Dockland, Smokestacks and Slums in the shadows of British History

Dockland, Smokestacks and Slums

Dockland, Smokestacks and Slums Cedric Greenwood

T

his book is a photographic study of the 19th and early 20th century British industrial scene when it recovered in the 20 years after World War 2, only to die away altogether in the mid-1980s. Extended captions describe each picture and the introductory texts to each section include some of the author’s contemporary, personal and rather purple descriptions of some of the best, or worst (whichever your viewpoint) of the old industrial scenes in the period 1950-65, when Britain still led the world in engineering, shipbuilding, merchant fleet, commerce, exports, prestige and in almost every other sphere.

£35

Dockland, Smokestacks and Slums In the Shadows of British Industry

Greenwood

This book is also a lament for that lost industrial Britain and probably the only book to extol the aesthetic potential and interesting contribution those industrial elements made to our townscapes. Much of the late-Victorian industrial architecture was a credit to our townscapes. Most of what we see in these pictures has disappeared almost without trace, except for archaeology, and the scenes have changed beyond recognition as if those industries had never been there. Thus new generations of residents have no idea of what their home towns produced for us. In some cases we say: ‘Good riddance to the dark, satanic mills’ but in other cases we are sorry for the loss in terms of employment and the contribution to the economy and the character of the built environment.

Link Silk Editio r e v ns l i S

A Silver Link Silk Edition from

The NOSTALGIA Collection

Cedric Greenwood

Acknowledgements © Cedric Greenwood 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Silver Link Books, Mortons Media Group Ltd. First published in 2023 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 85794 592 8 Silver Link Books Mortons Media Group Limited Media Centre Morton Way Horncastle LN9 6JR Tel/Fax: 01507 529535 email: sohara@mortons.co.uk Website: www.nostalgiacollection.com Printed and bound in the Czech Republic

All the pictures were taken by the author unless otherwise credited. Some of these pictures appeared previously in the same author’s Merseyside: The Indian Summer (Silver Link, 2007), Echoes of Steam and Vintage Voltage (Silver Link 2015) and A Transport Travelogue of Britain (Silver Link 2018 and 2019) My thanks for making this album possible go to those who printed my photographs: CC Imaging Photo Lab, Leeds Steve Howe of the Black & White Picture Place, Chester Rodney Smith, Photographers Gallery, Holt, Norfolk Thanks also to those who have contributed photographs to this collection: Graham Fairhurst, of Southport Robin Hogg, of St. Albans Geoff Price, of Halton-on-Lune In writing my captions I am indebted to the following people for assistance with information: James Barlow, miller, North Leverton Bob Docherty, retired Scotrail public relations officer Graham Fairhurst, of Southport, a retired chartered civil engineer The late Jack Gahan, of Liverpool Stanley Hooton, of Kendal Terry Pearman, of Herne, chairman of the Friends of Herne Mill

Brian Pike, of Mayfield, chairman of Uckfield District Preservation Society Simon Pratt, project officer, Canterbury Archaeological Trust Pat Rudrum, of Holt, Norfolk, for Internet facilities, assistance and research Robert Sawyers, relief harbour master, Hull Barrie Schofield, of Birkenhead, for checking local scene changes Danny Witherington, British Waterways’ north-west office, Wigan I am also indebted for information to the staff of: Associated British Ports at Barrow, Fleetwood and Hull BAE shipyards at Barrow and Govan Blyth Harbour Commission Haig Colliery Mining Museum, Whitehaven Maud Foster windmill, Boston National Waterways Museum, Ellesmere Port Office for National Statistics, Newport (Mon) Swindon Borough Council Penzance Tourist Office Teesside Archives Wells Harbour Commissioners

Dockland, Smokestacks and Slums Cedric Greenwood

Contents Part 1: Industry

7

Part 2: Industrial Railways and Canals

43

Part 3: Wharves and Warehouses

73

Part 4: Streets and Slums

116

Part 5: The Acceptable Face of Industry

151

Watermills and Windmills

152

Industrial Archtecture

162

Non-Industrialised Ports

165

Good Industrial Housing

171

Index

175

WESTMINSTER: A bronze sculpture representing craftsmanship and industry on a pedestal flanking the national Queen Victoria monument in front of Buckingham Palace on 22 May 1961. The sculptor was Thomas Brock and this group, which faces the palace, was a gift from New Zealand. The Victoria monument was completed in 1913 as part of Sir Aston Webb’s design to widen The Mall and rebuild the façade of the palace at the same time.

