London's Industrial Heritage E-Book

Geoff Marshall

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 501

Beschreibung

Did you know that apart from Lancashire, the greatest concentration of Boulton & Watt steam engines was in London, demonstrating the enormous and often overlooked significance of London as an industrial centre? The story behind the many industries found in the capital is described in this unique book. London once had scores of breweries; the world's first plastic material was synthesised in the East End; there was even a gasworks opposite the Palace of Westminster. Clerkenwell was a centre for watch and clock makers; the River Thames used to be full of colliers bringing coal from Newcastle; Joseph Bramah invented his water closet and hydraulic pump here, and Henry Maudslay made machines to make machines. Many household names began in London: Schweppes, Crosse & Blackwell, and Vauxhall motor cars. The list of fascinating facts goes on. In this, the first book of its kind on the subject, Geoff Marshall provides an enthralling overview of London's industrial face through history.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Preface

Part 1: Public Utilities

1     The Electricity Industry

2     Gas

3     Post & Telecommunications

4     Water Supply & Sewage Disposal

5     The Thames Barrier

Part 2: Manufacturing

6     Bell Founding

7     Candle Making

8     The Chemical Industry

9     Clockmaking

10   Engineering

11   Footwear

12   Furniture

13   Glass

14   Leather

15   Match Making

16   Paper, Printing, Newspapers & Bank Notes

17   Pottery

18   Shipbuilding

19   Textiles

20   Other Establishments & Trades

Part 3: Transport

21   Canals

22   The Docks

23   Railways

Part 4: Other Industries

24   Brewing & Distilling

25   The Building Industry

26   The Coal Trade

27   Food

28   Water Mills & Windmills

Sources of Reference

Plate Section

Copyright

Preface

London is rarely considered an industrial centre. It has no coal mines, no great steelworks. And yet at the height of the Industrial Revolution between 1775 and 1800, apart from Lancashire with its vast cotton industry, the greatest concentration of Boulton & Watt steam engines was found in London. These engines kick-started the Industrial Revolution, and the presence of so many in London ably demonstrates the importance of the capital as an industrial centre. There were breweries by the score; the world’s first plastic material was synthesised in London’s East End, as was the first ever synthetic dye. After an extrovert Moravian demonstrated in Pall Mall that London’s streets could be lit by gas, gasworks were built throughout the capital. There were power stations, sulphuric acid works, the River Thames was full of colliers bringing coal from Newcastle, and London’s Docks were the envy of the world. Shipbuilding thrived on both sides of the Thames. Brunel’s Great Eastern was launched from the Isle of Dogs, and at the Thames Iron Works at Bow Creek the world’s first iron-hulled battleship, Warrior, was built. London was home to great engineers – Joseph Bramah invented his water closet and hydraulic pump, Henry Maudslay made machines to make machines, and John Rennie built his bridges. Motor cars, and even aeroplanes, were made. There were glassworks in Bankside, leather works in Bermondsey, and Royal Doulton pottery was crafted in Lambeth.

Londoners had to be fed and food was imported to the capital’s markets – Smithfield, Billingsgate, Covent Garden, Spitalfields and Borough. There were (and are) food and drink manufacturers, and many household names began in London, such as Sainsbury’s, Schweppes and Crosse & Blackwell. Huguenot refugees fled to London after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and dominated the silk industry of Spitalfields. The match girls at Bryant & May went down with phossy jaw, and East End immigrants worked in the sweated labour of the textile industry. The list is endless.

For centuries men engaged in a common craft would combine together for their mutual benefit. Associations of this type were known as guilds and they dominated London’s trade and industry throughout the medieval period and beyond. By the end of the fourteenth century, guilds were empowered to control wages and prices and had the right to inspect all goods and confiscate them if found faulty. However, the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century and the increasing demand for goods severely reduced the influence of guilds. Their power was based on the organisation of a close-knit community. Once industry became more diversely spread around the country, the power of the guilds waned. Many survive, but their role has changed. Today they sponsor charitable causes and educational bodies and get involved in good work, often associated with their former trade. It is with the period following the demise of city guilds that the content of this book is mainly concerned.

As the book progressed I came to realise that more and more material could be included. The only sensible thing was to draw a line. Having said that, I appreciate that there are omissions and equally material has been included that should perhaps not be there.

Thanks are due to the many people who have helped in my research – the staff at the British Library, and the local studies libraries at Tower Hamlets, Newham and Southwark. I would like to give special thanks to Southwark Local History Library, for it was there that my interest in the subject was born when I was given the chance to contribute to their local history of Bankside. Thanks are also due to John Greenwood without whose Industrial Archaeology and Industrial History of London: A Bibliography this book would not have been possible.

Part 1

PUBLIC UTILITIES

1   The Electricity Industry

Electricity Generation

Michael Faraday’s parents came from Yorkshire. They moved to London, where his father, James, worked as a blacksmith in Newington Butts. It was here – the area now known as Elephant and Castle – that Michael Faraday was born in 1791. In 1796, the family moved to rooms over a coach house in Jacob’s Well Mews, Manchester Square. Faraday’s education was rudimentary and in his own words, ‘my hours out of school were passed at home and in the streets’. He was apprenticed to a bookbinder and his seven-year apprenticeship exposed him to books which he read avidly, most importantly those on science: ‘I loved to read the scientific books which were under my hands … I made such experiments in chemistry as could be defrayed in their expense by a few pence per week.’ In 1812, Faraday saved up sufficient money to attend the last four lectures that Sir Humphry Davy was giving at the Royal Institution. Faraday was entranced. He returned to the bookbinders, wrote up all the lectures and illustrated them with diagrams and sketches and bound them in a book which he sent to Davy, in effect asking for a job:

My desire to escape from trade, which I thought vicious and selfish, and to enter into the service of science, which I had imagined made its pursuers amiable and liberal, induced me at last to take the bold and simple step of writing to Sir H. Davy expressing my wishes and a hope that, if an opportunity came in his way, he would favour my views: at the same time I sent the notes I had taken of his lectures.

After a while Davy took him on to clean and dust his apparatus at 25s a week and he never looked back. At the Royal Institution, on 17 October 1831, Faraday generated a ‘wave of electricity’ by moving a bar magnet into a coil of wire. Thus he discovered electromagnetic induction, the means to generate electricity by converting kinetic energy to electrical energy.

