Posts Tagged ‘viaduct’

Coal Drops and Canal Kings Cross 1989

Thursday, April 27th, 2023

Coal Drops and Canal Kings Cross 1989: My posts about my walk around King’s Cross led by the Greater London Industrial Archeology Society on Saturday 8th April 1989 continues. The previous post was Gasholders, Flats and the Goods Yard – Kings Cross 1989

Eastern Coal Drops, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-44
Eastern Coal Drops, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-44

The Coal Drops Yard was reopened to the public in 2018, 29 years after I made the pictures in this post as what TripAdvisor calls “King’s Cross’ boutique shopping and foodie hotspot“, and I went along shortly after they opened to take some photographs of the transformed site which you can see on My London Diary at Euston to Kings Cross Coal Drops. You can read more about its early history in a post by Peter Darley on the Gasholder site.

Eastern Coal Drops, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-45
Eastern Coal Drops, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-45

Coal was carried in railway waggons from coalfields in the Midlands and North of England to the coal drops and these facilities built in the 1850s were an early example of bulk handling of goods. The Eastern Coal Drops, together with a coal and stone basin opened in 1851 could handle 1,000 tons of coal a day. Later around 1860 a second set, the Western Coal Drops were added. Derelict for many years, parts of the Eastern Coal Drops were badly damaged by fire in 1985.

Coal Drops, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-46
Coal Drops, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-46

Rather than unload the coal waggons by hand, the coal drops allowed a waggon at a time to be discharged into a storage hopper below, at the bottom of which it could be fed into sacks and loaded onto the waiting horse-drawn coal carts. There was also a coal drop to allow the waggons to be discharged into barges for onward transit.

The waggons could be tipped sideways in a special rig to empty, but it was easier to use waggons which had a bottom that could be opened to simply let the coal fall into the hopper of the floor below the track.

Gasholders, Regents Canal, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-31
Gasholders, Regents Canal, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-31

As well as supplying coal to businesses and homes across London, the nearby gasworks would also have been a major coal user. But I imagine they would have had their own rail sidings for delivery. The gasholders have been relocated since I made these pictures, which sometimes makes it difficult to understand the geography of the area.

In 1866 a viaduct was opened across the canal from the Western Coal drops to Samuel Plimsoll’s coal yard on the south on what was then Cambridge Street (marked as Coal Shoots on the OS map. He patented an improved coal drop which treated the coal more gently and avoided much of the breaking up and dust produced by the earlier drops and was more suitable for the softer household coal he traded in. (There were also coal drops on the other side of Cambridge St, on a siding from the lines into St Pancras.) However visiting the Camley Street Natural Park now on his site shortly after it opened in 1985 I found at least in parts the ground was still more coal dust and fragments than soil. Parts of the demolished viaduct could still be seen when I photographed from the canal towpath in 1979.

Viaduct, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-33
Viaduct, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-33

As well as taking waggons full of coal to the coal drops, a second track was needed on the viaducts to bring back the empty waggons, which were moved sideways using a traverser or waggon turntable. I think these had long disappeared before our visit in 1989.

This picture is I think of the viaduct for the Western Coal Drops, and the sign BERLIN BANK presumably reflects its use as a location for a film. Perhaps someone can tell me more.

Western Goods Shed, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-34
Western Goods Shed, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-34

The covered loading bay of the Western Goods shed was in rather poor condition at the south end, but was still providing cover for the loading and unloading of lorries further along. The lorries have the name ‘newsflow’, a name now in use for a number of media and news aggregators but then I think rather more physically connected with the newspaper and magazine industry, possibly for delivery of the printed papers.

Although looking rather derelict parts of the area were still in use for various purposes and I think a small piece of sculpture visible here suggests a sculptor’s studio. In the 1980s and 90s the goods yard was a popular spot for raves.

Viaduct, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-35
Viaduct, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-35

We were able to wander around the area fairly freely, although there were obviously some rather dangerous areas where we could have fallen like the coal, and others where roofs or walls seemed unsafe. But our wanderings make it difficult to place the exact location of some of my pictures. I think this is the viaduct for the Eastern Coal Drops, and it clearly shows the two tracks, one for the coal drop and the closer for the return of emptied waggons. Underneath you can see the area for the hoppers and where carts would be loaded, in the picture used for parking. Across the tracks are a line of newsflow lorries.

More of my pictures from the GLIAS walk around the area in a later post.

The first post on this walk was Kings Cross, St George’s Gardens & More

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in LondonPhotos, My Own Work | 1 Comment »

Sudbury to Brentford – 31st December 2016

Saturday, December 31st, 2022

Sudbury to Brentford

Six years ago on New Year’s Eve we walked with a couple of family members from Sudbury to Brentford. This year because of rail and health problems none of our family are staying with us and “South Western Railway services between 18 December and 8 January are subject to change and may not operate”, so if the weather is fine we will probably do a rather shorter walk from home.

Sudbury to Brentford

The trip in 2016 to Sudbury Hill station was reasonably fast; a short train journey then a bus and a couple of short hops on the Piccadilly line got us there in a little under an hour and a half, and within a few minutes we were walking along suburban streets to Horsenden Wood, where we walked to the top of the hill.

