Context 159 - May 2019

C O N T E X T 1 5 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 9 23 Building services Joseph Gordon, borough surveyor In 1881 the death in service of the borough surveyor led to the appointment of Joseph Gordon (1837-1891) as his successor. It was an inspired choice. Like John Snow, he was a self- made man. Born in the village of Haltwhistle, close to Hadrian’s wall, his formal education had finished at a young age and he had trained under the city surveyor in Carlisle. After broadening his engineering experience in other northern towns he moved to Germany, where by the time of his Leicester appointment he had spent 15 years carrying out several major urban sani- tary schemes. He conceived an ambitious programme of work in Leicester which attracted national attention among his fellow civil engineers.There were three elements. The first was to lay an extensive new system of sewers, of a design and capacity to serve the needs of the town. The second was to create a sewage farm on land purchased at Beaumont Leys, to the north-west of the town. This was described in the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers as ‘1,375 acres in extent, this being the largest area in England, and exceeded only by the sewage farms of Paris and Berlin‘. The third element was the construction of the Abbey pumping station, capable of raising the town’s sewage 164 feet at a rate of 208,000 gallons an hour through two 33-inch rising mains. It was powered by four Woolf com- pound steam engines built by Josiah Gimson and Co of Leicester. Uniquely, all four steam engines remain in working order, having been in continuous service from 1891-1964 and carefully maintained since then. The building in which they are housed, designed by the Leicester architect Stockdale Harrison, is now a fine museum. Leicester’s public health improved sharply following the completion of Gordon’s scheme in 1891. Infant mortality fell rapidly in the closing years of the century to levels close to the national average, where it remained through the 20th century. In his annual report for 1905, the medical officer of health Dr Killick Millard was able to write: ‘What was at one time the great blot on the sanitary statistics of the town, viz the excessive infant mortality, is being wiped away’. Joseph Gordon did not live to see the frui- tion of his work in Leicester. In 1889 he was appointed to take Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s role in London but died a few weeks after taking up the post, while on the morning bus from home in Hampstead to his office in Vauxhall. His grave is in Leicester’s Welford Road cemetery. His obituary in the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers testifies to the high regard in which he was held by his fellow engineers: ‘Mr Gordon may be described as a favourable example of this country’s self-made men, not spoiled by success or good fortune, and regarded with deep respect and affection by those whose lot it was to work with or under him. His genial and modest manner never failed to inspire a sense of confidence which was at all times justi- fied… [his] wide and diversified experience and restless activity, combined with his methodical habits, enabled him to compress within the comparatively brief span of his existence a large amount of work of the highest character.’ The full impact of that work only becomes clear from the analysis of Leicester’s mortality data and deserves to be better known. Abbey pumping station, Leicester, is now a museum. All four steam engines remain in working order (Photo: Alex Liivet, Wikimedia) Sir Kent Woods is emeritus professor of therapeutics, University of Leicester.