Chair

A single timber chair sits in a corner of West Ryde Pumping Station. Its paint is peeling, pulling back from the grain in the way paint does when a surface has been left alone long enough. The chair is not broken. It has simply been here, in this room, while the station around it kept working. West Ryde Pumping Station has never stopped. Station No. 2 was commissioned on 15 September 1921 as the largest steam-powered water pumping station in Australia, and it has been pumping to Sydney's northern suburbs ever since. The electrification conversion completed in 1982 replaced the steam plant with 13 electric pumping units plus one standby, bringing capacity to 700 ML/day and making the station the largest domestic water pumping station in Australia at that time. The machinery changed, the energy source changed, the staff came and went, but the function held. The building that surrounds this chair is Federation Freestyle in style, completed between 1916 and 1921. The engine house carries a timber-louvred monitor roof along its ridge. Steel windows, arched at the head, admit light into spaces built to contain enormous machinery. The boiler house, the highest section of the main complex, once received pulverised coal from roof-level bunkers fed by a reinforced concrete coal staith and viaduct. The three reinforced concrete chimney stacks are gone now, though their bases remain. The heritage listing, gazetted on 15 November 2002 as NSW State Heritage Register item 01634, recognises the station for historical, aesthetic, technical, social, and research significance. Engineers Australia awarded it an Engineering Heritage National Marker in October 2017. The chair does not appear in any of that documentation. It is simply there, in 2015, paint giving way to timber, inside a building that has not stopped for more than a century.