Holló Szilvia Andrea: Budapest's Public Works - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)

Natural or artificial?

William Lindley (1808-1900) was invited to prepare the designs. As Lindley had employed artificial filtering in other big cities (London, Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main), that was what he recommended to Pest, too, seeing that "the city stands on landfill layen of trash and manure, and if their solution penetrates into the wells of the natural filter, the mains will cany seemingly pure but in reality noxious water. ” But there was one thing that the aldermen left out of consideration: the expenses involved in building a permanent waterworks based on artificial filtering. Faced with financial difficulties, the city could now only afford to have a provisional system with natural filtering installed on the plot of the Navigation Bureau with a daily capacity of 9,100 cubic metres. The permanent waterworks to be constructed at a later time was meant to be located on the city perimeters, either on a plot opposite Margaret Island then occupied by the brickmakers' pits, or else around the Újpest docks.

Lindley, who was known as a pioneer of technological hygiene, arrived in Budapest in January of 1868 in order to put the works into (at least partial) operation the same year. Construction work on the pumping station and filtering plant started on 15 April, with the wells being bored according to plans drawn by Antal Bürgermeister. The filtering well was sunk about three metres deep into the soil; the engine and boiler room contained two steam engines powering the pump which forced the water into the pipes. Two mains running along different alignments conveyed the water abstracted from the Danube to Kőbánya, where the construction of counter■ The provisional waterworks in the plot of today's Parliament, the mid-i8gos (György Klösz)

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