One of the bonuses of wandering the streets in cities you’re visiting is that you sometimes stumble on fascinating things no one bothers to mention in tour brochures and travel guides.
On a streetcorner in the Moabit district, I noticed an old and somewhat corroded pump. Its elaborate castings caught my attention, and I stopped for pictures, not suspecting what a story lay behind it.
The pumps, over 2,000 of them around the city, were once the city’s main water supply. Berlin is sitting on very wet land, and clean groundwater is quite close to the surface. At one point in the 19th century, each house was required to have a five-meter-deep well of its own.
Even when the city developed a more modern system, the water came largely from the city’s underground aquifer, but from wells drilled over 100 meters deep.
Despite the modern system, the old pumps still have a role as backups, a role that has been critical during times of war and unrest when the city-wide system was disrupted.
The pump I noticed with its elaborate castings, is a model introduced in the 1850s and made for many years after, but there are also more modern styles to be found, such as the two shown here.
