Claverton Pumping Station

Claverton Pumping Station is identifiable by a massive, twenty-four-foot-wide wooden waterwheel housed in an ashlar Bath stone building on the banks of the River Avon. Designed by civil engineer John Rennie and completed in eighteen thirteen, the station was built to solve a critical water shortage on the Kennet and Avon Canal. Because boats lost water every time they moved through the canal’s locks, the station used the river's own current to drive a breastshot waterwheel, which in turn powered beam engines to lift water forty-eight feet up into the canal.