Sewage Pumping Station No. 1 SP001 c.1900
Image by Sydney Heritage
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n 1859 Sydney’s sewerage system consisted of five outfall sewers which drained to Sydney Harbour. By the 1870’s, the Harbour had become grossly polluted (especially with the nearby abattoir at Glebe Island) and there were outbreaks of Enteric Fever (Typhoid) throughout the period 1870s – 1890s.
As a result the NSW Government created the Sydney City and Suburban Health Board to investigate an alternative means of disposing of the City’s sewage. This lead to the construction of two gravitation sewers in 1889 by the Public Works Department: a northern sewer being the Bondi Ocean Outfall Sewer and a southern sewer draining to a sewage farm at Botany Bay.
Low lying areas around the Harbour which could not gravitate to the new outfall sewers continued to drain to the old City Council Harbour sewers. Low level pumping stations were therefore needed to collect the sewage from such areas and pump it by means of additional sewers known as rising mains, to the main gravitation system.
The first comprehensive low level sewerage system began at the end of the 19th century when the Public Works Department built a network of 20 low level pumping stations around the foreshores of the inner harbour and handed them over to the Metropolitan Board of Water Supply and Sewerage in 1904.
SP0001 was the first and largest of these 20 stations and originally took the sewage from the City area in the Haymarket and on the south-western side of Darling Harbour. It was also the controlling station from which 17 of the other stations were manually controlled, although this function ceased about 1918.
At least two of the early stations received their DC power from the Rushcutters Bay Tramway Powerhouse, near SP0018. Although called SPS No 1 the first SPS was the 1894 emergency Shone Ejector at St Peters (coal fired electricity) followed by the Double Bay Ejector (electricity from Rushcutters Bay) and the coal fired steam driven Marrickville Pumping Station (later SPS 271).
Overall, greater Sydney now has over 600 low level sewage pumping stations.