Due to the inadequacies of early dynamos, forty years elapsed before Faraday’s discovery could be exploited. It was the semi-literate but brilliant electrical engineer Zénobe Théophile Gramme who opened the way for electricity to be generated on a commercial basis. Gramme was born in Belgium and in 1871 he demonstrated his dynamo, with ring-mounted armature, at the Academy of Sciences in Paris. The Gramme machine gave a much smoother supply of direct current (d.c.) than had been possible hitherto.

In its early days electricity was employed solely for lighting. The earliest form of lighting was the arc lamp. Humphry Davy, at the Royal Institution, had discovered the arc lamp in 1808. He allowed current (generated by electrolysis) to jump between carbon electrodes thereby producing a brilliant light. But early arc lamps had a short lifespan and were unreliable. It was not until the Russian telegraph engineer Paul Jablochkoff, working in Paris in 1876, invented the Jablochkoff Candle that arc lamps became a practical possibility. Jablochkoff’s lamp consisted of two carbons rods separated by a paste of kaolin. When a current flowed, carbon paste between the two electrodes burned away emitting a dazzling light.

Given that both Gramme and Jablochkoff were working in France, it is hardly surprising that the French took the lead in installing electrically powered public lighting. In July 1878, the journal The Electrician highlighted the lack of progress in England, complaining, ‘in London there is not one such light to be seen’. Yet within one month things were to change.

The first public building to be lit by the new electric light was the Gaiety Theatre, where arc lamps were installed in August 1878, described as ‘half a dozen harvest moons shining at once in the Strand’. Then, a couple of months later, the French company Société Générale d’Électricité began an ambitious programme of street lighting along the Victoria Embankment between Westminster and Waterloo Bridges. Their power station – if that is the most appropriate way to describe it – was situated on the opposite side of the river, west of Charing Cross Bridge. It consisted of a wooden shed containing a steam engine, operating at 60psi pressure and driving a Gramme dynamo at 650rpm. Power lines ran beneath the Thames via a subway to power twenty Jablochkoff lamps on the north bank. More lamps were installed later, including some on Waterloo Bridge, but then, in 1884, the Jablochkoff Company went into liquidation and gas lights were reinstated.

Meanwhile, another scheme was under way at Holborn Viaduct. Sixteen Jablochkoff lamps were installed over a 500yd stretch of the viaduct and powered in a similar way to the Victoria Embankment scheme. The Times newspaper of 16 December 1878 reported:

On Saturday evening the electric light was experimentally tried upon the Holborn Viaduct, at the instance of the City Commission of Sewers [and] the light was remarkably steady and brilliant. The trial will be continued for some time and arrangements are being made for it to light the Royal Exchange and the Mansion House.

The trial was, however, less than successful and Colonel Haywood, engineer to the City Commission of Sewers, was reported in The Times of 21 March 1879 as ‘estimating the cost to be seven times that of gas and that the commission have resolved not to continue the experiment’. And that would appear to be that!

The gas companies were jubilant, boasting that ‘we are quite satisfied that the electric light can never be applied indoors without the production of an offensive smell which undoubtedly causes headaches and in its naked state it can never be used in a room of even a large size without damage to sight’. The problem lay with the intensity and dazzling light of arc lamps, and the fact that they smelled and emitted a hissing noise. But the gas companies had not bargained with the pioneering work of Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan.

Joseph Swan was born in Sunderland in 1828. Having trained and set up in business as a pharmacist, he began experimenting with incandescent lamps in the mid-nineteenth century but was hampered because he could not obtain a good vacuum in his bulbs. Vacuum pump technology improved later in the century and, in 1875, he was successful in making an incandescent lamp with a carbonised thread as filament. He patented his bulb in 1878, just before Thomas Edison in America did just the same. The two men joined forces and the Edison & Swan Electric Light Company was founded. By not having to rely on arc lamps, electric light now became a practical possibility.

Thomas Edison was quick to exploit the new electric light. In January 1882, he got in touch with the City Corporation and proposed that the Holborn Viaduct scheme be revisited. Edison offered to light the viaduct free of charge for three months and also to supply private consumers. The Times of 13 April 1882 reported:

From Newgate Street westward, across Holborn Viaduct, to Hatton Garden, the street and most of the buildings on either side of the street are now and for the next three months, will continue to be lit by Edison incandescent lamps. For the purpose of street lighting two of the incandescent lamps of 32 candle power each have been placed in every lamp-post and it had been hoped that last night permission would have been obtained from Colonel Heywood [sic] for the gas to be turned out in order that the effectiveness … might be proved the more satisfactorily … it is hoped that tonight the public will be able to judge on the matter themselves. Those that can obtain permission to see the machinery and appliances by which the electricity is generated and distributed will find a satisfactory answer.

The machinery The Times spoke of was sited at 57 Holborn viaduct (on the north side of the road) and can claim to be the first power station in the world. Current at 100V d.c. was supplied from an Edison dynamo driven by a steam engine, with steam raised from a water tube Babcock & Wilcox boiler. One thousand Edison lamps of 16cp each were installed; later, a further 1,200 were powered from another generator at 35 Snow Hill. Along the route was the City Temple, which can lay claim to being the first church to be lit by electricity. The mains were copper conductors, encased in insulation within wrought-iron pipes. Holborn Viaduct Power Station continued to operate until 1886.

A Myriad of Small Stations

In the early 1880s, the Great Western Railway built a power station to light Paddington Station, its offices and the Great Western Hotel. According to The Electrician, it supplied ‘by far the largest installation of mixed lighting hitherto made’. The power station stood a quarter of a mile from Paddington Station on the south side of the track. There were three 350kW alternators housed in a wooden building with double walls, so constructed to keep the noise down. It plainly did not, because in 1885 the residents of nearby Gloucester Terrace complained to the magistrates at Marylebone Police Court that the ‘tremendous vibration and noise, added to the fumes of smoke and steam and dirt caused by the machinery, produced such a nuisance as to be almost unbearable’.