Part One: Industry

T

his book is a photographic study of the 19th and early 20th century British industrial scene when it recovered in the 20 years after World War 2, only to die away altogether in the mid-1980s. Extended captions describe each picture and the introductory texts to each section include some of my contemporary, personal and rather purple descriptions of some of the best, or worst (whichever your viewpoint) of the old industrial scenes in the period 1950-65, when Britain still led the world in engineering, shipbuilding, merchant fleet, commerce, exports, prestige and in almost every other sphere.

That was the end of an era of pre-eminence.

Apparently, all went to waste because thrifty industrialists were reluctant to modernise and adapt in the face of rising foreign competition and there were two decades of industrial strife and short working weeks in the 1970s and ’80s for higher wages than could be justified by the competition.

The strikes delayed delivery dates on orders and gave British industry a reputation for being slow as well as expensive. Now one of Britain’s main exports is scrap metal to foreign steelworks – and we buy foreign steel!

This book is also a lament for that lost industrial Britain and probably the only book to extol the aesthetic potential and interesting contribution those industrial elements made to our townscapes. Much of the late-Victorian industrial architecture was a credit to our townscapes. Most of what we see in these pictures in Parts 1 to 4 has disappeared almost without trace, except for archaeology, and the scenes have changed beyond recognition as if those industries had never been there. Thus new generations of residents have no idea of what their home towns produced for us. In some cases we say: ‘Good riddance to the dark,

satanic mills’ but in other cases we are sorry for the loss in terms of employment and the contribution to the economy and the character of the built environment.

In the 1860s Britain produced half the world’s iron and cotton cloth and two-thirds of its coal. At the same time the Industrial Revolution desecrated the landscape with mining and quarrying for essential coal, iron ore, copper, lead, tin, slate and building stone. Coal mining caused subsidence and industrial processes polluted the air, ground and rivers. Life was hard and unhealthy for the workers and their families living in our industrial towns. The dirt and din and smells, the mill dust and coal dust and soot from smoking chimneys and funnels, the sometimes dangerous working conditions and the long working hours were a toll on the health and lives of those who worked there and were confined by convenience, poverty or debt to live in that environment. For many workers there were no holidays, no pension schemes and there was no such thing as retirement. Many of the houses, tenements and hovels we see in these pictures were probably grim and depressing places to live in but some of these scenes were photogenic and had a certain quaint appeal.

The mid-Victorian slum ‘rookeries’ described

by Dickens were a breeding ground for disease, drunkenness, crime and violence. As time went by conditions were improved by industrial and sanitary legislation although some masters of industry were slow to adopt the legal standards. There were also philanthropic Victorian industrialists who created ideal working conditions from the start, complete with extra-mural amenities and good housing. There was also much good industrial architecture, particularly among late 19th and early 20th century flour mills, textile factories and food processing works. Some

of the better factories, mills and warehouses have survived converted to residential apartments, mail order warehouses, offices or museums but too many good industrial buildings were lost in the Philistine 1960s and ’70s.

In the mid 19th century the subject of industry even became fashionable and there was ‘industrial tourism’ by the ‘lesser gentry’ who could not afford the ‘grand tour’ of Europe and based their holiday itineraries of the homeland on visits to interesting industrial premises to see how they worked and things were made. This stemmed from the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace and led to industrial exhibitions around Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

With the decline of British industry in the second half of the 20th century the scenes in this book have been replaced by urban deserts of empty wasteland or with better rented housing in much more pleasant conditions. Sites of old mines and steelworks have been sanitised and are now nature reserves. Modern British industrial estates are providing a healthier and safer working environment but are not as environmentally aesthetic or interesting as their Victorian forerunners and they are certainly not photogenic.

The pollution of the industrial age has since been replaced by the illegally high levels of pollution from increasing volumes of combustion-engined road traffic on motorways and A-class roads in city areas.

Even the petroleum-based bituminous asphalt that replaced granite street paving in our cities is now found to give off harmful pollutants in the heat and radiant energy of the summer sun with significant effects on public health. Asphalt is also used for car parks, footpaths, playgrounds and cycleways.

My captions to the pictures reflect a Britain in

6 transition from industry to shopping, leisure and tourism. Mills and railway terminals and banks have been replaced by car parks, shopping centres, leisure centres, restaurants and wine bars. I wonder how or if we can we afford more shopping, eating out, wine, leisure and tourism with less employment? We sold or abandoned many of our industries to foreign enterprise and now we have to buy goods from abroad that we once made at home, leading to higher unemployment and a trade deficit. Many former British service industries are now run by foreign firms.

