Lincoln

Untroubled waters

This is one of those architectural miniatures I particularly like. It’s St Mary’s conduit house, built in the 16th century to provide a source of clean water for the people of Lincoln. It’s said to have been built partly out of fragments of from a chantry in an old friary that was dissolved, during the depredations imposed by Henry VIII on the country religious houses, in 1530. By incorporating them into the walls of the conduit house (connected to a network of supply pipes begun by the friars) a few years after the dissolution, the builders gave a new life to bits of tracery and blind arcading, plus some corbels, niches, arch heads, and other bits and pieces.

They also provided an invaluable service to local people. The conduit and others in the city carried on supplying water until 1906, although not the conduit house did not remain in exactly the same positron – it was moved away from the street into St Mary’s churchyard in 1864. When mains water was laid on at the beginning of the 20th century, the supply from the conduits was trusted more than the piped water. I seem to remember that there was widespread suspicion of piped water in the Victorian period, with London water sellers hawking water from bowsers with the cry ‘Pure water! None of your pipe sludge!’ And no wonder, given the disease carried by infected water supplies in the early days. In Lincoln, confidence in the old conduits continued during the  1904–5 typhoid epidemic, so perhaps this attractive facility saved some lives too.