vibration can be extremely sensitive to small changes or imperfections in the system. In this talk it is shown that the prediction of vibration levels can be much simplified by the derivation and exploitation of emergent laws, analogous to some extent to the heat conduction equations, but with an added statistical aspect, as in turbulent flow. The emergent laws are discussed and their application to the design of aerospace, marine, and automotive structures is described. As an aside it will be shown that the same emergent theory can be applied to a range of problems involving electromagnetic fields.
Registered address:17 Mill LaneCambridgeCB2 1RXUnited Kingdom
Business address:6A King's ParadeCambridgeCB2 1SJUnited Kingdom
Office hours at the business address:Monday and Thursday: 10am-12pm and 2pm-4pm.
Please contact philosoc@group.cam.ac.uk to agree a timing before visiting the office.