Martham Water Tower
One of the more esoteric buildings of Martham stands to attention like a silent fortress guarding its avenue approach and surrounded by protective fences and curled barbed wire shutting everyone out. The first impression is that this could be a dreadful danger to the public or hold something of great value. But no …. this is an almost secret water tower. Secret, not because it cannot be seen but because little is known about its past and the authorities go out of their way to keep information about it to a minimum.
The Water Tower stands at the north end of the Bensley Road cul-de-sac in the northeast corner of Martham. It was built in 1953/54 by the East Suffolk & Norfolk River Board, which was the water authority covering the area at the time. Flanking it are two guard of honour rows of Council houses that were built after the tower. It was built on what was once a sand pit where sand was probably once extracted to make traditional Martham red bricks. During the Second World War, prisoners of war, were obliged to work there filling sandbags. After the war, there was an old brick hut there that a rough sleeper, nicknamed Crinoline, lived in. Older residents can remember playing there as children and building camps.
No one seems to know who built the tower with its unique six, huge, concrete buttresses supporting a circular single-compartment concrete tank. Its hexagonal design is in an almost brutalist style. The tank holds 182,000 litres of water, which is about 40,034 gallons or enough to fill from 500 to 670 baths (depending on their size). It stands about 31 metres high. Most water towers make use of gravity so the water can flow down through treatment works and on to the consumer under its own gravity feed. Towers are therefore built at a high point and their height can vary depending on the local landscape. In lowland areas like Norfolk, the water has to be pumped from its source, treated, and then stored. It follows that to provide the gravitational force allowing distribution of the water in lowland areas, storage needs to be in an elevated position: hence a water tower.
Martham Tower is supplied from the Ludham Water Treatment Works. Two pumps at Ludham feed water from the Ludham Water Tower to Martham Tower. Water is then gravity-fed into the Martham distribution system with the tower acting as a head tank. The tower is now owned by Anglian Water and has been serving the local community for over 70 years. Given its age, it is not surprising that it was recently (2025) in need of repair and restoration so Anglian Water put a scheme in place to ensure that it serves the local area for, hopefully, another 70 years. Access to the top of the tower is via very precarious, narrow, vertical ladders that are rusted and unsafe. They no longer meet Health and Safety standards so the repairs were complex and scaffolding was in place for some time but the work was finished in November 2025.
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