The South West Heritage Trust has received a grant enabling Somerset Archives to catalogue and care for the archives of Wessex Water and its predecessor organisations. Archivist Liz Grant describes the investment and the archives of the Somerset water industry.
Major investment in the historic archives of the water industry
Until relatively recently, Wessex Water held its archive at its Sutton Poyntz facility near Weymouth, Dorset. The archive relates to the whole of the Wessex Water region and includes plans, maps, photographs, and documentation relating mostly to the development of water supply, sewerage, and sewage treatment operations. In order to protect and conserve the material, the decision was taken to transfer the records to public archive services across the South-West, with each county archive receiving the records relating to their area.
The Wessex Water Archive Collection
Following extensive sorting, the collection has been distributed to archive services in Bath, Bristol, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Somerset and Wiltshire.
The complete archive is extensive, comprising hundreds of boxes of material dating back to the early nineteenth century when small, localised water companies grew up and when sewerage and sewage treatment was handled by urban and rural district and town councils, and land drainage by river authorities. These functions were amalgamated when 10 regional water authorities were established in 1974. Wessex Water itself was formed from 99 different organisations and in 1989, it was privatised and retained the water supply, sewerage and sewage treatment functions of its predecessors.
Wessex Water has provided overall funding in excess of £200,000 to enable the cataloguing, conservation, digitisation and preservation of the collection, thus allowing access to this huge and important resource. In addition, a significant quantity of historic video material will be digitised.
The public will benefit in the future from having access to a wealth of information about the development of water supply, sewerage and sewage treatment infrastructure across the Wessex Water area since the early 1800s.
“We are pleased to have been able to fund the conservation, preservation and cataloguing of this terrific collection and to make it available for research and study.
We are proud of our heritage and having been custodians of this collection for many years, we are delighted the archive will be freely accessible to anyone interested in learning more about the development of the water infrastructure across the Wessex Water region during the last 200 years.”
Marilyn Smith, Group Director of Communications and Community at Wessex Water
The Wessex Water archive for the county of Somerset is over 66 boxes and along with records relating to the management of water and sewerage, it also contains photographs of flooding and flood damage, research papers on water supply, and the building of reservoirs across the county.
