West Middlesex Water Company
Group From 1806 To 1903
A utility company which supplied water to parts of West London. It was established in premises on the banks of the River Thames at Hammersmith, the central part of which was designed by William Tierney Clark. The company eventually became part of the publicly owned Metropolitan Water Board.
The works on Upper Mall were demolished in 1965-8. Panorama of the Thames says Clark was appointed Clerk of the Works in 1810 (bet his fiends joshed him about being Clerk Clark) and describes the building and its history.
London Metropolitan Archives gives:
"The West Middlesex Water Works were established in 1806 to supply the Western Suburbs. They were originally proposed by Robert Dodd, a civil engineer, to supply the area around Hammersmith and Kensington. The company was incorporated in 1806 with a capital of £80,000. After a disagreement over the location of the works, Dodd resigned and William Nicholson took over in 1807 to oversee the establishment of a works at Hammersmith. Under an act designed to increase the capital of the company by £160,000, the area covered by the West Middlesex Water Company was extended to include the parishes of St James Westminster, St Anne's Soho, St Mary-le-Strand, St Clement Danes, St Paul's Covent Garden, Paddington, Marylebone, St Pancras, St George Bloomsbury and St Giles in the Fields.
"In 1825 a pump was built to channel water to a new reservoir at Barrow Hill, near Primrose Hill. New reservoirs were constructed at Barnes in 1838 and in 1866 the company entered into an agreement with the Thames Conservancy which allowed it to draw an extra 4 million gallons of water from the river per day.
"The company was taken over by the Metropolitan Water Board under the Metropolitan Water Act, 1902."
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