Historicizing Iron: Charles Driver and the Abbey Mills Pumping Station (1865-68)

Victorian architects and architectural theorists made a clear distinction between ‘building' and ‘architecture'; for them, a building became architecture when historical references were invoked. The development of new constructive materials, in particular cast iron, directly challenged this perceived distinction. A new material possessed no history; how, therefore, could it be architectural? This paper will address this question by focusing on the treatment of cast iron in a particular building – the Abbey Mills pumping station, of 1865–68 (Fig. 3) – assessing, for the first time, the contribution of its architect Charles Driver (1832-1900). By also referring to Driver's published writings, this paper will assess how he sought, in this building, to invest cast iron with architectural, and therefore historical, meaning.