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.
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Building viewed from Northeast
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Abbey Pumping Station entrance
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One of the educational displays
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Beam engines
Read more about this topic: Abbey Pumping Station
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)