Marina Willer
Bronze plaque for Abbey Mills Pumping Station
Designer Marina Willer of Pentagram was commissioned by Tideway to create a unifying visual identity for a series of bronze plaques installed at 12 locations across London. Marina was invited to pitch for this project as recognition of her long time passion for street covers and following the success of her project Overlooked. Now part of the V&A permanent collection, overlooked is a series of prints made of rubbings of street covers across London.
This permanent commission responds to the site-specific themes set out in Tideway’s Heritage Interpretation Strategy (HIS). For the East section, the cultural meander is titled ‘The Shipping Parishes: Gateway to the World’. At Abbey Mills, the narrative underscores the crucial role of water in sustaining London’s population, while providing a historical perspective on the urban planning challenges posed by environmental and climate change.
Willer’s design for the Abbey Mills plaque draws inspiration from the site’s Byzantine-style architecture, famously described as Joseph Bazalgette’s ‘cathedral of sewage’. Built between 1865 and 1868 as a vital part of London’s interceptor drainage system, Abbey Mills Pumping Station was designed to raise the level of the Northern Outfall Sewer and safeguard the city against flooding during storms and tidal surges. Today, it remains a much-admired icon of Victorian engineering, visible from the Greenway foot and cycle path.
As with the broader series, the Abbey Mills plaque features a moiré interference pattern – formed by layering similar but slightly offset motifs – with a central disc as its defining element. For this site, the abstracted pattern was directly informed by architectural details from the pumping station itself. The surface texture, articulated in varying levels of bronze relief, evokes both the movement of water and the circular geometry of the Tideway Tunnel.
Inscribed along the outer edge of the plaque is the site name, alongside the inscription:
‘THAMES TIDEWAY TUNNEL CONSTRUCTED 2016–2024’,
alongside the celebratory statement:
‘A HIDDEN FEAT OF ENGINEERING AND THE WORK OF 20,000’
Cast in bronze and measuring 600 x 600 mm, the plaque has been permanently installed on the boundary of the site, positioned along the Greenway above the Northern Outfall Sewer – offering a public marker of both infrastructure and imagination.
The designer has said: It was an absolute honour to design a new street cover (plaque) for this important project that replaces the Victoria sewage across the river Thames. It was very exciting to design with my team an object that transcends our area of specialism and will be in many spots around London for much longer than our existence.
