Mill Meece Pumping Station 2024

Mill Meece was evidently chosen as a suitable source of supply because of its proximity to the successful development at Hatton and the reservoir at Hanchurch.

By 1899, when the company decided to develop a second site in the Meece valley, the original pair of compound rotary beam steam engines at Hatton had recently been supplemented by a horizontal cross compound rotary engine. Plans were already in hand to meet the impending shortage of water by a further increase in the rate of abstraction, this was to be achieved by installing a horizontal tandem compound rotary engine at the same site.

In 1912, the continued growth in demand for water in North Staffordshire led the Staffordshire Potteries Waterworks Company, formed over 60 years before, to advance an Act of Parliament giving it power to construct a pumping station at Mill Meece, two miles south of the Hatton Pumping Station, which was built between 1890-1907. Two years later on the 25th November 1914 the Ashton Frost engine was started for the first time.

The old pumping station together with the steam driven plant, which last pumped water into the supply on 22nd December 1979, is now leased to the Mill Meece Pumping Station Preservation Trust, who officially took over the station under the auspices of the Severn Trent Water Authority on 31st May 1981.