Castle Acre Open Day 22nd March 2015

Photographer Dennis Pedersen has always had a thing for water towers. He says he was inspired by the futuristic cartoon The Jetsons and Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds. Never did he think that he might one day be the proud owner of one.

Last year he bought a decommissioned Braithwaite type tower just outside Castle Acre in Norfolk.

To his dismay though he found that the presumed fate for the Meccano-like structure by the vendors and local planners was its demolition for its scrap value. However Dennis recognised the tower as an important part of the area's rural heritage and he had a vision that this unused resource could "create an outstanding example of sustainable recycling."

Inspired by the work of the Landmark Trust and the Living Architecture Project, he commissioned cutting edge architects Tonkin Liu to envisage a way to preserve the structure with minimal changes yet allow it to be reused for accommodation. Now he's holding an open day at the tower to show local people and water tower enthusiasts his plans.

BWTAS members have been especially invited to come along and some will be available to explain the engineering history and cultural significance of water towers. Dennis and his architect will be showing a model of a potential conversion and serving tea and biscuits and giving free tours of the tower from 10 AM to dusk. If you'd like to come and have a nosey around or see the plans or show your support, all would be very welcome.

Please note that access to the tank is restricted by ladders and Dennis can only take small groups up there. The risk assessment for any water tower is that heights and places only normally accessible to trained personnel can be dangerous and so your visit will be entirely at your own risk. You will have to be suitably fit if you want to climb up to visit the tank. The site is overgrown and derelict and appropriate footwear and clothing are advisable. No children or persons under 18 may go up the tower. 

Please check this page for updates before you set off as this event is dependent on weather and jobsworth. The tower is .2 miles from the village where there are numerous attractions and facilities. Please park considerately.

This is a rare opportunity and BWTAS is profoundly grateful to Mr. Pedersen for his offer of hospitality.

Sunday 22nd March, 10 AM to dusk
Massingham Rd
Castle Acre

www.dennispedersen.com

They didn't just grow there

The recollections of an itinerant family of 'tankies' and their 284 water tower career in the postwar era.

download from 

http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/53/v53i04p130-141.pdf

Indian Inspiration

Painting No. 130, Water Tower
Stewart Indian School, Carson City, Nevada
8"x 8", oil on linen panel
September 1, 2011

Standing over the facility, like a giant sci-fi robot, the water tower is surrounded by trees and buildings. It's silvery exterior reflecting the local color. This is painting 6 of 10 in a series painted at the school. 

Source: http://jamesamckewfineart.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/water-tower.html

The Stewart Indian School in Carson City Nevada served as an off-reservation boarding school from 1890 through 1980, and its stone buildings are an icon of education and life for many American Indians in the West. After the school closed, the buildings were emptied and many became home to state offices. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is comprised of 83 buildings.

Radar-cal revision of Allhallows Water Tower

images from Geograph

A former Braithwaite water tower near Allhallows, Medway, England once owned by Southern Water was converted in September 2008 into a radar station by the Port of London Authority to monitor ship movements on the Thames. The Yantlet Line which marks the downstream limit of the PLA area lies 4 km to the east.


This re-version is a variation of the Tilbury radar tower disguised during WWII as a water tower.

Information Britain says:

Allhallows is a village and civil parish on the Hoo Peninsula in Kent, under the unitary authority of Medway Council. The Hoo Peninsula is a jutt of land above Rochester, sandwiched between the Medway and the Thames and divided from the Isle of Grain by the Yantlett Creek. Allhallows village is in two parts: the ancient Hoo All Hallows and the 20th century holiday colony Allhallows-on-Sea. Hoo All Hallows is clustered round the parish church of All Saints. All Saints church dates from the 12th century and is the only Grade I listed building on the Hoo peninsula. The modern holiday village of Allhallows-on-Sea lies to the north of the village and was developed by Southern Railways in the 1930s. Their original planned development never took place because of World War II, but there is a now a Haven holiday park and some residential properties on the estuary shore. The station was demolished in 1961 and sold for use as a holiday caravan park. There is a listed railway water tower situated among the caravans. The area is popular with bird watchers. Other leisure activities include a 9 hole golf course and The Cross Park Country Park. There are a couple of pubs, The Rose and Crown Inn and The British Pilot.

Tell me, where do you come from my Cotton Eyed To (wer)?

In 1915, when its population was about 1600, the city of Cotton Plant Arkansas USA was the birthplace of one of the greatest ever Americans, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

A fine documentary recently shown on the BBC about Sister Rosetta opens with views of the water tower, bearing the proud name "CITY OF COTTON PLANT". It's a fairly ordinary water tower and it never supplied water to the home of this great American artist.

It turns out that the present steel water tower was built with funds from the PWA (Public Works Administration, an agency of Roosevelt's New Deal) in 1935. It replaced an earlier water tower which would have been serving the city at the time Sister Rosetta was born.

At the age of six she was taken by her evangelist mother Katie Bell to Chicago to join Roberts Temple, Church of God in Christ, where she developed her distinctive style of singing and guitar playing. 

At the age of 23 she left the church and went to New York to join the world of show business, signing with Decca Records. For the following 30 years she performed extensively to packed houses in the USA and subsequently Europe, before her death in 1973.