After our post-war recovery in the late 1940s the unemployment rate nationally was at an all-time low of 1 per cent in 1950. By the nadir of British industry in 1984 it was 11.9 per cent and it had only recovered to 3.7 per cent in England, 3.2 per cent in Wales and 3.1 per cent in Scotland by mid-2022.

I am featuring these old industrial scenes not as a commercial photographer would for the record but as an amateur photographer for their photogenic and aesthetic aspects. Among my private collection of ‘beautiful pictures’ by other photographers – mainly rural landscapes, seascapes, people and animals – is an industrial section with pictures of smoky steelworks and sinister streets and alleys by day and by night. I cannot emulate the work of professional photographers I admire in this field, such as Bill Brandt (1904-83) and Eric de Maré (1910-2002), who had the advantage of working with more expensive equipment in an earlier era when industry was still a potent feature of our environment. The classic industrial scene is Eric de Maré’s smoky, gloomy semi-silhouette of a steam train crossing a viaduct over the river Mersey in a chasm of gaunt mills and warehouses at Stockport. Bill Brandt took similar pictures in Halifax, County Durham and Newcastle.

After the war British industry recovered from 1945 to a new peak in the 1950s and ’60s. Most of

Dockland, Smokestacks and Slums my pictures were taken during that period. Then our industry went into terminal decline. My earliest pictures, the black-and-whites taken in the 1950s, were taken with my father’s cast-off Kodak box Brownie camera dating from 1925 with its tiny, tummy-level viewfinder and fixed, slow shutter speed.

I graduated to a Braun Paxette taking 35mm colour slides from 1961, though I still took some pictures in black and white. The pictures in this book were taken only in the context of photographing the landscapes, townscapes and architecture of Britain in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, not specifically focussing on industry, but the industrial elements seemed to add interest to the pictures.

I now consider that these pictures of the humble, industrial side of workaday Britain are best appreciated when shown on their own collectively.

Had I foreseen I was going to produce a book of the old industrial Britain I would have pursued my subject more objectively, so my photographs are not as wholly representative of industry or its locations as I should like. It is now too late to remedy that. Most of the pictures – all those not credited – are mine but to widen the interest I have augmented this collection with some of my Dad’s photographs, credited to the late George Greenwood (1900-95), and contributions from my elder son Karl and old friends Graham Fairhurst, Robin Hogg and Geoff Price to extend and diversify the coverage.

The British film industry recorded many professional ‘noir’ scenes of industrial and dockland Britain in black and white films of the early 1950s, notably Pool of London (set in Bermondsey, 1950), Waterfront (Liverpool, 1950), The Clouded Yellow (London, Newcastle, Gateshead and Liverpool, 1951) and The Long Memory (Gravesend and Bermondsey, 1952), and River Boat (Bermondsey, 1953). These pictures are a wonderful record of a lost world. I am grateful to Studiocanal Films Ltd., which remasters

old films on DVD. for private viewing, for allowing me to use stills of two classic dockland and industrial street scenes in Bermondsey and Liverpool.

Going back to that time, I remember seeing the collieries with their winding frames in the rural Somerset coalfield from the train between Yatton and Cheddar when on holiday in 1946 but their interest made little impression on me at age eight. I first saw the attraction of ‘noir’ scenes at age 11 when I went to the cinema to see the film The Third Man in 1949, set in post-war Vienna among the bombed ruins and nocturnes in dimly-lit streets with shadows and wet granite setts. Also in 1949 I had my first encounter with industrial Britain as a wide-eyed boy from Hove and Oxford when the family migrated by the former Great Western Railway’s north mainline via the Black Country to Merseyside.

To bring the experience to life I refer to a contemporary description I wrote of the railway journey from Oxford to Birkenhead in 1951 on my regular way home to Wallasey from boarding school.

‘Stations came thick and fast as we echoed through Birmingham and the Black Country with railway yards, gas-holders, smokestacks, church steeples and slate rooftops as far as the eye could see. The Black Country was so named from its smoky industries stemming from locally mined coal and iron. There were 10 stations (including The Hawthorns Halt) in those 13 miles from Birmingham Snow Hill to Wolverhampton Low Level. I was fascinated by the mountainous, weather-withered slag-heaps of old colliery waste and a steaming, red canal alongside a steel works.’ I had never seen anything like this before!

