Skånska vattentornssällskapet - Eber Ohlsson - Scanian Water Tower Society/The Botildenborg water tower episodes

Skånska vattentornssällskapet - Urbanmorfologi
Scanian Water Tower Society - Urban Morphology

Vattentorn - Water Towers

Ebers vattentorn

Eber's Water Towers

Originalpublicering

VA-tidskriften Cirkulaton

Asfaltblänk och Vattenstänk

The Botildenborg water tower episodes
A free translation to English. The original version in Swedish published 2009-03-07.

Water towers is as the name indicate a vertical building, with task to has a good quantity water available to the subscribers and this supplied with a sufficient pressure. But the verticality has also given origin to episodes. Some of these concern the Botildenborg water tower in Malmö.

Serving
When the Botidenborg water tower was build, there were plans to have some form of café on the roof of the tower.

It was a fairly good thought 1949, when the tower was completed, because it was standing in the neighbourhood of the town and at just the right distance for a Sunday excursion, either this took place with a bike or with tramway line 1, finished with a shorter walking.

From the tower was it an outlook over both agricultural fields and districts of home one’s own, with Jägerso trotting track/racecourse and the Malmö-Ystad railway within sight.

The Water and Sewerage Works of Malmö advertised in the daily press after people who could be interested to run a café in the water tower. The only one who answered the ad was an old woman in Kirseberg [a district in Malmö].

It became clear that the rent she was ready to pay to run the café business, was not big enough to give cause for the investment of glazed walls that should connect to the smaller circular roof on the top of the tower.

This extra roof is there still today, reminding of the serving potential that the tower had one time.

The serving potential has probably been changed as times goes on, because the nearest surroundings nowadays is the district Herrgården [a district with not so good reputation] in Rosengård and also the Inre Ringvägen [a motorway].

The beauty experience should therefore be assumed to be limited to a visitor of today.

Mobile phone
The height difference between the tower's ground floor and the view plane is about 20 meters. In the water towers that previously was built in Malmo, this was a height difference that could be easily overcome with stairs. In the Södervärn water tower is the height difference even the double.

As the Botildenborg water tower originally was planned to have a cafeteria at the view plane, got the tower except stairs even an elevator. Of all Malmö water towers only this tower and the Hyllie water tower has this lifting device.

If you are enclosed in an elevator room you should be able to communicate with the outside world, if something unexpected should happen. Therefore, there is a phone in the tower's elevator, a black Bakelite telephone of classical type.

It should also be the first mobile phone in the Water and Sewerage Works of Malmö.

The Botildenborg water tower with the unused café roof.
A tower that is good both to measure the microclimate and reconnaissance the drugs.

Microclimate
The Botildenborg water tower was of great service on the evening June 14th 1974. The then docents Jan O Mattson, nowadays professor emeritus on the Department of Physical Geography in the University of Lund had at that time station equipment on the roof of the water tower to measure and register the microclimate of the surroundings of the tower.

The examination came later be part of the report ”Climatic information by night-recorded aerial photographs with special regard to registrations made in retro reflected light”.

In the report you can read that it that evening was calm or only with light wind and cloudless. The air was hazy, and the dew was lying over the field of corn. Some years later it so happened that the writer got Jan O Mattson as a teacher in the Department of Geography.

Reconnaissance
On another occasion, in the end of 1970s, the police wished to borrow a key to the Botildenborg water tower that, over time carry on reconnaissance towards the nearby houses of Rosengård.

It was the narcotics squad that from the roof of the tower wished to lie low and with binoculars reconnaissance criminal persons that haunt in this district.

It is not known by the writer if there was any result of the reconnaissances, but if we right understand today's mass media, so is the need of reconnaissances not less today.

Vattenblandat
Water mixed

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