Meanwhile, in 1887, the Cadogan Electric Lighting Co. installed a series of storage batteries in the houses of residents in Chelsea, South Kensington and Knightsbridge, and, via overhead transmission lines strung from poles, supplied direct current from a small power station in Manor Street (now Chesil Court) next to Albert Bridge. The scheme did not prosper; by 1895, only twenty-five houses were being supplied. The Cadogan Co. was then taken over by the Chelsea Electricity Supply Co. which had obtained consent to lay mains beneath the street. Their power station, in the basement of a house in Draycott Place/Cadogan Gardens, supplied direct current to batteries in a series of substations, one at Draycott Place, the others at Pavilion Road and Egerton Gardens Mews. The substations were charged in series and supplied low tension d.c. to customers in parallel. Another power station was built in 1894 at Flood Street, and by 1911 the company’s capacity had increased to 3,400kW, with further substations at Elm Park Gardens, Clabon Mews and Pond Place. The Chelsea Co. ceased generating in 1928.

The Whitehall Electric Supply Co. was formed in 1887 with the intention of lighting Whitehall Court (now the Royal Horseguards Hotel). A power station was built in front, underneath the road, and its customers included the church of St Martin in the Fields and various premises in Northumberland Avenue. Within the year it was taken over for £40,000 by the Metropolitan Electric Supply Co., which soon purchased a small power station in Rathbone Place, off Oxford Street. The Whitehall Court scheme supplied direct current, but at Rathbone Place the company opted for alternating current (a.c.). Another power station was constructed in Sardinia Street at the south-west corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the Metropolitan Electric Supply Co. now served Marylebone, Bloomsbury, Lincoln’s Inn and Covent Garden. A further station was built at Manchester Square in 1890. However, because of complaints – houses vibrated and clocks stopped – an injunction was served on the company. It was on the point of shutting down but the day was saved by replacing the noisy reciprocating Willans engines with three 350kW Parsons turbo-alternators, the first to be installed in the capital.

An early generating station was built, just south of Kensington High Street, by R.E. Crompton & Co. to illuminate Kensington Court. By 1890, the Kensington Court Electric Light Co. was supplying d.c. to the surrounding area. It was soon acquired by the Kensington & Knightsbridge Electric Lighting Co., which had a power station in Cheval Place. In 1892, 645kW was generated at Kensington Court and 410kW at Cheval Place.

The Westminster Electric Supply Corporation had two plants in 1890: one at Stoneyard, Millbank, near the House of Lords, supplying the Palace of Westminster; and the other at Chapel Mews, near St James’s Park Station. They had further stations, all d.c., in Dacre Street, in Eccleston Place to supply Belgravia, and Davies Street to supply Mayfair. In 1904, a substation was built at Duke Street, Mayfair, and in 1910 the Millbank plant was demolished to make way for Victoria Tower Gardens. Meanwhile, a new station was built in Horseferry Road, near Lambeth Bridge.

The St James’s and Pall Mall Electric Lighting Co. built their first power station in Mason’s Yard, Duke Street. Sited in the heart of St James’s, the station was prone to pollute the surrounding area with an oily spray which did nothing to please the members of London’s fashionable gentlemen’s clubs. As one of the engineers commented,‘it was almost a daily occurrence to see a gesticulating man pointing out his damaged top hat’. Wyndham’s Club even obtained an injunction against the plant but then had the nerve to insist that their supply shouldn’t be cut off! The company laid its mains in cast-iron culverts and on one occasion the outer casing became live. An old and unsuspecting horse was unfortunate enough to place his iron-clad hoof on the casing and received a fatal shock. The owner was compensated with £40 but soon afterwards a similar accident happened to a horse drawing a hansom cab. From then on it was commonplace for cab drivers to pass along Jermyn Street with old and worn-out nags in the hope that a similar fate might befall them. In 1893, a new station was constructed in Carnaby Street and by the end of the century the company amalgamated with the Westminster Company and began to build a new plant at Grove Road.

The Charing Cross Electricity Supply Co. traced its roots back to a small power plant installed in 1883 in the basement of the Adelaide Restaurant in the Strand owned by the Gatti Brothers. Two years later Messrs Gatti were supplying the Adelphi Theatre and in 1888 built a new station in Bull Inn Court, between Maiden Lane and the Strand. Acquired by the Charing Cross Co. in 1889, the new company soon expanded south of the river and built a plant between Waterloo and Blackfriars Bridges. In the early twentieth century consent was obtained to supply the City from a new power station at Bow. By 1919, its capacity was 74MW.

Originally known as the House-to-House Electric Light Supply Co., the Brompton & Kensington Electricity Supply Co. had an a.c. power station in Richmond Road, Brompton, in 1889. To begin with, every customer had a transformer in their own home before the company installed a series of their own transformers to supply low voltage. In 1928, when they finally ceased generation, the plant had a capacity of 8MW.

The County of London Electric Lighting Co. ran two power stations: one at the City Road basin of the Regent’s Canal; the other on the banks of the Thames at Wandsworth. They began operation in 1896.

The first local authority to supply electricity in London was St Pancras. A power station was built in Stanhope Street, just to the east of Regent’s Park. A second station opened in King’s Road and was unique in that it used the hot gases from a refuse destructor to heat its boilers – an early example of energy conservation. Hampstead opened a small station on Finchley Road in 1893, to be followed by Islington which built a generating plant at Eden Grove, off Holloway Road. Ealing was soon to follow the example of St Pancras and harness heat from a waste destructor plant, and Shoreditch followed suit with a plant in Coronet Street, opened by Lord Kelvin in 1897. It came in for much criticism and was labelled a waste of time, but the chairman of the Shoreditch company insisted in a letter to the technical press: ‘We are absolutely raising from our ashbin refuse sufficient steam to drive our electrical plant, giving a maximum output at our heavy load of 250kW, and this we are raising solely from ashbin refuse.’

Towards an Integrated Supply

So why did the electricity supply industry develop in such a haphazard way in London, and everywhere else for that matter? The answer is found in the early legislation to which the industry was subject. A select committee was established to look into the matter, chaired by Sir Lyon Playfair in 1879, and set the seal on how the industry was to develop for at least the next forty years. The committee recommended that electricity undertakings should supply power only within the area under the jurisdiction of their particular municipal authority. The result was scores of small power stations, each supplying only a small area.