Nothing of this can be seen today from the route of the Midland Metro tram on the light railway that now follows the old GWR roadbed from Birmingham to Wolverhampton.

Birmingham and the Black Country were the world’s pioneer manufacturing towns and collectively

Industry known as ‘the workshop of the world’. The area is on a plateau 500 to 900 feet above sea level and industry consisted mainly of small workshops making bicycles, bolts, chains, glassware, jewellery, locks, machine castings, nails and tools – in fact everything from pen nibs to giant beam engines. As we moved west the brick and slate gave way to a semi-rural landscape (the ‘country’ aspect of the Black Country) with small towns and villages interspersed with scrub, rough heaths, common pasture and disused open-cast and sub-surface coal and iron ore mines, networked by 160 miles of canals with many locks and tunnels to negotiate the hills. It was all rather quaint when I first knew it but now it is being modernised with motorways and skyscrapers and most of the small workshops have gone.

From the same travel log, Oxford to Birkenhead, I can also describe the contemporary eye-opening approach to Merseyside on the line over the viaduct from Rock Ferry to Lower Tranmere before the tunnel under Birkenhead to Woodside terminus on the Mersey bank. ‘The last half mile of the journey to Birkenhead was a fitting finale with a sense of drama. From that viaduct we had a panoramic view of rooftops, smokestacks, gas-holders, cranes, the mile-wide Mersey and Liverpool waterfront. We could see Rock Ferry pier wading out into the river and one mile across the water was ranged the whole south Liverpool waterfront from Dingle oil storage tanks along the line of docks to the handsome shipping offices around Pier Head with the gigantic red sandstone Cathedral crowning the rooftops of the dense urban ridge rising from the river. By night this scene was lit by a myriad glittering lights, reflected in the river: the lights of the city and of ships riding at anchor in The Sloyne awaiting high water to enter Birkenhead docks. As the train slowed, the view was eclipsed by the serrated range of high, black sheds and the forest of cranes of Cammell Laird’s shipyards

7 at Lower Tranmere.’ We cannot get that view today because all the industrial features of the townscape have disappeared and the railway to Woodside has been diverted down into the former Mersey Railway tunnel under Birkenhead and the river to Liverpool.

Dad’s work moved from Liverpool to Canterbury in 1952 and we lived at Herne Bay. Kent was pleasant and interesting enough with Ramsgate harbour, Whitstable harbour and Faversham Creek as my school holiday haunts. I sometimes consoled myself by riding the train on a workman’s cheap, early morning day return ticket (4s. 8d. for 120 miles return) on the 5.19 from Herne Bay to London Bridge (arr. 7.15) for a day in London’s dockland. I strolled around the riverside streets, wharves and warehouses, still busy with ships, barges and cargoes, from Southwark to Limehouse, crossing the river by the vintage Underground electric trains from Rotherhithe to Wapping. I still missed Merseyside and in August 1954, at age 16, I returned there on the then Margate – Birkenhead through train, boarding at Canterbury West, with my bicycle and box camera and I spent two weeks on Merseyside specifically to photograph the streets, docks and ferries; many of those pictures appear in the following pages under the sections on industry, dockland and streets.

Two years after my Merseyside photographic expedition I rode the Starlight Special night train on the old Midland Railway mainline from London St. Pancras to Glasgow St. Enoch in August, 1956.

I wrote a log of this journey, which featured another lineside experience of industry about 1 o’clock in the morning: ‘North of Sheffield we ran through railway marshalling yards in the hazy glow of floodlights, through rumbling steelworks with flaring smokestacks and glares from the furnaces and past the silhouettes of large textile mills with all their windows lit up – yet I saw no people about, not even engine crews or shunters; it seemed as if everything was working by

itself; it was all rather eerie.’

In May 1959 I rode through Sheffield steelworks on a tramcar and I have a graphic record of this in a descriptive log I kept of a 1,812-mile hitch-hiking and youth hostelling tour of England and Scotland with Ruth, my wife-to-be. Sheffield stands at the confluence of five rivers that flow down from the Peak District on its west side and used to turn the waterwheels and grindstones of the tool workshops that developed to make Sheffield the most famous steel town in Britain and put its name on every meal table in this land. The highly-skilled, iron-nerved steel workers of Sheffield made the tramlines we were running on and every conceivable large and small tool and part for industrial machinery, railway rolling stock and workshops, ships and shipyards. The steel and other kindred industries of Sheffield were concentrated on the east and north sides of the city, where, I wrote, it was ‘a black, grim, barbaric scene of heavy industry at its most aggressive.’

