History
The museum was previously a pumping station used to pump sewage to treatment works at Beaumont Leys, and was opened in 1891. The grand Victorian building, designed by Stockdale Harrison (city architect in 1890) and beautifully decorated beam engines were a cause of great civic pride. It continued pumping Leicester's sewage until 1964, and then underwent renovation. It opened as a museum in 1972. It is one of a number of historic pumping stations which have been preserved.
-
Building viewed from Northeast
-
Abbey Pumping Station entrance
-
One of the educational displays
-
Beam engines
Read more about this topic: Abbey Pumping Station
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by extreme cunning and by a relentless tactical clairvoyance .... Hitler was history in its purest form.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)