Posts Tagged ‘barges’

Kenfig, Hedon Sand & River Hull – 1989

Sunday, April 7th, 2024

Kenfig, Hedon Sand & River Hull – these pictures I made on Monday 21st August 1989 on a short section of the River Hull. I had hoped to walk along the footpath beside the river between Drypool Bridge and North Bridge.

Boats, River Hull, downstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-35
Boats, River Hull, downstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-35

The small tug Felix-Tow has got around a bit since it was built in the Netherlands in 1955. After working in Rotterdam the Ijssel came to Felixtowe in 1967 where it was renamed FELIX-TOW. I think it was fairly new to Hull where it was owned by Dean’s Tugs Ltd – and was still in service in 2008 – perhaps still now.

Boats, River Hull, upstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-36
Boats, River Hull, upstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-36

The vessel in the foreground is a coastal tanker belonging to the Hull based petroleum company RIX which still operates a fleet of coastal oil tankers, estuarial barges and crew transfer vehicles. Rix have oil storage tanks around a mile further up the river.

The company, as their web site relates, began in 1873 when Robert Rix, a sea Captain and Merchant Adventurer working in Hull set up in business building small coastal craft on the south bank of the River Tees in Stockton. In the 1900s the company bought steam ships and began operating them. The move into petroleum products came in 1927 when they began importing tractor vaporising oil and Lamp oil, packed in oak casks on their ships from Russia to the Humber.

The company expanded rapidly after the end of World War Two, supplying agricultural and commercial diesel across Yorkshire and opening petrol filling stations around Hull. The company has continued to grow and expand into new areas.

Boats, River Hull, upstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-21
Vessels, River Hull, upstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-21

Barges like these in the middle of the picture were once very common, and were often moored three or four abreast in the Old Harbour downstream of Drypool Bridge, but by 1989 were becoming much less common, though some are still in use. Others have been converted to houseboats.

Barges like this might carry as much as 24 large lorries and could transfer goods from the docks to river wharves at much lower costs than road transport, with much lower pollution and carbon footprint. But of course they could only take goods to sites on navigable rivers and canals and so are much less flexible than road transport.

Hedon Sand, River Hull, upstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-22
Hedon Sand, River Hull, upstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-22

Hedon Sand, IMO 5185875 was a Grab Hopper Dredger built in 1954 close to Hull at Richard Dunston’s Hessle Yard. The ship had gross tonnage 677 tons, deadweight 813 tons and was around 50 metres long with a breadth of 10 meters. An 8 cylinder four-stroke msrine Ruston & Hornsby engine give it a top speed of 9 knots.

Hedon Sand, River Hull, upstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-23
Hedon Sand, River Hull, upstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-23

Known for most of its active life as Kenfig, it had been built for the British Transport Commission and was transfered to the British Transport Docks Board in Cardiff in 1963. It returned to the Humber and was used in dredging the Humber Dock Basin when Humber Dock was being converted to the Marina.

Mud is always a problem in the Humber and in the River Hull and I think dredging was always needed when the River Hull was still a commercial river. In recent years there seems to be far more mud in the river close to the mouth than I remember.

Hedon Sand, River Hull, upstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-24
Hedon Sand, River Hull, upstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-24

Kenfig was sold to Jones & Bailey Contractors Ltd, Hull in 1983 – they also owned another dredger, Grassendale and they renamed it Hedon Sand. In 1989 when I took these pictures the vessel was sold to be broken up in Hull.

River Hull, upstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-25
River Hull, upstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-25

I think some at least of these massive wooden beams had probably once supported parts of the riverside path I had hoped to walk.

Kenfig, River Hull, upstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-26
Kenfig, River Hull, upstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-26

Ahead of me I could see North Bridge but with extensive work taking place on the riverbank there was no way I could continue to walk along it and I had to retrace my steps to Drypool Bridge

Hedon Sand, River Hull, upstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-12
Hedon Sand, River Hull, upstream, Drypool Bridge, Hull, 1989 89-8n-12

On my way I took another picture of Hedon Sand before walking up to the road and going on into East Hull – where I took more pictures. More later.