Sudbury to Brentford

Unfortunately it was a dull and damp day, and we could only see the extensive views this part of the walk would have given us had the air been clear dully through the murk, but the path up through the wood was enhanced by the slight mist. We walked down the hill to cross the Grand Union Canal.

Soon we reached the highpoint of the walk for some of us, the 1930s trading estate leading to the Art Deco Tesco on Western Avenue, designed by Wallis, Gilbert and Partners and built in 1933 for Hoover, along with the 1930s moderne canteen, now an Asian restaurant. We chose the Tesco both for a tiny bit of shopping and the toilets, then walked west to the footbridge to cross the busy road.

Almost immediately on the path the other side of Western Avenue we came to St Mary the Virgin Perivale, now used for concerts, with just an occasional service.

This Grade I listed redundant church dates in part from the 13th century and was the smallest church in Middlesex (outside London.) We explored its graveyard and sat down on a rather damp seat there to eat our sandwiches in what was either heavy drizzle or light rain.

The next section of the walk took us beside the River Brent, another of London’s minor rivers and like the rest of our walk going to Brentford, though we had to make some deviations to follow roads and footpaths. This was a relatively quiet and sometimes boring section of the walk, though its always good to walk beside the river, and there was a rather dumpy viaduct for a doomed railway, a council estate and a long foot path to a Cuckoo Lane where no cuckoos were to be heard except for our ludicrous imitations.

Things got more interesting again when we reached Hanworth Church, and early work of George Gilbert Scott who later called it ‘a mass of horrors’ and Brent Lodge Park, where I ignored the pleas of some of my cfo-walkers and led us firmly away from a tea-room – we were already and hour or so behind schedule if we were to finish the walk during daylight.

Brunel really knew how to build a viaduct, and here was the first major engineering work on the new Great Western Railway in 1836-7, with 8 semi-elliptical arches each of 70 ft span and rising 19 ft supported on hollow brick piers – the first time these were used in a railway viaduct. 886 ft long, the height to the parapet is 81 ft, and when built it was 30 ft wide to carry two broad gauge lines. Later it was widened to 55ft with a third pier added to each existing pair, and it could then take four standard gauge tracks, which were laid in 1892. We walked under this impressive structure beside the River Brent to the south side which is the earlier part and carries the arms of Lord Wharncliffe, chair of the committee that gave permission for the GWR.

We continued by the Brent to join the Grand Union Canal, another earlier great engineering acheivement along with the rest of the canal system, at the Hanwell flight of locks. Our route now ran along the towpath, so navigation was simple, all the way to the Great West Road.

There was still just enough light to take a few photographs, but my companions were flagging and our walk was getting slower and slower.

By the time we reached the road for the short walk to Brentford Station it was truly dark and they had slowed to a snails pace, and despite my urging them to catch the next train we arrived there to see it just departing, for once dead on time, though we were an hour and a minute later then planned. It had been a good walk but would have been better without the 29 minutes wait there for the next train.

You can see many more pictures from the walk on My London Diary at New Years Eve Walk.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in My Own Work | No Comments »

Land Of My Fathers

Thursday, April 16th, 2020

Well, not quite, but our family do have strong Welsh connections. The only grandparent I ever knew was a small woman dressed in black who sat in a corner of the parlour beside the coal fire, with its permanent kettle on the hob, and if she spoke at all it was at least with a strong Welsh accent, though she had a quiet voice and I was never certain it was in English.

She had a name, Eliza, though she died before I knew her as anything other than Gran’ma, and was born in Llansantffraed, Radnorshire in 1865 where her family farmed. Llan-Santfraid Yn Elvael is a few miles from Builth Wells, one of quite a few places named after St Ffraid the Nun, better known outside Wales as St Brigit, including another in Radnorshire, Llansantffraid Cwmmwd Deuddwr (aka Cwmtoyddwr.) Her family farmed at Llan-gyfrwys, or Llangoveris, not far from Hundred House and every Christmas my father or uncle would go up to Paddington Station to collect a bird sent up for the family table, a duck or a goose, which around 20 of us, my aunts, uncle, father, mother and cousins would sit around the table to eat, though I insisted on eating only the chipolatas, not liking the rather greasy birds.

As a young woman she had been sent up to London to work in a family business, a Welsh dairy near Mount Pleasant, on the Gray’s Inn Road, and I imagine Fredrick Marshall, a young tradesman around her age who had moved into London from Cheshunt came into the shop as a customer, and they were married at Highgate Road, later moving to set up home in Hounslow were he set up a small cart-making business and she running a small shop and bearing five girls and two boys, one my father.

One of those girls married a Welsh man who I think she met when she was sent to Wales to look after an elderly relative there, and they had a home at Aberedw, a few miles south of Builth where her husband was a river warden on the Wye. I spent several summers in their house as a small child, probably when my mother was in hospital and I think we often ate salmon.

