King’s Vale Well and Pumping Station

In November 1865 Birmingham readers opening their papers found a long legal notice from the Birmingham Waterworks Company. The Company was going to Parliament for powers to build “a well or shaft, and pumping engine or engines” on two pieces of land in Perry Barr, “known as the Corner Piece and the Roman Field”.

Those two fields sat beside the old road through what is now Kingstanding, a short walk south of today’s Circle. The Company was about to make a very expensive bet there, and lose it.

Six million gallons a day

Looking back in 1891, a speaker in the debate over Birmingham’s water recalled that in 1866 “a well was sunk at King’s Vale on a site marked out by the engineers”, a site “eminent geologists” had picked as the best in the old red sandstone beds. “It was estimated that the well would yield 6,000,000 gallons per day.”

The Company’s own half-yearly reports show the work going ahead. By September 1867 it had “obtained possession … of the land at King’s Vale”. By September 1868 contracts had been let for “the erection of an engine, boilers, engine-houses, and other necessary buildings at King’s Vale”. Drawings of a pumping engine for the Company’s “Perry Barr station”, dated 1869–70, survive among the Boulton & Watt papers and are probably for this engine.

“But a small supply”

Then came the disappointment. In September 1871 the directors had to report that “The sinking at King’s Vale continues to yield but a small supply.”

The Corporation took over the Company in 1876, and the well went on working. In 1880 King’s Vale was one of Birmingham’s five wells, with Witton, Perry, Selly Oak and Aston, and in 1888 £1,400 was allowed for iron pipes, instead of earthenware, between the King’s Vale well and Short Heath. The Ordnance Survey marked the “Pumping Station (Birmingham Corporation Water Works)” in 1882–83, and by 1901 it was “King’s Vale Pumping Station”, with its engine house and two tanks.

Its real yield became a byword. C. A. Vince, writing the history of the Corporation in 1902, used it to show that wells were a gamble: “The King’s Vale well had been expected, on geological evidence, to yield 6,000,000 gallons daily; its actual yield is only 300,000.” That is one gallon in every twenty.

Bad water

Worse was to come. In 1892, when Birmingham was asking Parliament for the right to bring water from the Elan valley in mid-Wales, Dr Frankland and other witnesses told the inquiry that the King’s Vale water was contaminated. The next year nitrates in the well were reported to be rising.

Welsh water won. On the map revised in 1913 the station is marked “(Disused)”.

What the site became

A photograph in the city’s collections shows the engine house at its grandest: an Italianate building with a square tower, a tall round chimney and pump beams jutting from the walls. When it was taken is not recorded. In the 1920s the pumping station was still standing in the background of photographs taken at Kettlehouse Farm across the road.

By 1984, when a photographer recorded the “old waterworks building” opposite Kingstanding Library, only a small flat-roofed brick building seems to have been left. Today the site is Wheeldon Recreation Ground, on the east side of Kingstanding Road facing the library.

Walk up Rough Road to the Perry Barr Reservoir and you will find a bronze plaque with the other half of the story. The water in it, it says, “has flowed 86 miles, without being pumped, through tunnels & pipes from the mountains of mid-Wales.” After the long struggle at King’s Vale, “without being pumped” were words worth casting in bronze.

Then and now

1984

2010