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Darent Valley Path & Thames

Tuesday, July 4th, 2023

Darent Valley Path & Thames, Dartford, Kent. On Saturday 4th July 2015 I went by train with my wife and elder son to Dartford for a day’s walking mainly beside the River Darent and River Thames.

Darent Valley Path & Thames

It was a hot summer day and the sky was blue with just a few small patches of white cloud. It probably wasn’t the best day to have chosen, as this was a walk with relatively little shade, but as usual there was a little breeze by the rivers to cool us slightly.

Darent Valley Path & Thames

I’d walked (and cycled) along the paths we took several times before, first in the 1980s, but they were new to my companions. After taking a short look at the Darent in Dartford we made our way to Hythe Street. Its name means a landing place or small port, and the Darent was once an important navigation at least as far as the mills in the centre of Dartford. The has been a pub here since 1764 and the Hufflers Arms gets its name from the men who guided and pulled the barges up the river to here.

Darent Valley Path & Thames

A footbridge takes the path across the Darent here, and past the backs of some industrial sites on towards the half-lock which stopped the river above it drying out at low tide, long derelict. It was something of a surprise to see a narrow boat moored close to it.

Darent Valley Path & Thames

There has been a huge change here since 2015, with volunteers working on and around the lock and the river. You can read more about the work of the Dartford and Crayford Creek Restoration Trust on the Facebook page of the Friends of Dartford and Crayford Creek, and see some of the changes in the pictures there.

Darent Valley Path & Thames

Later in the day I photographed a yacht making its way through the flood barrier from the Thames and going upriver. I heard afterwards that it had reached the recent bridge under the Bob Dunn Way bypass when the tide was just a fraction too high for it to creep underneath with its mast lowered.

The Thames is pretty wide here and the channel deep enough to take fairly large ships, with the ferries including the ship in the picture operating regular contianer services to Rotterdam and Zeebrugge.

I made a few panoramic images, but the sky was a little empty and blue for it really to be a good day for that. This one which shows my two companions walking on ahead is interesting to me as I have managed to make use of the curvature inherent in these very wide angle views. The path on which I was standing to make the image was more or less straight, though in the picture it seems to bend at roughly a right angle.

The Littlebrook Power Station had only recently ceased operation, and we walked past some interesting structures there before making our way under the Dartford Bridge.

I was pleased that the ferry was leaving and I was able to take a series of photographs of it going under the bridge and sailing on downriver. Some of the pictures give a better impression of the relative heights of ship and bridge with an enormous amount of headroom for the passage.

By now I was getting tired, mainly from the heat and the lack of any shade, and I took few pictures on the rest of the walk to the station at Greenhithe. We didn’t see any sign of the path marked on the map which would have taken us up to the church at Stone as I had planned, but I think I was releived not to have had to climb up the hill, and perhaps didn’t look too hard. After all I’d been there and taken pictures on various occasions before. And if you are walking this way it’s worth the detour.

More about the walk and more pictures at Darent Valley Path & Thames.


Around High St Stratford

Tuesday, January 19th, 2021

St Thomas's Creek, Cook's Road, Stratford, Newham, 1983 35q-34_2400
St Thomas’s Creek, Cook’s Road, Stratford, Newham, 1983

There is and long seems to have been some confusion about the naming of this part of the canal system that links the main line of the Lea Navigation at Bow Bridge to the City Mill River and City Mill Lock. On some maps (including Google’s) it is simply referred to as ‘Bow Back Rivers’ but I find it less confusing to give it the more local name, St Thomas’s Creek, sometimes written as St Thomas Creek. The creek got its name from St. Thomas’s Mill, sometimes called ‘Pudding Mill’, I think because of its shape, which also gave its name to the small stream the Pudding Mill River and was actually on that stream on Pudding Mill Lane. For those interested there is a good map of the area before the flood relief works of 1931-5 on British History Online.