The recommendations were given the authority of law by Joseph Chamberlain’s Electric Lighting Act, which received its royal assent in 1882. The Act sought to prevent monopolies and also favoured electricity supply being put in the hands of municipal authorities by empowering them to compulsorily purchase private undertakings after a period of, first, twenty-one years and then (by the terms of a later Act) forty-two years. There were thus conflicting interests between local authorities and private concerns. The Electric Lighting Act of 1909 went some way to improve matters by allowing the Board of Trade powers (over the heads of local authorities) to authorise the breaking-up of streets and the compulsory purchase of land for building power stations.

The early legislation of the electricity supply industry has come in for much subsequent criticism – often laid at the hands of Joseph Chamberlain – whose horror of monopolies, and tenure as mayor of the thriving industrial city of Birmingham, no doubt influenced his preference for supply being provided by municipal authorities. But it was not only legislation that caused confusion – there were technical matters as well. These centred on whether it was preferable to supply direct current or alternating current. The controversy became known as the ‘battle of the systems’, with eminent men in both camps. Ferranti was a fervent advocate of a.c., whereas R.E. Crompton and indeed Thomas Edison favoured d.c. Alternating current supply eventually won the day because of its ability to transmit high voltages from large power stations over large areas without power loss. But in the early days of power generation d.c. offered many advantages. The most important of these was that it ensured security of supply because batteries could be used as a stand-by supply in the eventuality of plant breakdown. In contrast, if an a.c. generator broke down, the lights went out at once – a common occurrence which did much to enhance the cause of d.c. supply. It is little surprise, therefore, that the great majority of early power stations generated direct current – only the London Electric Supply Co. and the Metropolitan Electric Supply Co. favoured alternating current. But gradually advances in engineering – particularly the replacement of belt-driven generators by the turbo-alternator – began to favour large-scale a.c. transmission.

But there was still a multitude of different companies: in 1921, there were eighty separate supply concerns in London, supplying power from seventy different power stations, with fifty systems of supply, twenty-four voltages and ten frequencies. Looking at it from the customers’ point of view, it meant that moving home meant changing all one’s electrical appliances! And from the suppliers’ viewpoint, because the stations were not interconnected each company was forced to install excessive reserve plant to cover for breakdown, or outage due to essential maintenance. The net result was that electricity was expensive!

The government responded later in the 1920s by setting up a committee under Lord Weir to enquire into the industry and make recommendations. Reporting in 1925, Weir recommended a national ‘gridiron’ of high voltage transmission lines taking power from the most efficient ‘selected’ power stations. His recommendations became the basis for the Electricity Supply Act of 1926. Selected stations – still either in private hands or owned by municipal authorities – generated alternating current at a standard frequency and sold it to the newly formed Central Electricity Board (CEB). Each company then repurchased electricity from the grid at a price not greater than it would have cost them to produce had the grid not been in operation. They then supplied their own customers in the same way as before. The CEB had the job of selecting stations and forcing inefficient undertakings to close their power plant and purchase supply from the grid. For the consumer, the result was a halving in the price of electricity.

The Second World War curtailed the construction of new power plant and, combined with a shortage of coal, power cuts after the war were inevitable. The building of new and large efficient power stations commenced immediately after the war. In London a new Bankside station was begun.

The post-war Attlee government nationalised the industry and by the terms of the Electricity Act of 1947 the British Electricity Authority was formed, later to be replaced by the Central Electricity Board and then the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) in 1958. The CEGB ran all power stations in England and Wales and sold power to twelve area boards; in London this was the London Electricity Board (LEB). In the early 1990s, the industry was privatised but by that time all London’s power stations had shut down and supply was taken from more efficient stations elsewhere.

Famous Thames-side Power Stations

Deptford Power Station – Ferranti’s Dream

The story of Deptford Power Station starts in the most unlikely of places – New Bond Street in London’s fashionable West End. There, in the mid-1880s, Sir Coutts Lindsay and Lord Wantage put up the money to illuminate the Grosvenor Gallery by means of a steam engine driving two Siemens alternators generating current at 200V. So impressed were local shopkeepers and residents that they asked to be connected to the system. Accordingly, overhead lines were strung along iron poles from house to house and transformers installed in each property to reduce the voltage. Rather than installing meters, each consumer paid £1 per year for every 10cp lamp and £2 for every 20cp one.

As with all new ventures, problems arose and so the young and ambitious Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti was called in to solve them. Ferranti was descended from a noble Italian family and was educated at St Augustine’s Roman Catholic College in Ramsgate. After the briefest apprenticeship at Siemens, he set up in business at the tender age of 18 with the engineer Alfred Thompson and the lawyer Francis Ince. Ferranti immediately set to work to update the Grosvenor Gallery station by replacing the Siemens alternators with ones of his own. But Ferranti and his backers had other, more ambitious, schemes in mind. A new company was set up, the London Electric Supply Corporation (LESCo), with an authorised capital of £1 million in shares of £5 each.

Ferranti’s dream was to supply large areas of London from what was, by the standards of the day, a giant power station situated by the river. There would therefore be an ample supply of cooling water, and coal could be delivered at minimum cost by sea from the coalfields in South Wales or Tyneside. He took his lead from the example of the gas companies, such as the Gas Light and Coke Co. which had consolidated their works at the remote site of Beckton. To quote Ferranti:

The business of distributing electrical energy must be done on a large scale to be commercial, and to attain this we must supply a large area … and we must do this from a site not in the congested heart of a big city but from a position best suited by its natural advantages to the carrying on of such an undertaking.

The site chosen was Deptford and LESCo set about building their station on land just to the west of Deptford Creek on a 3-acre site called the Stowage, previously used by the East India Company. Initial plans were for four 10,000hp engines, powered by steam from eighty boilers, driving four alternators supplying current at the then unheard of voltage of 10,000V.

Ferranti was newly married, but the building of Deptford Power Station was still at the forefront of his mind – he would often stay all night at the plant. His wife was to write later: ‘The first thing I remember during those first months of married life was Deptford, and again Deptford. We talked Deptford and dreamed Deptford.’ Ferranti’s obsession did not go unnoticed: the journal The Electrical Engineer called him the ‘Michelangelo of that installation because from first to last, from foundation to highest turret … all were specified or designed by one man, and the credit of that success will have to be given … to Ferranti’.

The first transmission cables from Deptford to supply London proved inadequate and so Ferranti, true to his character, set about designing and manufacturing them for himself. Rather than dig up streets and lay the cables underground, he came to an arrangement with the local railway companies and laid his cables along the railway track running from Deptford into London via Cannon Street, Blackfriars and Charing Cross railway bridges. He came to a similar agreement with the Metropolitan & District Underground Railway.