Back then we travelled to Aberedw by train (the line closed at the end of 1962) and there were several possible routes, though trains were infrequent on all. Trains from Hereford or Cardiff I think took us to Three Cocks Junction where we changed for Aberedw. When I last went to Aberedw by train in the late 1950s you had to tell the guard when boarding that you wanted to alight there, and to catch the train from there you stood on the platform and waved frantically at the driver.

The most exciting route was to come up through the valleys from Cardiff through Merthyr Tydfil (though I don’t remember the details, and I think there was probably another change involved) but the scenery with mountains, colleries and factories was rather more impressive than the lusher fields of Hay and Hereford.

I can’t now exactly remember how my trip to Merthyr came about, but I think I probably managed to persuade several friends from a small group of photographers that it would be a great place to go at that time, within a day or two of the announcement by the National Coal Board of the closure of more than 20 pits that led to the Miners’ Strike. It was clear that this was the end of an era for industry in South Wales, and was a part of Thatcher’s plan to end manufacturing and turn the UK into a service economy – which I had been documenting with a series of pictures of closed factories around London.

I think I was the only one of the four who didn’t have a car, but the four of us drove down I think together in Terry King, who had organised a couple of nights at a guest house and read up a little on the area.

I’ve just put a album with many of the pictures I took on this trip onto Flickr, where you can browse all of them at high resolution. Most are from Trehafod around the Lewis Merthyr colliery and from Cwmaman, as well as Dowlais and Cefn Coed. As always I’m happy for images to be shared on social media but retain copyright, and a licence is needed for any commercial or editorial use.

Wales 1984 – Views from the valleys

After taking these pictures I made some attempt to get funding to return and do more work in the area, but without success.

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.

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, please share on social media.
And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in My Own Work | No Comments »

Secret Rivers

Tuesday, May 28th, 2019

Just opened at the Museum of London Docklands is the exhibition Secret Rivers, which is worth going to see if you are around – and is free. Not all of the rivers featured are secret – they include the Thames and the Lea – but they are all of interest. As well as videos and maps and pictures including a few photographs there are also objects found in the rivers on display.

I’ll leave more general comments about the show to the reviews listed at the bottom of this post, but say a little more about my own minor contribution, the picture above of the DLR being built across the not very secret Bow Creek which I made in morning fog back in 1992. It was one of around a dozen images of the DLR extension shown as part of a group show on Transport at the Museum of London later that year.

I’d left home early on a Sunday morning in mid-January as a fine morning with clear sky was dawning, catching the first early morning train to Richmond then the North London Link to Canning Town. As we approached the destination I was disappointed to find everywhere was shrouded in mist; had I known I would have stayed in bed at home!

I’d recently bought what was then the most expensive camera I’d ever owned, a new Japanese Widelux 35mm model, a rotating swing lens camera, which had cost me around £2000 (equivalent to around £7000 today allowing for inflation) and had decided this was an ideal project to make use of its unique characteristics.

I was pretty fed up with the mist, as I wanted nice clear pictures, and it was also much colder than I’d anticipated in the mist, but as I’d spent a couple of hours travelling to the location I decided to take some pictures, and stuck at it for an hour or two, making around 40 exposures – roughly two films. The camera gave around 21 exposures on a normal 36x 35mm casette with negatives the same width as those made with a 6×6 camera but only 24mm tall.

It was a slow job, as the camera had to be carefully levelled on a tripod for each picture, otherwise the horizon would appear curved. The viewfinder was imprecise, and I soon learnt it was better to rely on the two arrows on the top plate which indicated the field of view to visualise the result.

The camera used no batteries, but was clockwork and entirely manual. Winding on the film also wound the shutter and rotated the lens, held in a vertical cylinder in front of the curved film behind, to its starting point. On pressing the shutter release, a slit behind the lens opened to epose the film as the lens rotated around a roughly 130 degree arc. I think the shutter speed was probably 1/125 s, based on the exposure of any point on the film, but it took perhaps 1/30th for the slit to travel across the film as the lens rotated.

I calculated the exposure using a separate hand-held meter, a Weston Master V, which could make relected light readings as in-camera meters do or, with the aid of a curiously shaped lump of translucent plastic, it could measure the light falling on your subject, almost certainly what I used for these pictures in the fog. The Weston meters used a selenium photo cell around two inches in diameter, which generated enough electricity to power the meter, and again needed no battery.

I’d walked from Canning Town down the Silvertown Way and over the Lower Lea Crossing to where the DLR crossed the creek. The mist I think was rather thicker than it looks in the picture, and I could hardly see Pura Foods. I took a few more pictures then my way back via the East India Dock Road to Canning Town cold and disappointed. It seemed to me to have been a wasted day – and I came back a week later to retake the images in clear daylight.

Once I’d developed and printed the films a couple of weeks later, I realised that although for most of what I’d taken the mist really spoiled the pictures, this image, with the viaduct disappearing into the distance was rather special. It remains one of my most widely published and exhibited works, but is the only one from that foggy day day that appears on my River Lea website.

More about the Secret Rivers show at:
Londonist
London Live (video)
The Guardian
Evening Standard
MuseumCrush

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, please share on social media.
And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

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.

To order prints or reproduce images

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in My Own Work | No Comments »