Yardley's Box Factory, Stratford High St, Stratford, Newham, 198336m-63-positive_2400
Warton House, former Yardley’s Box Factory, High St, Stratford, 1983

The earliest connection of the Yardley name to soap-making was in the first half of the 17th century, when a Yardley was given the concession to produce soap for the whole of London, but the company dated its founding as ‘Clever Brothers’ to 1770. This company making soaps and perfumes was taken over by William Yardley in 1823 and passed on to his son Charles when he died the following year. The company moved from Bloomsbury to a large factory on Carpenters Road Stratford in 1904 and bought land on Stratford High St in 1918. In 1913 they had trade-marked a picture by Francis Wheatley from his 1793 series, the ‘Cries of London’ to use in their advertising, replacing the primroses in his picture by lavender, and when they built a new art deco box factory in 1938 this was installed at a large scale on the building. Yardleys moved to Basildon in 1966, needing large premises, but in 1967 were taken over by British American Tobacco who sold the business to Beecham in 1985, who again sold it on after they merged to be SmithKlein Beecham. The company went into receivership in 1998. Parts of the box factory – including this section on the High St next to the Northern Outfall Sewer and the Waterworks River are still there, all that is left of Yardley’s in Stratford.

Stratford High St area, Stratford, Newham, 1983 36m-14_2400
Stratford High St area, 1982

I cannot remember exactly where I took this or the next picture, though from other exposures on the same films both are clearly somewhere not far from Stratford High St. I think the canal seen at right here is probably St Thomas’s Creek.

Timber yard, Stratford, Newham, 1982 32v-22_2400
Timber yard, Stratford High St area, 1982

Timber was the main product carried on the Lea Navigation in the later years of its use, and I think this timber yard was probably close to the main stream of the navigation. My attempts to find it again in later years were unsuccesful.

Cafe, Stratford market, Stratford, Newham, 1983 36p-35_2400
Cafe, Stratford market, Stratford, Newham, 1983

The notices on the door offer not just ‘Jellied Eels’ but ‘Best Jellied Eels’, along with ‘Loch Fine Kippers’. My contact sheet puts its location as Stratford Market in Burford Road, just off High St to the south.

Barge, Lea Navigation, Bow Bridge, Bow Flyover, Tower Hamlets, Newham, 1981 29t-26p_2400
Barges, Bow Bridge, October 1981

These last two pictures were some of the first I took in the area after I heard on a radio interview that commercial traffic on the Lea Navigation was to come to an end in a few weeks time.

I think it was the same day that I picked up my camera bag and got on the train to come to look for and photograph any remaining activity. It was a slow journey to Bromley-by-Bow from where I spent an hour or so walking along beside the navigation between Bow Locks and Bow Bridge, where I found three barges loaded with cut timber, photographing all three from the bridge and going down onto the wharf for another picture.

Barge, Lea Navigation, Bow Bridge, Tower Hamlets, Newham, 1981 29t-25_2400
Barges, Bow Bridge, October 1981

I find it hard now to understand why I took so few pictures – only around 30 exposures on the entire visit, and just these two where I found evidence of any remaining commercial traffic.

More pictures from the area on page 3 of my Flickr album River Lea – Lea Navigation 1981-1992.


All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.


Hull Colour – 8

Sunday, July 19th, 2020
Barges in River Hull, Stoneferry, Hull 81-04-Hull-051_2400

More barges on the River Hull, moored around the bend just north of the Isis Oil Mills. Here’s that same bend in 2018:

All of the barges are in the green and yellow colour scheme of Hull’s Gillyott and Scott, formed in 1964 by amalgamation of the five companies of William Gilyott, John A. Scott, T.F. Wood, Furleys and John Deheer.

Some of the barges had the names of birds – such as No 129 Ring Plover at the centre of the group above. Others had to make do with just a simple number or a letter and number such as R50 here. Perhaps it depended on which company they had come from.

Warehouse, River Hull, 83-01-Hull-061_2400
Warehouse, River Hull, 1983

This warehouse on the bank of the River Hull had its frontage on High St, immediately upstream from Drypool Bridge. The narrow passage of Blaides Staithe separates it from Blaydes House, the rear of which can be seen at the right of the picture.