But the Board of Trade concluded that four 10,000hp engines in one location at Deptford would be a risk to the continuity of supply should there be a breakdown. The Board was also keen to ensure competition and recommended both a.c. and d.c. distribution. The consequence was that Deptford’s area of supply was halved. In response, LESCo modified their plans and installed twenty-four Babcock & Wilcox boilers, producing 414,000lb of steam per hour driving two 1,250hp Corliss steam engines connected from fly wheel to the alternators. Then, on 15 November 1890, disaster struck at Grosvenor Gallery. Due to operator error, a momentary 5,000V arc was allowed to start a serious fire which eventually shut down the entire station. Supply was curtailed for three months and, not surprisingly, many customers transferred their allegiance elsewhere. LESCo lost money and many were quick to point the finger at Ferranti’s wild scheme. The company was forced to cancel its order for the 10,000hp machines and in August 1891, Ferranti left Deptford. However, as we have said, his vision of large power stations supplying large areas of population was to be realised – but much later.

Electricity continued to be supplied from Deptford. In 1904, two 2MW alternators were installed to power the London County Council’s tramways and later the station supplied the newly electrified railway. In time, a further station was built, Deptford West, and, in 1932, Deptford claimed to be ‘the most efficient generating plant in the country’. Deptford continued to supply power until its final closure in 1983.

Battersea Power Station – Londoners Love It

Ten small companies combined in 1925 to become the London Power Co. Their first project was to build a giant power station on a 15-acre site with an eventual capacity of 400MW. It was Battersea Power Station.

Final consent was granted on 27 November 1927, but not before a storm of protest had erupted. Objections came from all quarters. Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, railed that ‘it would cast the blight of soot and sulphurous fumes on London’s parks and gardens, picture galleries and oldest and noblest buildings. How can a sense of civic beauty survive the progress of civilisation which is making a desert of the past and a dust heap of the future?’ Lang was not alone in his outrage. He was joined by the King’s physician, Lord Dawson of Penn; by both president and past president of the Royal Institute of British Architects; and, predictably, by the newspapers, who joined in the furore with headlines warning of ‘a Blight of Poisonous Fumes’, ‘Noxious Gas by the Ton’, ‘Parks and Art Treasures in Danger’ and ‘Perils of Public Health’. The main sticking point was the vast amount of sulphur dioxide that would be emitted from the station, estimated at more than 3 tons per hour. In consequence, the Electricity Commissioners insisted that measures be taken ‘for preventing as far as reasonably practicable the evolution of oxides of sulphur and generally for preventing any nuisance’. The solution was the incorporation of gas washing. In June 1933, two 69MW Metropolitan-Vickers units were installed and two years later a 105MW set, which remained the largest unit in the country until 1956.

Battersea Power Station.

The original intention of having nine metal chimneys was abandoned. Battersea’s four upright chimneys are now a well-loved landmark, but to begin with – before the station was enlarged – there were only two. In response to the protests, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was engaged as architect. Coming from a family of eminent architects, Scott is best known for his design of Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, the elegant and graceful Waterloo Bridge and the red telephone kiosk. Scott was so successful that his design was given second place in a survey of modern buildings carried out by The Architects’ Journal in 1939. Seemingly, he disliked the inverted table design but matters had gone too far and he was, much to the benefit of later generations, stuck with it. Scott’s design is a steel-framed building clad in brick. No expense was spared: the control room was decorated with Italian marble and parquet flooring, and the turbine hall was so clean and well polished that the station superintendent commented that ‘you could literally eat off it’. The gas washing plant was the first of its kind in the world. Scrubbers were fitted and the effluent gases sprayed with a chalk suspension. But the gas washing plant was not without its unfortunate side-effects. A white plume was formed, clearly visible to enemy aircraft, which could then use it as a marker to bomb London. The liquid effluent was also polluting the Thames. The upshot was that the gas washing plant was taken out of service. After the Second World War, a second station was put in, Battersea B, with 100MW and 60MW sets, giving a total capacity of 509MW. The famous station was now complete with its four distinctive chimneys. The design at Battersea, in fact, became the norm for all later power stations in Britain in the immediate post-war years.

Electricity generation continued at Battersea until 1983 and there were many innovations. In 1952, pulverised fuel was used for the first time, and the original A station provided district heating for 30 acres of housing in Pimlico on the other side of the river. Spent steam was passed beneath the river through 12in pipes to a glass accumulator tower and gave heat to 2,000 flats – a total of 11,000 people.

Despite a new lease of life after the oil crisis of 1973, Battersea was supplanted by more efficient stations in the Midlands and the North, and eventually closed in 1983.

Bankside

The generation of electricity from Bankside began in the early 1890s with the formation of the City of London Electric Lighting Co., registered in July 1891 with a capital of £800,000. There were two pairs of 25kW Brush arc lighters and two 100kW alternators. They were driven by belting from Brush engines, powered by steam from Babcock & Wilcox boilers. By 1901, there were a total of thirty-eight such boilers and capacity had risen to 10,500kW. Bankside was now the largest establishment of its kind in the world.

City of London Electric Lighting Co. Power Station, Bankside, c. 1891.

Boiler house at City of London Electric Lighting Co. Power Station, Bankside, c. 1901.

Turbine hall, City of London Electric Lighting Co. Power Station, Bankside, in the 1930s.

Noise and vibration were major problems with power stations. The vibration at Bankside was such that the men operating within the engine room were said to require ‘sea legs’ to work there and the proud statue of St George and the Dragon that stood in front of the building soon disintegrated and fell down. But the riverside site was seen as a positive advantage. There was a plentiful supply of water for cooling, ash could be removed easily by boat, and coal could be delivered by barge after offloading from seagoing vessels downstream at Blackwall.

In the early days of operation it was difficult to cater for rapidly changing demands for power. London fogs were an ever-present headache. Within a few minutes of the onset of a London ‘pea souper’, demand for power could rise dramatically and then equally quickly fall again when the fog lifted. The company tried to get knowledge beforehand of the coming of fogs by arranging for notice of them to be phoned through from the docks to the east (given that, it was reasoned, fogs came from this direction). Messages tended to arrive after the fogs had lifted and this instigated a policy of having a lookout posted high up on an observation platform around one of the chimneys.

