Reservoirs of Edinburgh

The predicament Edinburgh found herself in at the dawn of the 19th century was one which was repeated the length and breadth of the country. As a consequence of the Industrial Revolution population centres were growing, homes were becoming more modern and the traditional sources of water were proving woefully insufficient for the needs of a changing society. For centuries Edinburgh had depended upon private and public pump wells to supply its water for industry, cooking, drinking water and sanitation. The pump wells could become contaminated by human and animal waste or other harmful byproducts or pollutants and the city folk often found themselves at the mercy of water borne diseases such as cholera. Not only was the water often unfit for consumption but these wells were few and far between and were unable to meet demand when the weather was dry.

In 1621 an act of parliament was passed allowing the town council to build a pipe line into the city carrying water from Comiston Springs just 3 miles from the city centre. It would however be 1672 before the act was carried out and another 4 years before the inhabitants of the town would benefit from the supply, which was only brought into the most affluent of houses and the vast majority of people still had to use stands in the high street to collect water for use in their homes.

It became clear that towns and cities had to better provide for their populace if they wanted them to remain healthy and prosperous in these times of rapid change. Many undertook ambitious engineering projects to do just that, a fine example being the Loch Katrine water works for Glasgow. Edinburgh was no exception. Through 1819 until 1905 the Edinburgh Water Company, under various incarnations and reimaginings, worked almost constantly to improve the supply and quality of Edinburgh's water. A network of reservoirs, aqueducts and filtration plants sprang up around the city starting with the acquisition of springs on the Pentlands range and the construction of the Glencorse reservoir, including the building of the Moorfoot Project heavily depicted in this volume of images, building several reservoirs in a range of hills to the south of the city which first brought their supply into the city in 1879, and onto the 1905 Talla works which holds a massive 2,805,000,000 gallon capacity. These works of Victorian or Edwardian engineering still play an important part in the efficient supply of water to the inhabitants of modern Edinburgh and its surrounding burghs.

Despite having no information on the photographer of the volume at the beginning of the process, after coming across the book 'Edinburgh and District Water supply : A Historical Sketch' by James Colston during our research we found that a number of the images in our volume had been engraved and used in the book as illustrations. Colston attributed the original photography to Mr Alexander Leslie C.E. Born in 1884, he was the son of the civil engineer James Leslie C.E. and was a partner in his father's firm J & A Leslie and Reid. The firm were responsible for the building of many reservoirs across Scotland including Alnwickhill, Rosebury, Gladhouse and Edgelaw amongst others. The photographs and their engravings have been published in the exhibition. Other illustrations from the book have been included as it was felt they helped to paint a more comprehensive picture of the history of the City of Edinburgh's water supply and shed light on some of the prominent figures involved in its development.