Derek Batey on Dec. 30, 2024, 10:48 p.m.

I remember going there as a kid in mid 1950’s until about 1962 when my grandad retired. He Jack Batey had been the works engineer and lived in the cottage in the photo. I don't know when he moved there but my dad Thomas Edward Batey lived there from at least 1923 until he joined the navy in 1942 and moved back there after the war in 1945 until he married my mum in 1948.

A can remember playing with my two year older brother when we used to run up and down the walls of the old empty reservoir to the east of the photo. It seemed huge at the time but would guess that the sloped sides must have been 15 feet high and the reservoir about 100 feet long and 40 feet wide.

We were told never to play across the grass covered newer reservoir in case we fell through in to the reservoir that was towards the north of the water works pumping station and probably reached across to Whickham View Road and opposite the Blind Workshop Factory.

We didn't go into the pumping station very often that I think had been built when they made the new reservoir and I’m sure that the chimney belonged to the old derilect pumping station that was feed from the open reservoir.

We used to play around the bottom of the chimney and there was one or two diggers with lots of earth digging buckets, like conveyor chains across the top of it, or them, on it that had been abanded there I’m guess from after the new works had been built.

The lodge had two bedrooms at the front and believe the front door opened in to the right hand bedroom and you would walk through this in to lounge and small kitchen. There was no bathroom and the outside loo was around the back and just over the wall that can be seen in the photo. Whenever my granny wanted to go to the lok she would say “I’m just going to fed the chickens” and we would ask if we could feed them too, thinking she had real ones.

Behind the second roofed part of the lodge, lounge and kitchen the where about 75-100 steps up to the old open reservoir area and imagine this was designed that way to give a gravity pressure drop for the water in the reservoir to the works pumping station.