The turbine came to Bankside in 1910 with a Parsons 2,500kW turbo-alternator replacing some of the earlier engine-driven machines. More quickly followed and by 1915 capacity had risen to 34,500kW. The eventual plant capacity for pre-war Bankside was 85,000kW, with two 15MW, five 10MW and one 5MW sets operating at a steam pressure of 270psi.

The original Bankside Power Station is now long gone but a remarkable incident occurred during its heyday. A 12-year-old boy was playing by the river water suction pumps when he lost his footing and fell in. A workman saw the accident and immediately raised the alarm and the pump was switched off. The boy, meanwhile, had been thundered, totally submerged, for well over a minute through the 3ft diameter entry pipe, through a couple of hairpin bends and along a distance of 50yd to a screened chamber under vacuum. The vacuum was turned off but it was twenty minutes before workmen were able to lift the cover of the chamber and perform what they thought would be the gruesome task of removing the body of a dead child. To their astonishment, when the cover was removed a loud cry was heard and there before the workmen’s eyes was the adventurous lad, clinging to the screen with his head just out of the water. After the briefest of hospital visits he was pronounced ‘none the worse for his experience’ and sent home wrapped in a blanket.

By early 1939 it was realised that a new power station was needed, but the war intervened and plans were put on hold. After the war the shortage of power reached crisis proportions and permission was sought to alleviate this in 1946 by building a conventional coal-fired station. There were immediate objections and a public enquiry was held for their consideration. Opposition concentrated on two issues. First, that the power station would conflict with and hamper the view of St Paul’s Cathedral, its vista now newly opened up by the wartime bombing. It was also anticipated that the sulphurous fumes emitted by the stack would drift across the river and damage the cathedral’s stonework. Secondly, it was thought that the station would not fit in with the London County Council’s ‘County of London Plan’, published in 1943. Its South Bank scheme envisaged a park for Bankside, with commercial buildings behind. Prominent in opposition were the London County Council (LCC), the City Corporation, Southwark Borough Council and the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral. It was all to no avail and permission was granted by Lewis Silkin, Minister for Town and Country Planning, with the proviso that oil be used to fire the station instead of coal and that the flue gases be washed to prevent the emission of sulphurous fumes.

Fashions change and it is now generally recognised that Bankside Power Station (now Tate Modern) is a fine building and an integral part of London’s architectural heritage. But at the time of its proposed construction, opinions were to the contrary and indeed if we examine views at that time, we see we are fortunate that the power station and art gallery-to-be were built at all.

Argument was heated. The Dean of St Paul’s wrote to The Times on 16 April 1947:

We submit that in the replanning of central London there is nothing more deserving of attention than the picture of London from the river and that to minimise the central and grandest feature in this picture would be to spoil an immemorial aspect of London and would be an irreparable mistake for which future generations would rightly blame those responsible. We earnestly hope therefore that the Government will assent to the views of the LCC, the City Corporation and Southwark Borough Council which are united in their opposition to this proposal.

The issues were debated in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. These views must be seen alongside the fact that in the previous winter the country had been beset with power cut after power cut, and this was what was behind all the government’s thinking. The Lord Chancellor, Viscount Jowitt, speaking on behalf of the government, summed it up: ‘It would be poor consolation to a man rubbing his cold hands together to keep warm, to think, having sat there cold during two winters: “Well, I may be cold, but thank heaven the historical dominance of St Paul’s over the river has been preserved.”’ Lord Llewellin wanted ‘vistas both to and from St Paul’s so that the cathedral might stand forth and be seen as the Arc de Triomphe can be seen down the Champs-Élysées’ and he compared the power station proposal ‘to introducing an alligator into the water lily pond’. Early to appreciate the beauty of power stations, Viscount Jowitt was quick to respond: ‘On the contrary, I would say that this may well be another large and beautiful lily in the pond.’ Poor Lord Llewellin could only reply: ‘I must say I have never seen a water lily so well gilded as it has been by the noble and learned Viscount this afternoon. In fact I came to the conclusion that if we took for granted all the Lord Chancellor said we ought to go out and clamour to have a further power station in Parliament Square. Let us have one next to Westminster Abbey so that we may all have the benefit of this wonderful structure he has described to us.’

Demolition of City of London Electric Lighting Co. Power Station and construction of Bankside Power Station, c. 1959.

In the Commons, debate proceeded along similar lines. One member wanted the power station to be built underground: ‘It is quite easy to construct an underground railway; why not a power station?’ Other gems included: ‘We have been told that a power station can, in its way, be as beautiful as a cathedral. A hyena can be as melodious as a nightingale, but we do not like the way and prefer the nightingale.’ And then there was: ‘A power station is very much like a purgative pill. Put as much sugar on the outside as you wish but it is still a pill inside and it is no good putting fat boys and bulbous ladies on the outside of the building, it will still be a power station,’ as well as ‘Does anyone believe that the people of Rome would tolerate the erection of this power station in the shadow of St Peter’s? Of course not.’

And so it was at a press conference at the premises of the City of London Electric Lighting Co. in Aldersgate Street on 19 May 1947 that the station’s architect, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, unveiled a model of the power station. The design had been amended to incorporate only one chimney as opposed to the previous two. ‘Well, there is the so-called monster,’ proclaimed Scott. He went on: ‘I prefer this to the mountainous groups of offices as were proposed in the County of London plan. This station, with its slender tower or campanile, completes a composition and it lends itself without artificiality as a centrepiece. Why power stations should be considered as untouchables I cannot say. Power stations can be fine buildings.’

Scott recognised that power stations can indeed be beautiful buildings and this argument was later taken up by the architectural historian Gavin Stamp, who wrote in praise of Bankside. The term ‘brick cathedrals’ was coined, and Stamp described Bankside as ‘urbane and elegant’. He also made the point that ‘rebuilding the City with characterless sixties boxes made a nonsense of all the worthy talk of preserving the visual dominance of St Paul’s’.

It was inevitable that consent should come, and work commenced in 1948. In the initial stages two turbines of 60MW each were installed. Later, in 1959, the original power station of the City of London Electric Lighting Co. was closed and demolished. Work started the next day to make way for the second half of the station with the installation of a further 60MW generator and a much larger 120MW unit.

