Conduit House

The Conduit House is part of the monastic waterworks which supplied nearby St Augustine's Abbey.

The remains of this medieval conduit house stand in King’s Park, Canterbury, on a steep west-facing hillside to the east of St Augustine’s Abbey, whose spring water supply it was built to protect.

A reliable supply of fresh water was an essential element of the infrastructure of a monastic community. The location of rivers and streams was often a significant factor in deciding the precise site of monastic houses, but within a town local supplies might be polluted.

In such cases clean water had to be piped in from a spring; the water flowed through pipes that were made of lead or hollowed-out tree trunks.

Arrangements such as this were well known in the medieval period. Sources of water on a higher level than the monastery were tapped and small buildings were constructed to cover the collecting and settling tanks at the spring.