TIPPING BAY (CMT Trail stop 11)

For more details visit http://www.creatingmycambridge.com/trails/cmt/pumping-station-trail/

CMT TRAIL STOP 11 WORDS SPOKEN BY CAMBRIDGE MUSEUM OF TECHNOLOGY'S CURATOR, PAM HALLS:

Here we are in a vast area and this is called the tipping bay and this is where all the rubbish from Cambridge was brought originally by horse and cart later on by motorised vehicles and it’s called the tipping bay because here the rubbish was tipped into the furnaces and here it will be laid out and it would be sorted because you only wanted to burn things that were not going to make you some money or things that were not going to snarl up your boiler. So metal would be sorted out, it was then put into piles and the corporation steamroller would then come and run over it and turn it into nice bales which could then be sold on. Bottles were sorted out and just thrown away or buried around the site as were crocks. Everything else was then brought in and tipped in to the destructors. So stand at the railing and you can peep over onto what's called the charge floor. So you remember when we were in the boiler room with all the boilers and this is the top part of a boiler and can you see on the right-hand side of it there is a big cap over a hole, it’s probably a couple of feet in diameter. Underneath that was the destructor, the fires, and you could pull it back using that metal rod that you can see and the men would then shovel in the rubbish. When the place was originally built they had a really neat little system of hoppers on rails that ran over the holes but after about 20 to 25 years they found the maintenance was a bit heavy and it was cheaper to pay men to work and shovel rather than to pay for the maintenance on the rail system. This was not a great job it was probably very smelly it was very hot and it got much much worse during the Second World War because originally this would have been open. All of this wooden frontage here that you can see behind us, that wasn't there, but during the Second World War they had a thing called ‘the black out’ where you had to make sure that no lights were shown during the night and the reason was that if you had an enemy bomber coming over, and they could see lights on the ground then they could think there are people there we’ll bomb them. They might also be able to use the light from a place like this, because every time you opened up the destructor all the flames could be seen, and if you had a map of Cambridge you could think ‘That’s probably the pumping station, there is a railway, bomb the railway’ and if you take a railway, you take out the country's communications. Also if you bomb the pumping station you’d probably cause a lot of problems too with unpleasant diseases spreading. So they added all of this that you can see here the wooden part at which point it was probably a much more pleasant place to be. That said, the Second World War really saw the end of rubbish being burnt here. There was so much recycling during the Second World War. You didn't send your food scraps here to be burned, you had them in pig bins at the end of the street so that they could go to feed animals and so I think from the end of the Second World War with changes in the sort of rubbish that people had and more recycling they shut down the destructors and only really used them for trade waste after that. If someone had an outbreak of maybe foot and mouth disease then they might burn some of the bodies here. I think we’ve talked about public secrets being burned here too. I met a police driver who said he used to drive here regularly from the police station bringing things to go into the destructor and also very recently I met a gentleman whose wife had a baby in 1967, in fact she had twins, she had two of them, and the midwife who delivered them appeared after the birth with a small package saying, ‘well this is the afterbirth you need to incinerate it’ and he said ‘How am I supposed to do that?’ ‘Take it to the town's destructor’ she said so he got on his bicycle with his little package and cycled down here and dropped it into that hole there. Apparently the men who worked here, I thought they be aghast at being presented with this but apparently they weren’t at all, they are used to dealing with this sort of medical waste.

You’ll see this area is quite crowded with lots of exciting machines. Virtually all of them come from local industries they don't actually relate to the story of the pumping station. There are some fascinating stories behind these but that's for another time.

This is the end of our tour. If you want to find out more about the pumping station or Cambridge Museum of Technology then visit our website: Museumoftechnology.com