WORK of volunteers on the restoration of the Victorian sewage pumping station at Crossness has been rewarded with a heritage award.

Members of the Crossness Engines Trust have been painstakingly restoring the pumping stations and its giant beam engines, for more than 20 years and have succeeded in getting one of them the Prince Consort back under steam.

Now they have been presented with an engineering heritage award by the Institute of Mechanical Engineering.

The award is a plaque with an inscription.

The pumping station, in Belvedere, was designed and built in the mid-1800s by Sir Joseph Bazelgette to relieve London from the “Big Stink” caused by sewage being emptied straight into the River Thames in central London.

Instead, it was pumped through new sewers to Crossness and into the Thames, to be carried out to sea on the tide.

The trust has also just been given £1.5m of Lottery money towards restoration work and to turn the pumping station into a new industrial museum.