The museum's most compelling exhibits are the two Hathorn Davey steam engines installed in 1894, built specifically to lift foul water from the sump below the station and pump it up to the farm at Milton — a total lift of about 43 feet. One of these engines is still fully operational and runs on steam weekends, filling the Victorian pump house with the noise and heat of nineteenth-century engineering working at full scale. The destructor furnaces that originally burned the city's rubbish are preserved here too — the only near-complete examples of their design that survive anywhere. Together, the engines and furnaces represent the original 1894 system in something close to its complete form.

The pumping station evolved as Cambridge grew. In 1909, two 94-horsepower National gas engines were added to cope with increased pumping demand after heavy rainfall — these drove centrifugal pumps alongside the steam engines and could route sewage to Milton or to storm water tanks with a capacity of over a million gallons. By the 1920s, the calorific value of the city's rubbish was declining, and Sunday waste collection had ended, reducing the fuel available for the destructors. A Babcock and Wilcox coke-fuelled boiler was installed as backup. By 1942 it was providing the main steam supply. In 1992, the celebrated industrial heritage broadcaster Fred Dibnah climbed the station's chimney to undertake painting and pointing repairs, and was filmed doing so for a BBC programme.

The museum presents what it calls an "alternative side" of Cambridge's history to the famous colleges. Displays cover the forgotten industries that ran alongside academic Cambridge: the Pye electronics company, which grew from a Cambridge workshop into a major British electronics manufacturer; the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, whose precision instruments went to laboratories and expeditions around the world; and the trades, crafts, and industrial enterprises that employed thousands of Cambridge residents across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These are the stories that tend not to appear in books about King's College Chapel or Newton's apple. They happened in the same city, in the same decades, powered by the same river.

The museum occupies a substantial site on the River Cam with open green spaces, a relaxed atmosphere, and a print shop, café, and education centre. The Pye building houses exhibitions on twentieth-century local companies. The building that served as the original public health disinfector — built around 1900 to sterilise bed linen and clothing from municipal hospitals and care homes using waste steam — now houses the print shop. Steam weekends, when the Hathorn Davey engine runs, draw visitors who want to understand Victorian engineering through something that still actually works. The chimney still stands. The site is a scheduled monument.