We think we’ve had it tough this week but here’s what Lancaster residents had to face to get water back in 1800

It was not always so and certainly not the case this week as thousands of homes in the district went days without a supply of water.

With that fresh in our minds, we thought it would be interesting to look back from 1800 to the present day to see where our water comes from.

Around 1800 the 9000 people in Lancaster borough drew their water from 1300 wells, and open drains along the streets removed their waste.

After 1812 the sewage was carried away underground in an expanding network of rectangular stone-lined drains, but these tended to get blocked and to leak, polluting the ground water that seeped into the wells.

The Mill Race into which the drains emptied was an open sewer, which backed up into the streets and houses when it rained heavily and at high tide.

Much of Lancaster’s water supply was seriously contaminated and death rates were high (compared with other English towns at that time) particularly among the poorer families who lived in the lower-lying parts of the town.

Richard Owen’s report in 1845 confirmed just how bad Lancaster’s water and sewage system was.

However, among the ratepayers of Lancaster there was a protracted resistance to spending the large sums needed to rectify this problem and save lives.

The Public Health Act of 1848 strengthened the hand of groups like the local Sanitary Association to establish a Lancaster Board of Health to plan and press the Corporation to

build an affordable, properly engineered solution to the problem.

The Lancaster Waterworks Act of 1852 was the green light.

The peat on Clougha held back the rainwater that soaked slowly into and down through the sandstone of the hill and emerged as very pure water.

Edmund Sharpe’s scheme collected this water from the becks, springs and bored tunnels and led it through pressure-break tanks at the Old Gauge Basin (near Jubilee Tower), Appletree and Brow Top into the Workhouse Reservoir (later known as Wyresdale Road Reservoir).

These tanks reduced the water’s pressure so that the new iron mains and the lead pipes being installed in houses did not rupture.

The first houses were connected in 1854: decades later the last of the town’s older houses were still being connected up.

An additional cost to Lancaster was the need to build a reservoir at Abbeystead to ensure that Lancaster’s abstraction of water, directly or indirectly, from the tributaries of the River Wyre did not lead to water levels in the Wyre so low that mill production south of Abbeystead was disrupted.

The Abbeystead reservoir held 95 days’ worth of Lancaster’s water usage that could be used to top up the flow in the Wyre during dry weather.

By 1901 Lancaster’s population had reached 40,000 and its water system had also been supplying rapidly expanding Morecambe and Heysham since 1864, so the rest of the

nineteenth century saw a sequence of schemes to expand the supply.

A second source on Clougha was fed through the original system in 1864.

A new supply was created in 1876 with a supply reservoir at Damas Gill (1891), south of Hare Appletree, which led into Brow Top Tank.

The next expansion was the building of Blea Tarn Reservoir on Blea Tarn Road to take more water from the wider Clougha area, and a filter house was built in 1913 on the A6 (Scotforth Road) at Burrowbeck Bridge and expanded several times in the twentieth century.

Blea Tarn Reservoir was built between 1896 and 1901.

The official opening ceremony in 1902 was captured by Mitchell and Kenyon in a very early silent film that can be viewed here

The original supply line got its own filter house on Langthwaite Road, again to remove discoloration in the water, balance its pH and kill bacteria.

The next expansion was the building of the even bigger Langthwaite Reservoir on Little Fell Lane, which opened in 1935.

The opening of Langthwaite was again captured on film and can be viewed here

The expansion of the water supply so far has been based on collecting more water from Clougha.

In 1941 a connection was made from the Thirlmere-to-Manchester supply that runs in tunnels and aqueducts east of Lancaster.

This allowed Lancaster to tap into this major supply when needed.

This source of water now has its own Water Treatment Works.

In 1961 the responsibility for Lancaster and Morecambe’s water supply passed from the Corporation to the Lune Valley Water Board and then to the North West Water Authority in 1974.

It then moved to North West Water in 1989 (a privatised company) that merged with NORWEB in 1995 to form United Utilities who are the current operator.

In terms of sources of water supply the next major development was in 1964 when water could be extracted from the River Lune at Caton and pumped into Langthwaite Reservoir.

Blea Tarn reservoir had become an overflow reservoir for Langthwaite.

Also in the 1960s a new holding reservoir was built off Newlands Road and the one next to Williamson Park was extended.

The one on Wyresdale Road was closed.

The new Water Treatment Works built at Langthwaite in the 1990s (to meet higher water-quality standards) led to the decommissioning of the filter houses on Langthwaite Road (now private housing) and on Scotforth Road (now demolished and the site of student accommodation).

The water-supply system for Lancaster, Morecambe and the surrounding area in 2005 is shown in a diagram attached to this story.

Today the River Lune is the main source, followed by the Thirlmere supply and finally the old Clougha sources.

Langthwaite Reservoir now has a floating array of solar panels.

United Utilities said today: “Did you know that over two thirds of your water comes from upland surface water reservoirs in the Lake District, the Pennines and North Wales; some comes from boreholes; and a quarter comes from rivers, like the Dee?

“Catching all that rainfall is one thing, but to take it from its natural source and turn it into clean, clear drinking water that comes out of your taps, is something else.

"After transporting the water from rivers, boreholes and over 200 reservoirs to more than 80 sites across the North West, the raw water then has to be treated and disinfected to kill any harmful germs that may be present.

"All stages of water treatment will remove some of the micro-organisms present, however, chemical disinfection is still needed to make sure the water is completely free from harmful bacteria and viruses.

" We do this by adding small amounts of chlorine, which is the final stage of treatment before the water is piped to our customers.

"The chlorine levels in the water supply are constantly monitored, and the water that leaves our works meets strict water quality standards.

“At every stage in its journey from source to your tap, we sample, analyse, and continually monitor the effectiveness of water treatment to make sure we are providing all our customers with the highest quality drinking water.”

Thank you to Keith Horsfield for his contribution to this article from his book on the Mill Race and the Green Ayre which is out of print but available on the LAHS's website here

Thanks to Lancaster Civic Vision for the information for the article from their leaflet no 76 ‘Lancaster and Morecambe Water Supply'.