- Royal Albert Hall — South Kensington Gasworks
- Early gas industry
- The old dairy, Crouch Hill
- 174news.pdf
Some readers may remember hearing a wag remark that the Royal Albert Hall was Victorian and ugly and reminiscent of the gasworks. At first sight this does not seem a very appropriate comment and it would be easy to dismiss the gasworks connotation as coming from an ignorant person who only associated the Albert Hall with a gasholder because they both had a roughly similar outline.
However, closer inspection of this connection reveals more concrete justification for the once popular Cockney joke. Britain has a warmish temperate climate and here our gas industry developed the water-sealed type of gasholder familiar to us all. Readers unfamiliar with the details of how these holders work are recommended to consult Brian Sturt's excellent article on low-pressure gas storage in London's Industrial Archaeology number two.
A problem comes when trying to transfer our traditional gasholder technology to countries on the European continent which have cold winters. In Germany, at least to the east, Poland, Austria and so on the winters are just too cold for a Victorian-type British gasholder to work. Quite simply the water freezes. This would be particularly true for the water forming seals between the upper lifting sections of telescopic holders in an east wind (see Brian Sturt's article, figure 7). The solution to this problem was to build gasholders indoors where the building could be heated. A water-sealed gasholder in a protective building existed in Hamburg up to the late 1980s. Further east the advisability of indoor water-sealed gasholders would have been even more pronounced.
So we have gone some way to explaining the old Albert Hall joke. The building surrounding a water-sealed gasholder in central Europe might well be circular in plan to accommodate a largish holder efficiently and have a domed roof of some kind.
Only since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the removal of the Iron Curtain have industrial archaeologists with cameras been able to visit Eastern Europe freely and photograph industrial sites. Needless to say the pictures we have seen published recently are very interesting and they include photographs of gasholders enclosed in circular buildings with domed roofs looking very much like the Albert Hall. A good example is the view of Warsaw gasworks on page 7 of Industrial Archaeology News number 99.
Before the First World War well-heeled music lovers would have been familiar with Leipzig, Dresden, Vienna and so forth and no doubt saw gas works there of the type alluded to above. With Prince Albert having such strong German connections the old Albert Hall joke is beginning to appear far more plausible. Can we say that now the Iron Curtain has come down it is obvious?
Some of the exterior decoration of the Royal Albert Hall is very much industrial. Look up and you will see a rolling mill for working hot wrought iron, a broad gauge GWR locomotive and other manifestations of Victorian high technology. For late Victorian haters of that age's industrialisation these images would contribute to a climate of opinion which disparaged the aesthetics of the Albertopolis concert hall.
Perhaps the Germans had the last laugh after all. It will be appreciated that building water-sealed gasholders in large protective buildings is expensive. To overcome this Germanic Europe developed, roughly since 1900, a different type of dry gasholder, essentially a large vertical cylinder with a piston above the gas having an oil or tar seal which could be heated by an electric element in winter. Since the 1920s dry holders of this type have been built in Britain. Brian Sturt deals with them from page 19 of his article. You may know the example in London at Battersea.
The German-type dry holder at Harrow, Middlesex, used to display a white painted sign 'NO' for aircraft navigation purposes. Nominally the NO meant Northolt but it could also be taken as no, not Heathrow. There is a well-known story of a Boeing 707 pilot mistaking the Harrow gasholder for a similar dry holder at Southall and instead of touching down at Heathrow he landed by mistake at Northolt. Luckily the skill of the pilot enabled the plane to be brought to a standstill just before the end of the Northolt runway, shorter than Heathrow's, and a very nasty accident was averted.
Do the dry holders at Harrow and Southall still both exist? Perhaps readers familiar with the present situation might write in. Before the Boeing 707 incident the holder at Harrow carried a sign other than 'NO' which made confusion with Southall easier. Does anyone remember what that sign used to be? Bob Carr
I was interested to read Mary Mills' reference to the Westminster Gas Supply Company in her Notes on the Early Gas Industry in the last Newsletter (GLIAS Newsletter December 1997). Rather than a separate concern this was more likely a forerunner of the Gas Light and Coke Company, however it would be interesting to know if it ever supplied customers with gas. Among the various leaflets produced by Winsor, I remember somewhere one (it is probably in the British Gas Archive at Partington, Manchester) with reference to a Westminster Gas Company. If this was the case, Millbank was abandoned, as in 1807 Winsor's fortunes started to improve.
He was backed from 1804 by a 'Society' with funds for a committee making experiments'. In 1807 this was reformed on a larger scale with James Ludovic Grant at the helm. Winsor was then able to move his demonstration plant from the Lyceum Theatre where he had given public lectures, to 97 Pall Mall, and set up his famed display of lighting along the garden wall of Carlton House in June that year. Gas was supplied from his property, the garden of which backed onto the wall. This was followed by a demonstration of street lighting in Pall Mall at the end of the year, or early in 1808. These two demonstrations were adequate proof that behind Winsor's more flamboyant ideas there was the basis of a sound practical scheme.
