It is not every day that you come across a set of 80-year old electric motors, 2m in diameter, that are housed in a beautiful 150 year old Victorian building. For the team at G&G Engineering in Barnsley, the refurbishment project in the Water & Waster Industry at Abbey Mills Pumping Station was a real eye-opener.

Abbey Mills is a sewage pumping station located in London E15. It was designed in an elaborate Byzantine style and hence for centuries has been nicknamed ‘The Cathedral of Sewage’.

The electric motors drive massive pumps to raise the sewage in the London sewerage system between the two Low Level Sewers and the Northern Outfall Sewer, built in the 1860s to carry the increasing amount of sewage produced in London away from the centre of the city.