The log of that tram ride reads: ‘In Sheffield High Street we embarked on a tramcar bearing the significant name VULCAN ROAD on its destination panel. Over the bridge on the river Don, here banked by the sheer walls of giant factories and warehouses, and north-east through Attercliffe and Carbrook we rumbled between dark, satanic mills — large, black, grim, buildings with tall smokestacks spitting flames and belching black, blue, red and yellow plumes of smoke. They stand among gigantic slag heaps, railway marshalling yards, scummy canals and torrential rivers.

‘Sections of the route are lined with small, grimy, workers’ houses and shabby little shops with old fashioned, rusted, enamelled steel advertisements. In one place a small crowd gathered around the entrance of an alley in which two men were fighting. In the background are steep hillsides furrowed with more streets of terraced houses. The whole character of the

8 scene is forbidding and I looked with awe at the sight of this realm of veritable heavy industry such as I had never seen before. Three and a half miles from the city centre the road leaves the built-up area and traverses a desolate and desecrated landscape to Rotherham. Accordingly the tramcar turned off into Vulcan Road, a side street, and terminated there, alongside a steelworks that specialises in making tramway junctions!’

Halifax was my favourite Pennine milltown because of its steep hills and the profusion of industrial smokestacks on the moorside. I discovered it on a cycle tour of England and Wales in 1958 but it is to my eternal regret that I was on too tight a schedule with advanced bookings at youth hostels to have time to reconnoitre and take any good milltown photographs on the way and I never returned to Halifax before the close of the industrial era. I did, however, show my appreciation by buying 15 picture postcards of Halifax including three totally industrial scenes of smokestacks, mills, terraced houses and railway viaducts – Halifax was obviously proud of its industry – and I reproduce one of them here to illustrate this introduction to industry.

Finally, on the west side of the Pennines, I take a leaf from my diary of 3

Dockland, Smokestacks and Slums January 1965 when my wife, Ruth, and I were living at Kendal and returning home by train from a Christmas visit to our parents in Kent. The west coast mainline was electrified only from Rugby to Crewe in those days, so we were diesel-hauled from Euston to Rugby and steam-hauled north of Crewe by Britannia class 70043, Lord Kitchener. My diary entry reads: ‘As we journeyed north it was good to see the steam drifting past the carriage window and to hear the locomotive’s clanking rods and chime whistle as it hauled us across the neat Cheshire Plain, over the Manchester Ship Canal and the river Mersey, stopping at Warrington Bank Quay and Wigan North Western, to Preston. Between Warrington and Wigan the industrial plain, with large, black factories, canals, wastelands, derelict coalmines, slag heaps, railway sidings, gas lamps, locomotive water tanks etc., was bathed and silhouetted in the red afterglow of sunset in the western sky. Ruth pointed to a silhouetted slag heap and two chimney stacks and said: “Isn’t that beautiful?”’.

I was not the only one who could see beauty in industry. My earlier books featured townscapes and transport of this period, which included industrial settings. Those pictures have aroused emotional nostalgia among readers, not only for the loss of character and interest that industry contributed to the scene but also for the loss of Britain’s industrial potency. I now feel confident in offering this photographic viewpoint of the late lamented British industrial scene, for better or worse.

Today we talk about the agricultural industry, the hospitality industry, the service industry and the tourist industry but these are not what I mean by industry. In Part 1 we feature individual industries, such as mines, mills, maltings, gasworks, foundries, shipyards, workshops, iron and steel works, power stations and general industrial townscapes.

We also see industry in rural settings around the edge of the Lake District. The presence of indigenous natural resources, such as copper, fish, hides, iron, lead, coal, slate, timber, tin, wool and water power, gave rise to industries that go back to the Iron and Bronze Ages and occurred throughout rural Britain before the Industrial Revolution.

Change comes so fast these days that it is difficult to keep up to date. The captions to the pictures were true at the time of writing but further changes of scene and changes of circumstances might have occurred since.

HALIFAX, looking east. Lilywhite Ltd., Brighouse

Industry WEST CORNWALL: The ghostly silhouette of a derelict Cornish tin mine engine-house at Penderleath, near St.Ives, at dusk on 28 September 1962. The mine engines were used for pumping water, for raising and lowering the lifts carrying the miners and ores and to work the stamping machines to grind the ores.

Although this building was in ruins the cast iron glazing bars were still in place in an upper window.