Not long after I photographed it, the warehouse was demolished, its site remaining undeveloped when I last visited it 35 years later, though then said to be ‘Under Offer’. In London it would almost certainly have been preserved, probably listed and converted into luxury flats, but Hull’s low property prices signed its death warrant.

Kenfig, dredger, River Hull, Hull 83-01-Hull-062_2400
Kenfig, dredger, River Hull, 1983

I took quite a few photographs of the Kenfig, which seemed to be moored and quietly rusting in the River Hull for several years, though I think it had previously been responsible for some of the dredging of Humber Dock for the new marina.

I wrote the following when I was commenting daily on a picture of Hull during the 2017 year as City of Culture:

The Kenfig, a grab hopper dredger built in 1954 by Henry Scarr Ltd of Hessle for the British Transport Docks Board at Port Talbot. It was one of the dredgers used to clear the passage into Humber Dock for the Marina, and in 1983 was bought by Jones & Bailey Contractors Ltd of Hull who renamed her Hedon Sand in 1984. Around 5 years later she was scrapped at New Holland.

Kenfig was moored just a little upstream of Drypool Bridge on the River Hull for most of the 1980s, seldom if ever moving.

Hook Sand, Dry Dock, Hull 83-01-Hull-067_2400

There are still several dry docks on the lower part of the River Hull, though I think none currently in use, with one scheduled in 2023 to be the centre of a new maritime museum, where it will house Hull’s last sidewinder trawler the Arctic Corsair.

This one is on the opposite side of the river, north of Drypool Bridge and my picture is taken from its road entrance on Great Union St.

The Old Harbour, River Hull, evening. 83-01-Hull-077_2400
The Old Harbour, River Hull, evening. 1983

My apologies for the poor technical quality of this image, which reflects the difference between colour films and the quality we now get from digital images. I think this was probably taken on an ISO400 colour film, while with my current digital camera I would happily work at ISO6400 and get considerably superior results. Photographers will understand this is a difference of five stops. I couldn’t use a very slow shutter speed as the small tanker was moving up river at some speed with the tide.

The view here is looking towards the mouth of the River Hull. The sand and gravel works have now gone and there is a rather ugly hotel on that side of the river. Further down, past the Myton Bridge, built in 1979 and the tidal barrier, the land at Sammy’s Point is now occupied by The Deep.

More pictures at Hull Colour 1972-85 on Flickr.


All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.


Hull Colour – 6

Friday, July 17th, 2020
Barges on River Hull and Croda works, Hull 81-04-Hull-030_2400
Barges on River Hull and Croda works, Hull 1981

A busy scene on the River Hull, probably taken in 1981, though the dates on these images come from the album they are filed in and are sometimes not the exact year, and this could possibly have been made earlier.

The slide mount crops the image slightly and I’m sure that the actual transparency will have included the top of the water tank on the Croda silo at the Isis Oil Mills, but it would have greatly slowed down the photographing of this and the other slides to have removed the slides from their mounts – and would have made handling them much more tricky. And the macro lens and bellows combination I was using with the older Nikon slide holder was fine for mounted slides but could not give proper coverage of the full 24x36mm.

Perhaps because of the problem of slide mounts, many SLR cameras, though marketing on the benefits of actually viewing through the taking lens rather than the separate optics of the rangefinder Leica or twin-lens Rolleiflex had viewfinders that cropped the images and were actually less accurate in their framing than the Leica. Though even the Leica white line frames never quite exactly represented the area that would appear on film (though some lenses came very close) making something of a nonsense the insistence of many photographers of printing the edges of the negative to give a black frame because this represented how they had seen the picture when they pressed the button. It was always more an aesthetic decision.

The silo was still there last time I walked along Bankside, but the location from where I took this picture was behind a locked gate and the buildings to the right of the silo had gone and there was only one vessel, Cargill’s edible oil tanker Swinderby, moored along this reach of the river.

Works, River Hull 81-04-Hull-032_2400
Works, River Hull 1981

I can’t remember now where I took this picture of a wharf across the RIver Hull, somewhere in Hull. But I do remember being attracted by what appears to have been built as an incredibly tall doorway, though it does now appear to have been blocked by a pipe that emerges through it at a little under half its height.

