A Water Tower Windfall!!

BWTAS was recently contacted by Peter Loosley, who had been photographing water towers since 1976. He was unaware of our existence until his wife, Pat, read about us in Bill Bryson's book "The Road to Little Dribbling". He was keen that his collection of over 1,000 water towers worldwide went to a good home and offered them to us. A small delegation from BWTAS was assembled and went to meet Peter and his wife…

From left to right: Barry Barton (President), Andy Norris (Hon. Treasurer), Pat & Peter Loosley,
Wil Harvey (Chairman) & Ferrers Young (Archives)

On arrival we were greeted most warmly and enjoyed good hospitality… After coffee, biscuits and home made cake, Peter gave us a PowerPoint presentation that he'd previously created: "Living History — A Millenium of Water Towers Worldwide" that covered the development of materials and structures for the collection, storage and distribution of water through the ages.

This naturally created some discussion! Of particular interest was a tower, the like none of us had previously seen — one with a toroidal tank! This is located in Ciechanów, Poland, designed by Jerzy Michal Boguslawski and built in 1972, but now out of use. The tank is supported on a hyperbolic steel lattice base. Unfortunately I haven't been able to establish its capacity, but measuring it on Google Earth™ it would appear to be somewhere in the region of 400,000 gallons.

We were able to continue our chat about water towers over a most enjoyable pub lunch — we had a lot to catch up on… Hopefully we'll see Peter and his wife again. We left then left with Peter's collection of water tower photographs.

Ferrers

Photograph of Ciechanów water tower reproduced from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Licence