Another blog entry from the unpublished visits I made during the late summer, here’s a piece on the rather unusual Kew Bridge Steam Museum.
Starting its life as a water pumping station all the way back in 1838, it operated until the 1940s in its original guise. Fortunately when the site was decommissioned the Water Board acted with some foresight to preserve several of the old steam-operated pumps which are the core of the Steam Museum’s current set of exhibits, including a mammoth 50 tonne ‘Grand Junction 90′ engine, described by Charles Dickens as a ‘monster’. The many steam-operated beam engines are put into service on Sundays during the summer months, as is the small steam locomotive that takes visitors around the site on its narrow-gauge railway. Even for those not mechanically-inclined there’s something very impressive about the museum’s big spinning and whirring marvels of engineering, and its definitely worth a visit.
When I was there earlier in the year, the museum was also playing host to a Steampunk exhibition, consisting of artifacts from a world where the Victorians made the technological leaps that it took us until the 1940s or so to make in the real world. On display were rocket packs, rayguns and even a re-imagined Darth Vader helmet! On the day of my visit the finals of the annual ‘tea duelling’ competition were also taking place – a fiendishly complicated game which requires nerves of steel and, according to one of the participants, was devised by the great detective himself, Sherlock Holmes…
The Kew Bridge Steam Museum is open from Tuesday to Sunday every week during the hours of 11 t to 4pm. Admission prices are £10 for adults and £4 for children, but this price allows you to return at any time during the following year. You can see all the other photographs I took during the visit here.
December 17, 2011
London Sights