CHIMNEY (CMT Trail stop 6)

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

CMT TRAIL STOP 6 WORDS SPOKEN BY CAMBRIDGE MUSEUM OF TECHNOLOGY'S CURATOR, PAM HALLS:

So we can look up here at our amazing chimney which is we reckon about 180 foot tall. That chimney was used to take away all of the smoke that was produced from burning the town's rubbish and also from burning coal and later coke in the boilers so it is tall because you want to have a nice pull for the furnaces. And I suppose you also want to throw out all the noxious gases a long way up.

This pumping station was run by the local council and as well as burning the town’s rubbish it was also used to burn what they call trade waste, waste coming from businesses and also from the local council and one element of this was secret documents. Nowadays we put things through the shredders but in the past drivers would come out from the police station and also from the council and they would bring secret documents which they would feed into the furnaces. On one occasion this went badly wrong. There was a bit of a draft which sucked all of the papers that were burning away in the furnace and then sucked them up the chimney and distributed them all over Cambridge and so there is a big rushing around trying to pick all these things up and get them back and after that a modification was made to the chimney on the left-hand side here you can see there's a grill, a filter thing, and this is to catch any secret documents that might accidentally zip up the chimney and end up distributed across Cambridge. Now this is the only chimney in Cambridge really but at one time there were really quite a lot around here. If you look at old photos of the area you can see chimneys from the brick factories that were around here. There was also a really large chimney down on Quayside which was linked to the electricity generating plant where they used Hathorn Davey engines just like ours to generate electricity.