Money down the drain? Crossness Pumping Station in East London. Photograph: Alamy
The abandoned coal mine or the mausoleum, the huge ramshackle shed which was once a parking bay for an airship, the vast battered mill building with - hidden behind crumbling bricks - the iron frame which makes it the engineering grandfather of the Manhattan skyscrapers ... The annual English Heritage Buildings at Risk register is always a heartbreaker, page after page of buildings left behind when the world they were built for changed beyond the wildest imaginings of their architects. Town halls and power stations, churches and iron foundries, beautiful country houses now rotting behind chip shops and minicab firms on desolate high streets.
This year they have flagged up the 16 most hopeless cases, the ones where no conceivable new life for the building could pay back the money spent on restoration. So which would I save, which chuck out of the airship? I'm drawn towards Astley Castle in Warwickshire, out of sheer sentimental pity for the lovely 13th century moated manor house burned to a husk 25 years ago, now in danger of total collapse as even its scaffolding props totter and fall.
But, watching water bubble and seep from between the paving slabs along my street, coming home to an ominous brown stain on the hall wall below where the infernal flat roof meets the pitch, it has to be Crossness pumping station in Bexley, a heroic creation of the wonderful Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the patron saint of the storm drain and the interceptory sewer. Like the legends of King Arthur sleeping under the hill, waiting to come back to save his country in time of dire trouble, we have need of Sir Joseph now. Restore his glorious cathedral of sewage, but set all his great beam engine powered pumps working for their living again - we need them.
