A Tale of Two Towers

Across the street from my house is the Hart Hill Water Tower. It’s a four storey octagon topped with a steep cone of a roof.

By Jeremy Williams

It’s a noble structure, with its tall casement windows and terracotta decoration.

There was a drought in 1898 that left the Stopsley area of Luton without water.

Hart Hill Water Tower was built to stop it happening again. You’re welcome, Stopsley.

The tower has a twin, or perhaps more of a flamboyant cousin. Across town is the Bailey Hill Water Tower, also completed in 1901 and also built from the ‘Luton grey brick’ of the local vernacular. It’s big and square, but with rounded edges and slit windows that make it more elegant than it should be for a building of such bulk.

At the top are large stone balconies and broad semi-circular windows. Bands of bright stone lead the eye up to the pyramid of slate on the roof, and winged lions jut from the eaves at each corner.

We have a man by the name of Henry T Hare to thank for this bold and distinctive tower.

He was the architect behind the Oxford Town Hall and Fulham Library, and served as design consultant on Bailey Hill. Posterity has awarded him his own Wikipedia page.

The two towers are among Luton’s most prominent landmarks, along with the town hall and Easyjet’s bright orange hangar up at the airport. I like to think of them as sentinels, watching over the town from their opposing hills. Or perhaps like the two towers in Lord of the Rings, home to rival wizards. The Hart Hill one would be the evil wizard. Bailey Hill, with its arts and crafts pretensions, would have to be home to the good one.

At one time the towers would each have had a steam pump filling the tanks at the top, using the downward force of all that water to maintain pressure in the local system. The introduction of electric pumps changed that in the 1960s, as they could be fitted straight to the pipes and switched on and off at will.

Like most of the Victorian water towers, Luton’s are obsolete, serving only as above-ground reminders of the water system that we so easily take for granted.

But if there’s no water in the tanks, that opens them up to new possibilities. Last year the Bailey Hill tower was converted into a glamorous four-bedroom home and sold for £1,200,000.

The large windowless section halfway down makes a perfect private cinema.

There are no such plans for Hart Hill, although there is a bit of scaffolding up at the moment. I would like to live in it, naturally, should the opportunity ever arise.