Wind engine at the Wapping Hydraulic Pumping Station 🌍

As an example of pretty lax journalism, Secret London has recently put up a couple of posts about flea markets being held at the Wapping Hydraulic Pumping Station. It illustrated those posts with a old stock photo pulled from flickr, showing a wind engine at the pumping station, but the photo was taken 14 years ago, and on visiting the market this weekend I found there was no such wind engine present.

Via Google Earth I can establish that the wind engine was

• not visible in the clear aerial imagery from 2003, and doesn't appear to be in the less clear imagery through to 2008
• it looks like the concrete base on which the wind engine was erected first appeared in 2009
• the wind engine tower was present in 2010
• the only clear aerial image of the wind engine including the mechanism is from 2013
• 2014 image is unclear, but doesn't seem to show the wind engine
• The clear image from 2015 is definitely missing the wind engine

Having inspected the concrete base, which simply shows where the 4 legs were bolted down, there are no signs of any allowance for a pump to be present, so I have conclude that this was simply added as a decorative feature, whilst the pumping station was being operated as an art centre/restaurant called The Wapping Project, and was present on the site approximately 2010-2013. As far as I can tell, there was no historical basis for it being there.