Glasgow Corporation Water Works and its successors have provided a public water supply and sewerage and sewage treatment services to the Scottish city of Glasgow. There were several schemes in the early part of the 1800s, with the Glasgow Company which was established in 1806 pumping filtered water from the River Clyde into the city. The Gorbals Gravitation Water Company was established in 1846, and brought water from reservoirs to the south-west of the city. However, an outbreak of cholera in 1848/1849, in which 4,000 people died, concentrated the minds of Glasgow Council, and in 1855 a scheme to use water from Loch Katrine, to the north, was authorised. The work required at Loch Katrine was quite modest, and the major construction work was the building of an aqueduct to carry the water to the city by gravity.
The civil engineer John Frederick Bateman managed the contract, but the engineer for final section into the city was James Morris Gale, who became the Engineer in Chief for the Glasgow Water Commissioners when the project was completed in 1859. He oversaw the development of the system, with levels in Loch Katrine being raised and a second aqueduct being constructed, until he retired in 1902. Extra water was obtained from Loch Arklet in 1914, when a dam and tunnel into Loch Katrine were completed, but a similar scheme to impound water in Glen Finglas and feed it through a tunnel to Loch Katrine was delayed by the First World War, and was not implemented until 1965. A new treatment works at Milngavie costing £120 million was completed in 2008 and opened by Queen Elizabeth.
Glasgow also invested in sewerage, with sewage treatment works opening at Dalmarnock in 1894, Dalmuir in 1904 and Shieldhall in 1910. They carried out research into better ways to treat sewage, and until 1935 sold sludge cakes as "Globe Fertiliser". Surplus sludge was carried away by a fleet of sludge ships, to be dumped at sea, and the ships also took passengers along for the voyage, initially to help recuperating soldiers, but later for the general public. A major upgrade to the sewerage infrastructure took place in 2017, when a tunnel was completed, to provide storm water storage, a project which reduces flood risk, and should ensure that the River Clyde is not polluted by sewage overflows in storm conditions.
History
The earliest known records of activity concerning a public water supply in Glasgow date from 1805, when the civil engineer Thomas Telford produced a report on schemes for supplying Glasgow and its suburbs with water. In 1806 he produced a second report and an Act of Parliament was obtained to create the Glasgow Company. They took advice from the Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer James Watt, and plans for a water treatment works on the north bank of the River Clyde were drawn up by Telford. The company constructed filtering beds and ponds, and bought two Boulton and Watt steam engines, but the system did not work well, and a new works was constructed on the south bank. In order to filter water from the river, they constructed a tunnel below river level, with open joints between the bricks, which allowed water to seep through the river bank, which was formed of sand, and to be drawn off from the tunnel. Although the filtering was not particularly efficient, the system lasted for 30 years, and provided per day on average, with the amount available depending on the river level.
A second company was established by Act of Parliament in 1812. The civil engineer and statistician James Cleland produced a report in 1813, on a scheme for raising and distributing water, and building public baths, and there was a flurry of activity in the 1830s. James Jardine, who was engineer for much of the early work for the Edinburgh Water Company, was consulted in 1834, Thomas Grainger published a report on the Glasgow water supply in 1835, and Robert Thom, the designer of the self-cleaning sand filter used in water purification, produced another report in 1837. The Glasgow Company took over the other company in 1838, but the quality of the water they supplied was poor, and there was general dissatisfaction with their performance. This resulted in a number of alternative schemes being considered.