During this period, Winsor now issued a prospectus of something far more grandiose, the 'National Light and Heat Company', capital one million pounds. Investors were informed a deposit of five pounds on a fifty pound share would guarantee an annual return of £570, a nice little earner if ever there was one. The Committee tried to establish this as a Chartered Corporation, but were told to first gain an Act of Parliament. This was achieved on the second attempt in 1810 as a scaled down version of the Gas Light and Coke Company. Under terms of the Act, half the capital had to be raised before obtaining a Charter of Corporation within a time limit of three years. The Charter was granted on the 30th April 1812, and now the Gas Light and Coke was able to get down to business. Crown Wharf off Cannon Row was purchased and the Company Engineer, James Hargreaves, with the Company Chemist, Frederick Accum, and Winsor, set about creating necessary production plant. Unfortunately none of this dynamic trio were able to achieve any real success, and by the end of 1812 the Gas Light was in dire straits.
Therefore if Winsor was unsuccessful in building a plant suitable for gas supply in 1812, he would have been unlikely to have succeeded at Millbank in 1808. There is a very considerable amount of difference in obs experimenting on a small scale, and setting up a works capable of supplying a district on a regular basis. Even Murdoch with his previous experience in Redruth took several years of expensive development at the Soho Foundry before commissioning his first lighting installation at the mill of Messrs. Phillips and Lee in 1805. Working with Murdoch was a Mancunian, Samuel Clegg, who managed to complete a gas works at Henry Lodge's mill a couple of weeks before Murdoch. Shortly afterwards Clegg set up a business in his home town, later building a number of successful gas works. In 1812 he came to London to build a gas plant for Rudolf Ackermann's print works in the Strand.
To get themselves out of a hole, the Gas Light at the end of 1812 took on a 'man who can', Samuel Clegg, as assistant to Hargreaves. Clegg condemned Crown Wharf as a site for gas manufacture and after a hurried search, the Company were able to lease Providence Court, off Great Peter Street. By salvaging what he could and building the rest, Clegg had the Company supplying gas by Autumn 1813. Thus from an inauspicious start the Gas Light, the first successful public gas company, eventually grew into what was to become Europe's largest gas concern. Brian Sturt
The Old Dairy at the bottom of Crouch Hill and the junction with Hanley Road in north London is a noteworthy building (GLIAS Newsletter August 1997). The original building at 127 Hanley Road was in use as a dairy from the middle of the 19th century but the decorative building at 103 Crouch Hill, with its sgraffito panels, was built specially for the Friern Manor Dairy Farm Company. The panels are very unusual in being pictorial and in the street, there being very late little 19c sgraffito work and what there is is mostly decorative, or in churches. If for no other reason, this makes the building special.
The earliest reference to Friern Manor Farm is in the London Illustrated News of 1853 which identifies herds kept in Peckham by a Mr Wright, who had offices in Farringdon Street and Grosvenor Square. Friern Manor Dairy was incorporated as a Limited Company in 1887, with George Taylor as Chairman, and his son Charles Henry Taylor as Managing Director and Secretary. The building in Crouch Hill was put up in 1891 for use by the company which had its Head Office at Farringdon Street and branches in south London at Peckham, Nunhead and Streatham, and in north London at Stroud Green, Holloway, Highbury and Finsbury Park. It appears the origins of the company may have been in south London, so why build such a prestigious and expensive building in north London, not even the head office?
In the early 1900s the company advertised itself as a specialist supplier of Dr Gaertner's Humanised Milk preparation for infants and invalids, with a local farm, Park Farm, in Coppetts Road, Muswell Hill, and branches all over London. Later the firm diversified into supplying ice cream to south London cinemas and milk bars in the city. The premises at Hanley Road and Crouch Hill were let in the 1920s to United Dairies who continued to use them until 1968, after which they had an assortment of occupiers. The Crouch Hill building was listed in 1972 and Hanley Road in 1974. The identity of the builder of 1 Crouch Hill is unknown, as is the designer of the decorative panels. In 1889 a Mr Wells put a proposal to the Islington Vestry for a frontage of 11 shops, between Hanley Road and Sparsholt Road, on Crouch Hill. He also developed property on the Stroud Green Road about this time.
In 1890 permission was given to Mr Wells to erect houses and shops on the south side of Crouch Hill between Findon Terrace and 127 Hanley Road. Also at this times Messrs J. Young & Co. were to build additional stables at the Friern Dairy Farm Co premises at Hanley Road. These two seem to be likely contenders for the construction of the building. An article on William Wise, a late 19th century freelance ceramic painter working for Mintons, suggests that he may have had some influence on the design of the panels on the Crouch Hill building, but there is nothing to suggest that he actually designed or executed the sgraffito work.
The Crouch Hill building is constructed with red rubbed bricks having a footing of brown glazed brick and stone dressings. The rubbed bricks have been identified by the markings T.L.B. as being made by Tommy Lawrence of Bracknell. This 19thc brick making company closed down after the war, was a source of bricks for Hampton Court and synonymous with cut and rubbed brickwork. To the left of the entrance are five bays, and two to the right, containing round arched panels with stone foliage imposts and archivolts with roll mouldings, cach flanked by Corinthian pilasters. The panel in each bay is decorated with murals illustrating dairying in the past and as practised then in the Friern Manor Farm at the turn of the century.
Each panel is made up of a hard red plaster laid onto the bricks and then covered with a hard white plaster in which areas of the surface layer are cut away to reveal the different coloured background to make the picture in relief. The panels were then sealed with linseed oil for protection. The panels depict, to the left of the entrance. dairy scenes of grazing, milking, cooling, country delivery, making butter, and to the right of the entrance, old style delivery and present day delivery, as it was in 1890.
If any of our readers has further information, I would be pleased if they could let me know, as I am researching the buildings. I can be contacted at 9 Umfreville Road, London N4 IRY Tel: 0181-348 3375. John Hinshelwood