Hatton's posh flats... and dilapidated gates

Another curious structure with an equally unexpected present is the late Victorian pumping station at Hatton.  This quite beautiful Italianate building, which once housed giant machinery, has been converted in recent years into ... luxury flats!  It makes an odd sort of sense...

But quite why the posh folk who live here allow the dilapidated old back-gates (still marked as the property of the Staffordshire Potteries Water Board) to the grounds to remain unrepaired and in situ is puzzling.
Is it a heritage thing?  Maybe.

Almost a fairy tale castle

The Victorian pumping station at Wombourne (now empty, disused and decaying) looks even more like a Sleeping Beauty-style enclosed castle, now it is behind its screen of winter-leafless trees.

'Castle' allowed to decay

This Victorian castle-style building is a really attractive work, on the fringes of Wombourne.  It's hard to believe that it is (or was...) a pumping station, in which two steam engines pumped up water from boreholes which went deep into the ground underneath it.

After The Bratch Pumping Station was supplanted by a new system, a group of enthusiasts, The Friends Of The Bratch, was given the chance to maintain the building and the steam-engines, which they lovingly did, holding a number of open-days along the way.... until 2010, when, for no reason I can find, the owners, Severn-Trent Water, withdrew their permission.
The enthusiasts are still, to this day, understandably bitter.

Meanwhile, the empty building suffers from ingress from pigeons, the engines are no longer maintained, and tree-foliage has been allowed to grow along the front to the property so that it is no longer easy to see the building from the road.

Seems hard to think why it should be so allowed to decline when there are volunteers who would take it on.