Was it, I mused, made for giraffes?

542 Hessle Rd and phone box, Hull 81-04-Hull-034_2400
542 Hessle Rd and phone box, Hull 1981

Hull Corporation was one of 55 local authorities to bid for a licence to provide telephone services in their local area in 1902 and opened its first telephone exchange in a former public baths two years later. While other local authorities who had been granted licences soon abandoned or failed, Hull continued its service after the Postmaster General had gained a monopoly elsewhere across the country.

And when in 1936 the Post Office launched a new red phone box designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of King George V and decided that all phone boxes across the country should be red, Hull decided while adopting the new design to keep their traditional colour of cream and green, eventually moving to all cream. Hull City Telephone Department continued to innovate – and introduced a message from Santa in 1952. The council hived off the service into a fully owned separate company, Kingston Communications (HULL) PLC in 1987, which was floated on the Stock Exchange in 1999. In 2007 Hull Council sold its remaining stake in the business which changed its name to KCOM Group PLC.

The scene on Hessle Rd is still recognisable, but the shop has changed and no longer has the colour scheme and awning that attracted my attention, and although there is still a phone box I think it may have moved a few feet.

Lincoln Castle, Hessle Forshore, Hessle 81-04-Hull-039_2400
Lincoln Castle, Hessle Forshore, Hessle 1981

The paddle steamer Lincoln Castle was now beached on the Humber foreshore at Hessle, close to the Humber Bridge, and was now a restaurant where we went for afternoon tea. I made it into a rather strange landscape of distant jagged hills in this picture.

Humber Bridge, from Barton on Humber82hull135_2400
Humber Bridge, from Barton on Humber 1982

And of course we went across the Humber Bridge which took us to Barton-on-Humber. Where we walked around a bit and found there wasn’t a great deal there. I took a few photographs, mainly of the Humber Bridge, and I rather like this almost monochrome view.

More pictures on Flickr in Hull Colour 1972-85.


All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.


Hull Colour – 3

Sunday, July 12th, 2020
Humber Ferry, Hull 72hull057
PS Lincoln Castle – Humber Ferry, 1972

Before the Humber Bridge was opened in 1981, ferries transported passengers and cars across the Humber from the pier in Hull to New Holland in Lincolnshire, where a train service took passengers on to Grimsby and other stations. For drivers it avoided the journey to Boothferry Bridge near Goole, 28 miles away up river – and a similar journey back on the opposite bank. By the mid-70s an alternative route for many journeys had been provided by the M62 viaduct a mile or so east of the Boothferry Bridge – which largely removed the necessity for the Humber Bridge.

The Lincoln Castle was a great improvement on the other paddle steamers when she came into service in 1941, and was much loved by the time she was replaced by a more economical diesel-powered ferry in 1978. For a short time she was grounded on the beach at Hessle as a restaurant – where I went for afternoon tea – and later in the same role in Grimsby. By 2009 her condition had deteriorated and after attempts to preserve the ship failed was scrapped in 2010.

I travelled across on the ferry a couple of times, took a few pictures in New Holland and took the ferry back. It was a good family outing, particularly for our two young boys as the ship had been constructed to give passengers a good view of the engine room and steam engine.

Old Harbour, Hull  77hull045
Old Harbour, Hull 1977

You can still walk beside the River Hull in the Old Town, and it remains an interesting walk, but back in the 1970s there was still some commercial activity, and at the right times of the tide vessels would pass up or down past these largely redundant barges, moored here three deep.

This was the original harbour of Hull, before the docks were built, though there were many wharves upstream both in Hull and further north to Beverley and beyond, and the river remains navigable. Although traffic had dropped markedly there were still a number of industrial sites still using the river in the 1970s and into the present century.

Old Town, Hull 77hull047
Old Town, Hull 1977

Wooden crates were being burnt in a bin down an alley and producing an almost comic book head of flame, a beacon in the shadow of the alley. Flames are always something of a challenge for photography, generally resulting in burned out highlights that have nothing to do with their temperature but simply their intensity. I was surprised that transparency film with its very limited exposure range handled this so well, more I think a matter of luck than expertise.