There were three special features that set Bankside Power Station apart. First, its appearance, as a true ‘Temple of Power’, was the culmination of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s power station designs. His brief was to design a building that harmonised with those existing and planned for the South Bank redevelopment. Secondly, to avoid dust and particulate smoke pollution, Bankside was the first large generating station to be fired solely by oil. And, thirdly, to complete the anti-pollution measures, a flue gas washing plant was incorporated to remove sulphur dioxide and other acid gases. Oil was transferred to the station from 500-ton tankers at an island jetty on the river front. Here it was pumped to three enormous mild steel tanks, set beneath the ground and to the south of the station. Each was 92ft in length and 24ft deep with a capacity of 4,000 tons.

The fuel oil could contain up to 4 per cent sulphur, which when burnt converted to acidic sulphur dioxide. In order to protect surrounding buildings and in particular St Paul’s Cathedral from excessive damage, provision was made to remove up to 95 per cent of the polluting gas in a gas washing plant. Here the flue gases were passed through giant cast-iron washing chambers 106ft in height, 53ft wide and 48ft deep. They were packed with cedarwood scrubbers and sprayed with river water to which a 50 per cent slurry of chalk could be added. The effluent water, after it had done its job and removed all acidic gases, was de-aerated and any traces of oil removed before being returned to the river. The gases were then discharged to the atmosphere. To preserve his elegant design, Scott incorporated four chimneys within the one 320ft-high tower. Each was fitted with a nozzle at its outlet to enable the plume to be discharged to the atmosphere at an increased velocity. The ‘smokeless shimmer of vapour’ was indeed a noble and familiar site on the London skyline.

Aerial view of Bankside Power Station in the 1960s.

Chemistry laboratory, Bankside Power Station, in the 1960s.

Bankside’s heyday was in the sixties and early seventies, and there were many distinguished visitors: the Queen came in 1962, Prince Charles in 1968 and the Lord Mayor of London in 1975. In autumn 1970, output levels were broken twice: on 30 September, 5,876,246 units were sent out over a twenty-four-hour period; but on 8 October, this rose to 6,004,364 units! Then, in 1973, came the Arab–Israeli war, resulting in the oil crisis of the mid-seventies and an enormous increase in the price of oil. This was fatal for oil-fired Bankside, and the station never really recovered. It simply could not compete, in price terms, with larger coal-fired stations or nuclear power. The final outcome was inevitable!

2   Gas

Before natural gas was discovered in the North Sea, practically all gas used for commercial and domestic purposes was manufactured from coal.

It has been known for many years that when coal is heated in the absence of air, gas is produced. As long ago as 1690, John Clayton, a Wakefield clergyman, was experimenting with the distillation of coal and observed, ‘first there came over only fleghm, afterwards a black oyle and then likewise a spirit arose’. He collected the ‘spirit’ in a pig’s bladder, which he subsequently lit with a candle flame to produce a luminous jet. Clayton was, however, unaware of any practical application for this strange phenomenon. Later, in 1760, George Dixon filled a kettle with coal, heated it and lit the gas coming from the spout. Encouraged by the luminosity of the flame, Dixon built a pilot plant but an explosion halted any further progress. Later, gas was obtained as a by-product by the Earl of Dundonald. His main purpose was the formation of tar for caulking ships but – as a diversion – he lit his home, Culross Abbey, with coal gas. It was left to the Scotsman William Murdoch in the late eighteenth century to realise the enormous commercial potential of gas.

Murdoch was employed by Boulton and Watt, the famous Birmingham-based manufacturers of steam engines, and in 1777, the 25-year-old engineer was dispatched to Redruth in Cornwall to take responsibility for his employers’ steam engines in that county’s tin mines. Murdoch had an inventive mind – he is said to have filled the head of his pipe with coal and ignited the gas as it emerged from the stem. It was not long before he astonished his neighbours by lighting his house with coal gas. That was in 1792, and in 1798, back in Birmingham, he succeeded in lighting Boulton and Watt’s Soho factory in that city. Quick to realise its commercial importance, Boulton and Watt were soon illuminating the Salford cotton mill of Phillips and Lee with gas. And money was saved! Previously, the mill owners had paid over £2,000 per year for candle illumination compared with £600 for lighting by the much brighter gas burners. At this stage, however, gas lighting was seen as suitable only for illuminating factories. But all was to change when an extrovert Moravian, Friedrich Albrecht Winzler, arrived in London.

Frederick Albert Winsor, as he now styled himself, set up home in Pall Mall in 1803. He had heard about gas lighting from the Frenchman Philippe Lebon, claimed it was his invention and set about publicising this new source of light with pamphlets and lectures. In his own words, ‘the thought of introducing the discovery for the advantage of the British realm struck me like an electric shock’. To his credit, Winsor was first to deliver gas by pipes to street lamps. He was soon to gain the approval of the Prince Regent and on the evening of 4 June 1807, gave his first public demonstration of gas lighting to celebrate the royal birthday.

The carbonising furnaces were situated in Winsor’s Pall Mall house and 1½in-diameter pipes led the gas to a series of lamps in the gardens of the Prince Regent’s residence at Carlton House. Here they illuminated a board inscribed with the following ode:

Sing praise to that power celestial,

Whom wisdom and goodness adorn!

On this day — in regions terrestrial,

Great George, our lov’d Sov’reign, was born.

Rejoice, — rejoice, ‘tis George’s natal day.

Without question, Winsor’s display for the Prince Regent was well received, The Monthly Magazine recording:

The light produced by these gas lamps was clear, bright and colourless, and from the success of this considerable experiment hopes may now be entertained that this long talked of mode of lighting our streets may at length be realised. The Mall continued crowded with spectators until nearly twelve o’clock and they seemed much amused and delighted by this novel exhibition.

