Old Waste Water Treatment Plant, Bubeneč

Historic · Bubeneč (Prague 6)Prague,Czechia

A Prague sewage works of 1906 left exactly as the last shift finished it, its brick settling galleries and steam engines still in place.

The Old Waste Water Treatment Plant is a sewage works from 1906 that nobody ever cleared out. It took the whole of Prague's waste water for sixty years, settling it and sending it on, and when it stopped in 1967 the machinery was simply left where it stood. You go underground into it: long vaulted brick galleries where the sewage settled, with daylight dropping in at intervals from above, and a boiler house with the steam engines that drove the pumps still in place. By the end of the nineteenth century Prague was putting more into its river than the river could carry away, and the city went abroad for the answer. Building ran from 1901 to 1906. What went up was a machine rather than a monument, laid out to move water in one direction, and nobody has rearranged it since it stopped. That is the reason to come. You are not shown a display about a sewage works; you are taken through the sewage works, with the pipes, the channels and the engines standing where the last shift left them.

Worth knowing

HistoryProtected, and on a waiting list

The Bubeneč plant was declared a national cultural monument in 2010, and it stands on the Czech Republic's UNESCO World Heritage tentative list.

Good to know

Watch the brickwork rather than the machinery in the galleries — the vaulted sedimentation tunnels are laid in curved courses that were built by hand and were never meant to be seen by anybody but maintenance men.
Dress for a cellar — the underground sections are cool, damp and uneven underfoot the whole year round, and the temperature down there does not follow the weather outside at all.
Ask whether the engines are being steamed — they run only on announced demonstration days, and the difference between still ironwork and a working steam engine is the difference between two visits.
It is down by the water, below the road — the site sits on the river bank under Podbaba, which is why people looking for it from the main street above regularly fail to find the gate.

Things to do

1
Walk a sewage tunnel end to end
On the underground section, follow one of the long settling galleries to its end. Brick vaults curve overhead, the floor is a channel, and daylight drops in at intervals from the yard above. It is the closest thing in the city to walking inside a piece of Victorian infrastructure that still has all its parts.
2
Stand in the engine room
In the machine hall, look at what is left in position: boilers, the steam engines that drove the pumps, the pipework between them. Almost nothing has been moved since 1967. On a demonstration day the engines turn, and the noise explains what the room was for better than any panel.
3
Look at the plant from the yard
Outside, take in the buildings as architecture: brick, gables, a chimney, an entrance with a date on it. A city that thought a sewage works deserved this much design was making a statement about public engineering, and that is the same argument behind the plant's place on the Czech UNESCO tentative list.