Terrace, Hull 81-Hull-003
Terrace, Hull 1981

Widely publicised as a “fairytale wedding” and the “wedding of the century”, the marriage Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer on Wednesday 29 July 1981 clearly caught the imagination of many in Hull, and I photographed some of the decorations painted on derelict buildings and here on a typical Hull “terrace’, though I cannot remember its location.

Many of Hull’s roads have these short pedestrian terraces at right angles to the main street to pack more houses into a small area. Not all have such neatly maintained fences and gardens, but almost all are too narrow for them to have been converted to take cars.

The black cat halfway down the street didn’t bring the unhappy couple much luck.

Wincolmlee, Hull 80hull087
Wincolmlee, Hull 1980

Wincolmlee runs roughly parallel to the River Hull, on the road side of the wharves along its west bank, from the north of the Old Town up to Air St, a little over a mile. Lime St, runs in the same way on the east side of the river a little less than half the distance.

Much of Hull’s industry involved agricultural oils and there were storage tanks on both sides of the river. I think these colour-coded pipes probably linked some of them, but what attracted me as well as their colours were the clouds of steam.

Scott warehouse, Hull 80hull088
Scott warehouse, Hull 1980

Hull’s unlisted riverside properties have largely been demolished with some notable losses. But John A Scott’s warehouse in Alfred Gelder St was converted to flats around 1980, the work going on while I took this picture involving making windows in what had been a largely or entirely blank wall.

It isn’t in itself a very exciting building, but it’s river frontage now fits better with the listed building immediately downstream than a new build.

Quite a few buildings in the industrial area around Wincolmlee which in areas of higher property values – such as London – would have been converted to luxury flats have simply been demolished or are still largely derelict. But the area has perhaps been given a boost by the ‘Bankside Gallery’ of graffiti which sprang up following the intervention by Banksy.

Mud, Hull 80hull090
Mud, Hull 1980

I’m unsure as the the actual location or date of this picture – one of the great majority of my slides which lack any captioning. But it is certainly one of Hull’s docks, almost certainly Humber Dock, Railway Dock or Humber Dock Basin. The reflections in the wet mud give some clues, but not enough for me to be sure.

These docks close to the centre of the city had been unused for some years and were all heavily silted with Humber mud. Considerable dredging was required to make Humber Dock usable as Hull Marina, which opened in 1983.

S Not W, Hull 80hull091
S Not W, Hull 1980

I deliberately cropped the message which I think was written on the wooden side of a dockside shed to give the rather enigmatic message ‘S NOT W’. Unfortunately I can no longer remember the entire text, though the letter after W is clearly E, and not as I hoped A for an anti-war slogan.

The saturated red which attracted me, at least in part because it matched the colour of the painted letters, was the roof of a car.

British Extracting Co Ltd, Hull 80hull089
British Extracting Co Ltd, Hull 1980

This former British Extracting Company silo on the side of the River Hull was built in 1919 and one of a number of similar buildings in Hull and elsewhere designed by Gelder & Kitchen of Hull. It has regularly been visited and photographed in recent years by urban explorers.

Sir Alfred Gelder (1855-1941) was born in North Cave and became a Hull councillor in 1895, serving five terms in a row as Mayor from 1898-1903 and overseeing the extensive redevelopment of the city after which he was knighted. He was Liberal MP for Brigg from 1910-1918. A Methodist, he founded his architectural practice in Hull in 1878 and designed a wide range of buildings including several Methodist chapels in the city and elsewhere as well as many flour and oilseed crushing mills, including the first roller mill for fellow Methodist Joseph Rank and other buildings for Ranks’s son, J Arthur Rank.

Llewellyn Kitchen, (1869-1948) from Manchester joined Gelder as chief assistant in 1892 after having worked for a number of architects elsewhere and soon became the junior partner in the practice, although he appears to have been the more interesting architect of the pair. Kitchen was also a leading freemason in the area.

Gelder and Kitchen LLP is still in business, the second oldest firm of architects in the UK today.