The Penwith peninsula, the toe of Cornwall west of Penzance, is dotted with the ruins of these disused 18th and 19th century steam engine houses that mark old tin and copper mines, many of them running out under the sea bed. The Cornish mining engineer Richard Trevithick (1771-1883) successfully adapted the stationary mine engine to road and railway locomotives at Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, in 1803-04 and invented the high-pressure steam locomotive to save coal. He is regarded as the ‘father of the locomotive’.

9

10 CANTERBURY castle and the city gasworks might seem strange bedfellows but the gaunt, grim bulk of the flinty Norman castle keep and the Victorian brick gas works seem well matched in this picture in March 1960 and the two buildings, fronting on to Castle Street and divided by Gas Street, are historically connected.

The castle was built between 1085 and 1125 with its bailey wall integrated into the south-west segment of the Roman city wall, built in 270-300. This is the third largest Norman castle keep in England after Colchester and Norwich, the walls being 80 feet by 80 feet in plan. The castle dungeons became the county jail from the end of the 12th century and in 1381 the prisoners were released in a siege by Wat Tyler’s peasants revolting against a heavy poll tax and they burnt the records and threw the castle keeper into jail! The county assizes were held there in 1565, 1569 and in 1577, when the prison closed. Over the next three centuries the bailey wall was plundered for a supply of local building stone but the 11ft. thick stone and flint walls of the keep were so firmly cemented together that they resisted removal – and even an attempt by the gas company to blow them up!

The Canterbury Gas & Waterworks Company sited its coal bunker inside the ruined castle keep and mounted its water tank atop its stout walls from 1826 till 1928, when the city council bought the castle for the public. The large, cast-iron water pipe can still be seen running outside and through the north wall of the keep. Thus Canterbury castle has survived philistine uses as a quarry and a gas works annex to be one of the main attractions for visitors to the city today. The gas works were demolished after the switch from coal gas to natural gas and the site is now a surface and multistorey car park.

In The Ingoldsby Legends by the Rev. Richard Barham (1788-1845), we read in these extracts from his doggerel verse about Canterbury castle that its walls were: ‘stuff ’d with leaden pipes and coke and coals and bellows; in short, so great a change has come to pass, ’tis now a manufactory of gas.’

Dockland, Smokestacks and Slums

FAVERSHAM: Belvedere Mill on Faversham Creek was a 19th century, steamdriven corn mill of R. & W. Paul, the Ipswich-based millers, and was latterly producing corn flakes breakfast cereal when pictured on 2 June 1995. This is a brick building with weather-boarded lucams (the hoods over the hoistways). The mill once owned sailing barges, which unloaded grain to the hoistway directly

over the water. The hoistway at the side was for horse waggons and motor lorries.

The two external silos, the boiler house and a chimney were removed when the mill closed and the building was converted to residential apartments and a ground floor restaurant. The grimy walls have been cleaned to expose attractive yellow brickwork.

12 ST. PANCRAS: The brick, gas and iron industries were represented in a most public manifestation in this picture of an ornate, cast-iron gas lamp post of a standard St. Pancras Corporation design outside the former Imperial Gas Works, well immured behind this high brick wall in what was Wharf Street and is now Goods Way. This street led to a wharf on the Regent’s Canal and the coal sidings of King’s Cross railway terminus. The towering lattice iron stanchion was part of the guide frame of one of 16 gas holders in what was the largest gas works in London, between the railway approaches to King’s Cross and St. Pancras stations, and used coal gas from the Imperial Gas, Light & Coke Company. The photograph was taken on 20 August 1961.

The gas works was decommissioned in 2000 and demolished but four of the gasholder guide frames with stout, circular, cast-iron stanchions, dating from the 1850s, were listed Grade 2 and taken to a Sheffield and Leeds restoration firm in 2011. They were returned to this site in 2013 as features of a new business and residential park, where modern, nine-storey flats in the form of freestanding rotundas are built inside three of the frames while the fourth one encloses a park. Robin Hogg

Dockland, Smokestacks and Slums

MOUNTAIN ASH: This was the scene at the top of the mineshaft under the winding gear where men, coal trucks and equipment were lowered and raised at Navigation Colliery, the deepest mine in the Glamorgan coalfield, on 27 July 1980. The colliery was opened in 1861 by John Nixon, a pioneer mining engineer from northeast England. Work stopped during the recession from 1931 to 1936, then restarted by the Powell, Duffryn Steam Coal Company. The mine was nationalised in 1947 and employed 756 people at its peak in the post-war period before closure in 1979. Graham Fairhurst