Following his success, Winsor set about promoting the virtues of gas lighting at every opportunity. Not surprisingly, oil and candle sellers were keen to see the back of Winsor’s ideas. They claimed that gas lighting would ruin the navy because seamen would no longer be able to be recruited from whaling ships if gas put an end to the demand for whale oil. As well as that, the benefits of gas lighting were frequently met with ridicule. People were unconvinced by the idea of ‘lighting London with smoke’ and ‘carrying light below the streets in pipes’. Sir Walter Scott commented that ‘there was a mad man proposing to light London with – what do you think? Why with smoke.’ When the House of Commons was eventually lit by gas, members placed their hands on the pipe work and were amazed to find that it was not hot! The sceptics were even joined by members of the scientific community. Sir Humphry Davy remarked mockingly: ‘Is it intended to take the dome of St Paul’s as a gasholder?’ Another eminent scientist observed that ‘it would be as easy to bring down a bit of the moon to light London as to succeed in doing so with gas’. Public sentiment was neatly summed up in a contemporary rhyme:

We thankful are that sun and moon

Were placed so very high

That no tempestuous hand might reach

To tear them from the sky.

Were it not so, we soon should find

That some reforming ass

Would straight propose to snuff them out,

And light the world with gas.

But lighting the world with gas was precisely Winsor’s aim. He even proposed that there should be a tax on lighting by candles or oil and estimated that gas lighting would save the country a massive £128,041,667.

Gas Light & Coke Co.

Winsor’s ideas soon bore fruit, for in 1807, at the ‘Crown & Anchor Tavern’ in the Strand, the first meeting of the New Patriotic Imperial and National Light and Heat Co. was held. It was not long before this became the Gas Light & Coke Co. (GLCC). Then, in 1812, it was granted a Royal Charter by the Prince Regent, on behalf of George III, giving the company power to raise capital with limited liability, to dig up streets and lay mains to supply gas to the City, Westminster and Southwark. The company, by virtue of being established both by Royal Charter and Act of Parliament, had a governor and a court, rather than a chairman and board of directors. James Ludovic Grant became the company’s first governor. Hopes were high. Up to now, London had been illuminated by tallow candles or oil lamps but the German chemist Frederick Accum, formerly assistant to the renowned Sir Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution, insisted that one gas lamp emitted light equal to three tallow candles or eighteen oil lamps. It was intended that Winsor would be the company’s engineer. But the poor man was heavily in debt and refused to do any work unless the company paid him what he alleged they owed. A stand-off resulted and for the moment Winsor left the scene.

The company’s first works were at Canon Row, Westminster, not a stone’s throw from the Palace of Westminster, and their offices were at 96 Pall Mall. The company were full of ambition, with plans to light the approaches to Parliament to gain maximum publicity and to obtain a contract to light the Liberty of Norton Folgate in Spitalfields, just north of the City. The problem was that they overstretched themselves and failed to deliver. But the day was saved by the appointment of Samuel Clegg, who was paid a salary of £500 per year. (It was said of Clegg 100 years later that ‘perhaps there is not another individual to whose zeal and ability the art of gas making is so much indebted for the variety as well as extensive utility of his inventions and improvements’.) He had previous experience working for Boulton and Watt with William Murdoch and realised at once that the Canon Row works were entirely inadequate. The outcome was a move to a much larger site at Providence Court, Great Peter Street (at the junction of Great Peter Street and the present-day Horseferry Road). So was born the Westminster Gas Works, the first permanent gasworks for public supply in the country. And it was not long before a further works was constructed in Curtain Road, Shoreditch, to fulfil the Norton Folgate contract.

The manufacture of gas in those early days at the Westminster works of the Gas Light & Coke Co. is described by George Dodd in his Days at the Factories, in which he tells of a visit he made in 1843. The town gas (as it was known) was separated from coal by distillation, in the absence of air, in iron retorts. To begin with, horizontal retorts were used but these could operate only by a batch system and so had to be frequently recharged. Later, vertical retorts were employed, which were continuously charged at the top with the coke which then fell to the bottom. The coke residue was then either sold or used to further heat the retorts. Many impurities were produced which had to be removed before the gas was sold. First of all the evolved gas was passed through pipes surrounded by cold water to condense out tars, then ammonia was removed by passing through water and finally hydrogen sulphide by passing through lime water. The town gas (including 55 per cent hydrogen, 30 per cent methane and 10 per cent carbon monoxide) was then stored over water in gas holders. Due to the public’s fear of explosions, the first gas holders were enclosed within brick buildings. In fact the risk was minimal, as convincingly demonstrated by Clegg who put a lighted taper to one by way of demonstration. The traditional gas holder was a wrought-iron container, sealed in a tank of water. Gas was admitted at the base causing the container to rise. Its capacity could be increased by telescoping the inner container within a series of outer ones and the whole was surrounded by a trellis of wrought iron.

The Westminster gasworks operated from 1813 until 1875, and in its first year produced 20 million cubic feet of gas. To begin with there was just one gas holder with a capacity of 14,000 cubic feet, but by 1822 a total of eighteen had been installed, the first four holders being enclosed within brick buildings. In 1856, the works was visited by the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII). The plant closed in 1875, when the giant Beckton gasworks opened (see later), but gas holders remained on the site until 1937. It was at this time, during the redevelopment of the site, that 6,000 gallons of tar were discovered, buried! In the Second World War special underground shelters were constructed in the plant’s foundations to secure the safety of government officials and it is said that these were linked by an underground railway to other shelters in Whitehall.

In the early days of gas supply, explosions were an ever-present hazard. Barely a few weeks after the Westminster works opened, Clegg was foolish enough to allow a purifier to remain in operation after it had developed a fault. The result was a deafening explosion prompting the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, to invite the Royal Society to investigate the safety of gas manufacture. Sir Joseph Banks and Sir William Congreve were conducted around the works by Clegg and, to their consternation, he punctured one of the gas holders and lit the escaping gas – there was no explosion. They were obviously convinced, commenting that the previous incident was only the equivalent of five to ten barrels of gunpowder. As it turned out, there was a beneficial side-effect to the Royal Society’s visit. Sir William Congreve became a convert. He took the lead in arrangements to celebrate – prematurely as it turned out – the exile of Napoleon Bonaparte to the island of Elba. A large pagoda in St James’s Park was to be illuminated by gas light in the presence of the Allied sovereigns and other dignitaries. Unfortunately, Congreve opened the fete by organising a fireworks display, a spark from which burnt the pagoda to a cinder. Even so, the company came out of it well and soon gas light was installed on a permanent basis in St James’s Park.

Explosions were not the only hazard – there was pollution as well. The Commission of Sewers refused to accept effluent and tar from the Westminster works. The company’s solution was simply to store it in tanks and then pump it directly to the Thames – and this at a time when Londoners were still taking their drinking water from the tidal river.