Kielder Water
If you go down to the woods today, you might just find 200 billion litres of water. Kielder Water, a reservoir built in the late 1970s near the Scottish border, is the largest man-made lake in Northern Europe and has played an important role in securing water supplies for the growing cities of North-East England. Fourteen years in the planning, it has since become the site of England’s largest hydroelectric plant and a tourist attraction in its own right. Civil engineers Babtie, Shaw & Morton, architects Sir Frederick Gibberd and Partners and contractors AMEC and Balfour Beatty delivered this massively ambitious build on behalf of Northumbrian Water.
“This is a great engineering achievement, assuring the residents and workers of the North East with water supplies sufficient for all foreseeable future needs” – Her Majesty the Queen, opening Kielder Water in 1982