Manchester Corporation Water Works enamel sign

Manchester Corporation Water Works enamel sign about laws regarding trespassing on the Corporation's waters, about 1950.

This sign links immense landscape-defining water supply engineering efforts of the 19th and 20th centuries to the source locations, communities, and workers who built and kept them running.

Driven by the increasing need to raise access and standards of clean water and sanitation for Manchester's growing population during the 19th century, engineers sourced water from outside the region in places like the Lake District and the Peak District.

Manchester Corporation Water Works (MCWW) employed innovative and ambitious engineers such as John Frederick Bateman to design and build vast dams, reservoirs and pipelines to supply Manchester with much needed water. Signs such as this would have informed people of the MCWW’s claim to the water and linked infrastructure.

Although many of the projects were seen as engineering triumphs, capturing and transporting water was not without conflicts and challenges. These epic engineering projects disrupted nature and whole communities who had lived adjacent to the water sources for generations.

Today, many cities around the world are growing as rapidly as Manchester did in the 19th century, and providing sufficient and reliable water to their urban populations is a significant challenge, with hundreds of millions of city dwellers still living without running water in their homes. Providing sufficient and reliable water to urban populations such as Manchester was and still is a serious issue.