frankley reservoir
The semicircular 900K cubic metre Frankley Reservoir is at the terminus of the Elan Aquaduct which brings drinking water from the Elan Valley Reservoirs in mid-Wales to Birmingham.
The photo (left) shows Frankley Reservoir with its Treatment Works visible on the right, and Bartley Reservoir beyond.
The delivery of enormous quantities of water from the Elan Valley Reservoirs (opened in 1904) in Powys through Shropshire to the city is an impressive engineering feat. The Elan Aquaduct, authorised by the innovative Birmingham Corporation Water Act in 1892, initially opened in 1906. The water travels 73 miles (118km) at 2mph via a gravity-fed system dropping 171ft (52m), taking one and a half days to reach Frankley.
Although now inside the city boundaries, it used to be partly in Worcestershire as can be seen from this OS map (left),
which clearly shows the border running through the middle.
In the 1920s, more storage was needed, so the Bartley Reservoir was built next to Frankley. Frankley also feeds another reservoir, the covered Perry Barr Reservoir which, despite its name, is actually in Kingstanding.
In 1987 ground-penetrating radar was used to isolate the leaks at Frankley which were causing the loss of 540 litres of water per second.
(Photographs from the collection of the Malvern Industrial Archaeology Circle, reproduced with their kind permission.)