“to maintain or to keep alive, a memory or quality”
Waterhouse was built in the late 1800s by Papa Joao Esan Da Rocha, an Ijesha man who had been captured by Ijebu traders and sold into slavery. After the abolishment of the slave trade, he returned to Lagos with his family and built his home on Kakawa street which had been apportioned to him for resettlement. It bears the name Waterhouse because Papa Esan built a big sanitary well for himself and sold some of the water to Lagosians at a time when there was no portable water in the city.
His son, Candido Da Rocha invested in his father’s estate after he passed turning the water well into what we now know as the Lagos Water Corporation or Iju Waterworks. Today, the well sits quietly and unused in the yard at Waterhouse on Kakawa street in Lagos Island.
Images were shot in 2018