Jumbo Water Tower

Britain's largest Victorian water tower, looming over the high street

Visible from much of the town centre, Jumbo is a vast 1882 brick water tower designed by Charles Clegg with thirty-foot cast-iron columns and a wooden cupola perched on top. At over 100 feet high it is the largest Victorian water tower in Britain, holding 230,000 gallons in a great iron tank above what is essentially an enormous stone shed.

Decommissioned in 1987 and empty for decades, Jumbo has been the subject of long-running redevelopment proposals to convert it into a viewing tower or apartments. For now you cannot go inside, but it is worth walking down Balkerne Hill to look up at the structure from below — the scale is astonishing and the wedding-cake silhouette is the defining oddity of the Colchester skyline.

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A story
The tower was nicknamed Jumbo after the famous African elephant sold by London Zoo to P.T. Barnum in 1882, the same year construction completed. The rector of nearby St Mary-at-the-Walls had loudly opposed the project on aesthetic grounds — when it was finished, locals retaliated by christening it after the elephant, then the largest animal in captivity.