In 2008 the state governor of Pennsylvania declared that henceforth January 11th will be Sister Rosetta Tharpe Day in recognition of her remarkable musical legacy.

The present Cotton Plant water tower - beside the town's derelict one room jail - is being nominated to the National Register of Historic Places with local significance under Criterion C as a good example of a 1930s water tower. The Cotton Plant Water Tower is also being nominated to the National Register under Criterion A for its associations with the activities of the PWA in Woodruff County during the 1930s. The Cotton Plant Water Tower is being submitted to the National Register of Historic Places under the multiple-property listing “An Ambition to Be Preferred: New Deal Recovery Efforts and Architecture in Arkansas, 1933-1943.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Company noted in its first map of Cotton Plant that the small, eastern Arkansas city had a four inch main running a short distance along Main Street. This water main served eight one inch hydrants used solely for sprinkling the unpaved street. One water tower, sixty-three feet above ground, held 23,000 gallons of water to help keep the dust to a minimum in this quickly growing town. This first water tower was behind a blacksmith shop north of Main Street and west of Ammon Street in the middle of the block. Though the population, 900 in 1908, reached 1,661 by 1920, the city continued to maintain this simple water system and 23,000 gallon tank. More information from Arkansas Historic Preservation Program

Cotton Plant was first called Richmond and was sparsely settled as early as 1840. William Lynch was the first man to build a store in the area, settling here from Mississippi in 1846. After unsuccessfully seeking application for a post office by the name of Richmond, the town settled on Cotton Plant in 1852. Lynch’s store attracted others and soon the village became the center of economic activity in this relatively isolated part of Woodruff County. It was not until 1887 that the town was formally incorporated.

Everyone comes to Ric's

Dining at Ric's Grill in Lethbridge, Alberta is truly an extravagant experience; located 150 feet in the air in a converted watertower, Ric's Grill guarantees a dining experience that is so unique, it is the only one of its kind in all of North America. 

From the Daily Commercial News and Construction Record:

Lethbridge, Alberta builder spends $2 million to turn water tank into restaurant

PAT BRENNAN, correspondent, LETHBRIDGE, Alta.

Builder Doug Bergen always marvelled at his town’s water tower while growing up in Lethbridge, Alta. It was the tallest structure out on the wide open prairies south of Calgary. So, he was shocked when he learned Lethbridge proposed to scrap the retired water tower.

Bergen, an architectural technician and developer, persuaded the town to sell the water tower to him and more than $2 million later he opened it as one of Canada’s most unconventional restaurants.

He believes it is the only restaurant in the world built into a water tower 12 storeys above the ground. “The town council fought me all the way on this project. They made me jump through some very unreasonable hoops, but on our opening night in 2004 the entire council was there for the free booze and food,” said Bergen.

City engineers claim the tower, built in 1958, had outlived its usefulness and it sat abandoned for several years after a new community reservoir replaced it. “The town’s public works feared it was unstable and should come down, but I had consulting engineers check it out and found it was still strong and sturdy. The municipal guys wouldn’t even climb up the tower’s ladder to check inside the tank,” said 44-year-old Bergen.

“It’s been an iconic structure in Lethbridge and southern Alberta and if I was going to keep it alive I wanted to make it a place that the public could visit and use.”

It took him two years to find a tenant, but eventually Ric’s Grill, a chain of nine steak and seafood restaurants in Alberta and B.C. moved in and has become a popular tourist attraction in Lethbridge.

Bergen designed the 9,000-square-foot restaurant with two levels for eating and a third as a lounge in the bulbous water tank, which used to hold 500,000 gallons of water 36 feet deep. He had to hoist nearly 1,700 tons of washed gravel into the water tank to replace the weight of the water to keep the tank from swaying in the prairie winds.

He cut 32 windows into the side of the tank, plus skylights in the top. A catwalk was built around the outside of the tank so maintenance crews can wash the windows. An elevator was installed in the 8-foot-diameter central shaft of the tower to carry customers up to the restaurant. Eight narrower legs support the weight of the tower. Bergen added large banners between each of the legs, which he rents out as billboards.

A 60-foot-tall transmission aerial was added to the top of the water tower.

Everything but the customers and the Alberta beef steaks had to be lifted to the restaurant by mobile cranes. Steel floors were crafted to create the three levels.

Douglas J. Bergen and Associates designs and builds real estate and commercial projects in Southern Alberta, such as vacation cottages in the Crownest Pass in the Rocky Mountains.

Alcatraz Island (1941)

BWTAS member, David Blackburn, has sent in these photographs of the water tower on the Alcatraz Island, taken from a tourist boat by a friend (click on images to reveal full size). The island has had many uses during its history, but it was during the period when it was being used as a federal prison, that the water tower was built in 1940/41. The tower consists of steel tank of 208,710 gallons (250,650 U.S. gallons) supported by six columns secured to concrete footings. The structure is 93 feet tall and is the only elevated fresh water storage facility on the island. The location is 37 degrees, 49 minutes, 34.18 seconds North, 122 degrees, 25 minutes and 19.56 seconds West.