South Met. The amalgamated Company
So from 1880 South Met was a very much
bigger company with the Old Kent Road works just one with several others. What did this new company consist of – what
works did they have?[1]
In taking over the Phoenix, South Met had
acquired not only the largest company in south London but one of the
oldest. They had three works and a
number of holder stations.
Bankside Gas Works. This works probably dated from around 1815.
It had been set up originally by a George Munro. This became the South London
Gas Company which was taken over by the Phoenix in the mid 1820s. Their works
was sited under what is now the easternmost part of the site which is now the
Tate Modern art gallery. As Phoenix had
expanded so the Bankside Works became their head office[2]. A detailed plan of the works neither appears
on the Ordnance Survey for 1873 nor is there a riverside jetty shown although
coal supplies must have been landed locally and a wharf is mentioned in 1837. This
wharf was connected to the main part of the works on the south side of Bankside
by bridge across the road - this is not shown on the map either. The entrance was off Bankside itself with an
office block connected by the 1870s to the company’s other works by a private
telegraph line. It appears to be on a
small and restricted site surrounded by factories and works of all sorts.
What may have been the Phoenix Company’s
original works was a on a much smaller site. This was known as Wellington Street
works but actually lay between what is now Pocock Street and Webber
Street. By the 1880s it appears to have
been used only as a holder station and in fact 12 holders are shown on it in
the 1870s. Although it was still in
Phoenix ownership at amalgamation it was closed in 1880 and sold to the London
School Board in 1883.[3]
The site has been a school had ever since.
Another of the Phoenix works was in
Greenwich - later known as West Greenwich.
It was in Thames Street at the junction of Deptford Creek and the Thames
and built with some difficulty on a marshy site which needed to be stabilised.
It is now the site of a Waitrose supermarket. It had been built in the mid
1820s and had at first included the site of a smaller earlier works in Norway
Street built by a rival company[4].
There was also a large detached holder station nearby in Roan Street where
there was also a lot of vacant land which was later used for manufacturing
purposes.[5]
Phoenix also had a more modern works dating
from the mid 1840s and built for a planned expansion westward. It consisted of a riverside works site with a
holder station on the side of the defunct site owned by the Southwark and
Vauxhall Water Company where existing tanks could be used to site new gas
holders[6]
– which became the famous holders seen in the background to every cricket
march. The riverside works was large and had good wharfage facilities. The
works is however very unrecorded and very little, if anything, appears to have
been written about it. It is often confused with the London Company's Works
which lay to its west near to what became Battersea Power Station. The site is now posh flats and businesses - but
it should be noted that one block is called Phoenix house.
Phoenix had also taken over a tiny works on
Eltham Green in 1876, but had closed it down almost immediately. This site too is now housing.
South Met. had also taken over the Surrey
Consumers Gas Company based in Rotherhithe and ‘few companies had a start quite
like the Surey consumers’.[7] The works was built by Tom Hedley working for
the engineer Stephen Hutchinson, in 1851 ‘but he made a fudge of it’. [8]
The company then handed everything over to Angus Alexander Croll - who we have
already described as a chemist involved in purification and a great supporter
of ‘consumer’ gas companies where the shares were owned by those who bought the
gas, mainly the local authorities. Hedley faced with Croll taking over his Rotherhithe
works simply barricaded himself in and had to be removed by force. It was said that
‘a worst arranged works never came to our notice’.[9] The works lay alongside the west side of the
Surey Canal and Surey Basin on the south side of Rotherhithe High Street with a
wharf on the north side. A gasholder
still stands on the south sides of Brunel Road one of three which stood there
in 1870. [10]
Surrey Consumers had taken over a Deptford
Company in 1855 which had begun as the Greenwich Railway Gas Works. Garton says that this had been built by Black
Horse Bridge in the Lower Road, although this holder is nowhere near a railway
line, even one which was never built. There certainly was a gas holder there
alongside the Surrey Canal and it was still there in the 1950s. As late as the mid 1980s a building on the
site had displayed a notice indicating that the owner was South
Eastern Gas.[11]
The site more usually thought of as the Greenwich
Railway Gas Works was that alongside the Greenwich Railway line as he crosses the
Ravensbourne and before it goes into into Deptford Station on its way to London
Bridge. It is shown in records of the
1840s as belonging to the London and Greenwich Railway Company.[12]
This was also later the Bermondsey, Rotherhithe and Deptford Gas Light and Coke
Company. It also had some input from Frank Hills, the Deptford chemist and
purifier patentee, whose works was next door. Three holders are shown on the
site in the 1870s when it was presumably used as a holder station only. It
remained empty for many years until the 1990s and is now the Ecology Centre based
in Copperas Street. [13]
There werw two more amalgamations after 1880
which really made up the final composition of South Met. before
nationalisation. They comprised two
sites in Woolwich.
One of these was and the Woolwich Equitable
Gas Company. This was built in 1834 on the
site of an earlier works dating from the 1820s in which the first Thomas
Livesey was involved. It suffered from the same scandals and ‘defalcations’ of
many gas works of the period. One of the
highlights of its history was the prosecution of its engineer for the theft of
lead from the Arsenal. The works was on the riverside close to the western wall
of the Arsenal. The site is now under development but has been subject to a
couple of archaeological investigations.[14]
The other works was the Woolwich, Charlton
and Plumstead Consumers Company set up in 1843 as a response to the Equitable Company’s
pricing policy. Their works was also on the riverside in an area now covered by
the Waterfront Leisure Centre.
But these were closed down following
amalgamation with South Mt in 1884. This
led to some protest in Woolwich local papers that they were taken over by a
giant intruder when they would be better run by the local authority.
[1] This subject has been covered by: Garton, History of the South Metropolitan Gas Co.",
Gas World, 1952;
Layton, Early years of the South
Metropolitan Gas Company ; A Century of Gas in South London; Sturt, The Gas
Industry in South London, Lewisham History Journal, 1995. There are also articles
in various GLIAS newsletters by Brian Sturt and myself.
[11] Garton. Brian Sturt, I am afraid, simply ignores this
site in his history of South East Gas.
The site is currently under development.
[13] Articles on this by
Brian Sturt and myself in GLIAS newsletters discuss the problems in issues of
June 1986, February 1999, February 1999, and June 1999.
[14] A reproduced article
from Co-partnership Journal and references to modern investigations is at https://greenwichindustrialhistory.blogspot.com/2015/03/great-to-see-on-facebook-that-there-is.html
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