BOILER ROOM (CMT Trail stop 8)

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

CMT TRAIL STOP 8 WORDS SPOKEN BY CAMBRIDGE MUSEUM OF TECHNOLOGY'S CURATOR, PAM HALLS:

So we are now going to walk through the Boiler Room. Mind the step as you come in. It is a complete contrast to the Engine Rooms, the Engine Rooms would have been very clean, they had designated cleaners cleaning them all the time. This is very dirty, it would have been very hot, very smelly but it's a marvelously open space that goes up almost 2 stories of houses up to a corrugated iron roof. The boilers that I’d like to show you first are down the end here so if you follow me along the cobbled floors. I love these floors because it looks as if generations of people have walked on them and worn a passage along them. So originally, when the pumping station was built, there were three boilers in a row, number one, number two and number three. Each boiler had what they called a destructor cell on each side. The destructor cells, isn’t it a wonderful word, a destructor was where the town’s rubbish was poured and burned to get up the heat to boil water to make steam which was then taken through to the Engine Room to power the engines. You can't actually see the destructors that's one of that the problems, that you have to imagine that on either side of this boiler there would have been two big furnaces which were called destructors and six days a week they were powered by dropping in the town's rubbish, all of the town's rubbish went in there and it was burned. On Sundays the rubbish wasn't collected from houses. In Victorian times you were not supposed to work on the Sabbath day, the Sunday, therefore rubbish wasn't collected on Sundays. But we still needed to keep the pumping station going so on those days they then had to use coal and then later coke in order to power the boilers. Now you can see right in front of us there is a door which is open and I can open it a bit more and you can see it's pretty much like a very large grate that some people might possibly have in their houses if they’ve got old fashioned houses with open fires. And so on Sundays the workers here would be shoveling coal or coke in there to keep the power going, keep that steam running, because if the steam finished then the sewage backed up and I am going to tell you a rather unsavoury story about the destructors later on. The boilers worked by using tubes, water was all in water tubes, Number Two which we can see on the left and I am going to open up the door to the boiler tubes and you can see them all, so there’s a whole row of boiler tubes there and they'd have had water going round and round and round in them with a destructor cell on each side heating them up and as the water got hotter and hotter it would eventually turn into steam and it would go up to that big vessel up there, a big round thing at the very top and that's where the steam collected and the steam was then channeled off through pipes, through next door to the Steam Engine Room.