Echos from the Fair

Explorer Tom Cambridge Museum of Technology has a wonderfully rude way of correcting anyone who thinks the city's clever history began with computers. Its old sewage pumping station beside the River Cam is packed with engines, boilers and bright ideas that made daily life possible long before anyone asked a machine to answer an email. The station handled Cambridge's waste, a vital job that polite histories tend to hurry past. In the Steam Engine Room, great Hathorn Davey engines show the muscle behind the system; the Boiler House keeps original boilers, and the Gas Engine Room records another stage in the site's changing power. Beyond the pumping story, the Pye Building explores local firms including Pye and Cambridge Instrument Company, while other displays recover industries that have slipped out of the usual university picture. Start at the visitor entrance on Riverside, not the old Cheddars Lane approach, and check the museum's current public days. Steam and machinery demonstrations happen on selected dates, so the calendar matters if you want to catch an engine in action. The site is a historic one with cobbles and some uneven ground; its access page explains the routes. Take time outside too, where the buildings stand close to the river they helped keep cleaner. I reckon the old pumps are offended that the city's glamorous inventions get the headlines while they handled the truly urgent business. On that point, they may have a case. Come for gears and great engines, stay for the story of workers who kept Cambridge functioning, and leave with new respect for the invisible jobs beneath an ordinary day. The machinery would accept applause, I think.