Gasholders, Goods Way and Midland Road: Continuing with pictures from my walk on Sunday 18th February 1990 – the first post on this was Between Kings Cross & St Pancras – 1990.
I photographed the gasholders here on various occasions and from various places, both in black and white and in colour. The Pancras Gasworks and those at Shoredittch were the first gas works of the Imperial Gas Light Company (later the Imperial Gas Light and Coke Co) were built in 1822 on Battlebridge Road beside the Regent’s Canal. In the 1860s it was still the largest gas works in Britain if not the world, but soon it was eclipsed by others.
Although the gas works closed in 1904 and was dismantled three years later, the gasholders continued in us for gas storage for gas from the company’s vast Beckton gasworks and were only finally decommissioned around 2000 well after town gas had been replaced by natural gas.
These three gasholders were originally built in 1879, replacing an earlier triplet from the 1860s designed by engineer John Clark. He had them built as ‘telescopic’ holders with two interlocking sections or ‘lifts’ around the outside of the ‘bell’ which could rise up inside the guide frames to increase the capacity.
As the Grade II listing text states this involved “replacing the guide frames in their entirety by the contractors Westwood and Wright under the direction of John Clark. The columns of the new guide frames observed classical rules so that the lowest tier was in the Tuscan order, the middle in the Doric and the topmost in a simplified version of Corinthian.”
The guide frames of these three gasholders were carefully disassembled, painstakingly restored and re-erected around 300 yards away on the other bank of the Regent’s Canal, with two now surrounding the new Gasholder apartments, designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects.
This section along Midland Rd with the corner of Brill Place at right was demolished to build the Francis Crick Institute.
These small industrial workshops were also demolished in the redevelopment of the area for the building of St Pancras International.
This Grade II listed water point is close to the new location of the gasholder frames and also the redeveloped coal drops on the north side of the canal. Built around 1870 for the Midland Railway it was probably designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott’s architects office.
Like the gasholders its original location was in the way of St Pancras International and was moved around 2001 to its new location on Camley St, some 700 yards to the north. When built it was condemned by some architectural critics for being an inappropriate use of Gothic for a functional building, but it well matched the station and hotel.
Together with the Granary building and others in the area according to Historic England it forms “an evocative ensemble of former industrial buildings of considerable urban landscape value.” Having a theme park like this is certainly better than losing these structures completely but it isn’t any real replacement for the original.
More pictures from the walk in a later post.
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