The building houses a museum on the ground
floor and there appears to be office accommodation on the upper floors. The
plaque, affixed to the Southwark Street wall, reads:
"Kirkaldy Testing Works
This building was built in 1874 for David
Kirkaldy (1820-1897). In 1857 Kirkaldy helped form the Institution of Engineers
in Scotland and was the first person to set up a load testing machine for
construction materials and powerful enough to deal with the largest specimens.
The original 48 foot long machine, able to apply a load of over 300 tons, is
still in position here.
Historic Southwark".
The building is Grade II listed and its entry, at English Heritage (visit
link), reads:
"Testing works, now restored as offices
above ground level. 1872-3. By TR Smith. Multi-coloured stock brick, banded with
light yellow brick with stucco dressings. Romanesque style.
EXTERIOR: 4 storeys, 5 bays. Brick cornice
with paired, stuccoed brackets, blocking course and brick parapet over.
Romanesque style. Ground-floor openings segment-headed with stucco mouldings
over gauged-brick arches, stuccoed impost blocks and lowered sills. Door, 2nd
bay from left treated similarly. Another door, at extreme right, has heavy
bracketed cornice and pediment with inscription "Facts not Opinions". 1st and
2nd-floor windows are pairs of round-arched sashes with gauged, yellow brick
arches with impost blocks, the central block on the 1st-floor windows being a
stuccoed capital. They are set in giant, round-arched recesses with gauged,
yellow brick arches with stuccoed string at spring, resting on band at 1st floor
level beneath stuccoed 1st-floor sill band. 3rd-floor windows are groups of 3
(or 2 in outer bays) similar round-arched sashes with gauged, yellow brick
arches.
INTERIOR: main testing machine of 1864-66 by
Greenwood & Batley of Leeds is preserved in-situ on ground floor.
HISTORICAL NOTE: David Kirkcaldy (1820-97)
was the British pioneer of testing building materials scientifically and the
components of many famous structures were tested here."
The John Pullin website (visit
link) has this to say about the Testing Works:
"Across the road and at the back of
Kirkaldy’s Testing and Experimenting Works in Southwark, south London, vast
high-rise buildings are being built, testimony to the current regeneration of a
neglected part of the inner city, which is less than a mile from the financial
heart.
The money that’s being lavished on the new construction is in rather stark
contrast to Kirkaldy’s itself, where the works, which has been on the site since
1874 and is now a museum that houses perhaps the world’s most complete
collection of Victorian and early 20th century mechanical testing machinery, is
in need of both funds and friends.
Particularly friends. A snowy Sunday in early February may not be the easiest
time to get your volunteers out, but the current level of willing helpers means
that the museum opens for the first Sunday of every month, and at other times
only “by arrangement”. And you need a few people to be around to work the
machines, especially the biggest one of them all.
The centrepiece of the Kirkaldy’s Works is, as it has been since curmudgeonly
Scots engineer David Kirkaldy set the place up, a huge hydraulically-powered
“universal” testing machine for carrying out tensile and compressive testing of
large-scale components. A complex arrangement of weights and arms allows the
current configuration to exert forces up to 150,000 lb; in the past, and perhaps
the future if restoration funds are available, it could go up to 1,000,000 lb.
The machine was designed by Kirkaldy himself and was built by a Leeds firm; it
was installed first on a site nearby and the current building was built around
it with power coming from the London Hydraulic Power Company whose network of
pipes also lifted Tower Bridge’s road deck and revolved the stage at the London
Palladium.
With his huge testing machine, 47 feet and seven inches long and weighing 116
tons, Kirkaldy may not have invented materials testing, but he certainly brought
it to a new peak and established the idea of an independent test house. His
motto, “Facts not opinions”, indicates Victorian qualities of earnestness, but
also encapsulates the rigour of the profession.
It was rigour that was well used in the 91 years that the works operated
commercially on the site until the retirement of Kirkaldy’s grandson in 1965.
Among the artefacts brought here were the girders from first Tay bridge,
retrieved from waters of the firth after the disastrous collapse in December
1879. Old photographs of Kirkaldy’s “gallery of failures” on an upper floor of
the building – now smart high-tech offices – show other tested pieces: buckled
locomotive tyres, a fractured stringer from the current Hammersmith Bridge.
The Testing Museum that now occupies the ground and basement floors of
Kirkaldy’s works has many other smaller testing machines as well, some of them
originals bought by the firm, others loaned or bequeathed over the years. Many
of them work: a 1916 French Charpy testing machine cuts through a piece of
modern steel as neatly as it would have done for the First World War munitions
factory that bought it; a 1930s Avery fabric testing machine explains Hooke’s
law without using words.
Kirkaldy's Testing and Experimenting WorksKirkaldy’s is helped by close links to
Imperial College and the benign influence of the Greater London Industrial
Archaeology Society, but its long-term survival, now that Southwark has been
“discovered”, has to be in some doubt. For a snapshot of real engineering and
problem-solving, it’s to be hoped that it finds funds and friends soon."