The Full Gasometer

Here's the complete text of my article on Gasometers

Gasometer; The Rise and Fall of an Industrial Icon.

Is there a gasometer near you? If there is, take a few photographs for posterity because this iconic part of our industrial heritage won't be around for much longer. They were ubiquitous up until the 1960’s; nearly every UK town had its own gasworks, providing reassuring views of the accompanying gasometer as it rose and fell almost mysteriously in the middle distance. We were all very used to them, so their slow demise has hardly registered. Most stopped rising and falling from the introduction of North Sea Gas onward and today, gas arrives from elsewhere, coming ashore from the North Sea or across from Europe to arrive at one of seven UK processing terminals such as the one at Bacton in Norfolk. A few gasometers still rise and fall, but now they are simply used for temporarily balancing the system, not for providing the local gas supply.

This rather elegant lattice structure is part of Huddersfield's column-guided gasometer (or gas-holder), a familiar sight near the town centre just off the Leeds Road. Any fan who has ever ever attended a match starring either the Huddersfield Giants or Huddersfield Town F.C. and tried to locate the John Smith (formerly the Galpharm) Stadium will have either used the gasometer as a landmark to find their way, or parked in its shadow.

Strictly speaking this is the structure which supports the telescopic gas holder as it rises and falls according to how much gas is inside, sealed in by the water reservoir underneath. This column- guided, telescoping gasometer design was invented in 1824 to conveniently contain ‘town gas’ which was produced using coal. However well before this, a coal ‘gasification’ process was creating gas in useful quantities, which was kept in rigid containers and used for lighting in factories and workshops. These coal gases were far from pure, consisting of numerous substances including methane, carbon monoxide and sulphur, they went through purification processes to be reliably and safely useful.

The importance of this early gas production cannot be overestimated. Reliable gas lighting made it possible for manufacturing in huge woolen, cotton and steel mills to continue more efficiently throughout the night and so pushed the pace of the industrial revolution. The system for gas-powered lighting invented by Ayreshire born engineer William Murdoch, who was senior engineer for Boulton and Watt, manufacturers of steam engines, was first use for industrial purposes late in the eighteenth century.  Murdoch’s home in Redruth, Cornwall was the first domestic environment to be illuminated by a gas-light system of his own devising.

Early, rigid gas holder at Bean Ings Mill, Leeds.

In Leeds, with nearly 2,000 workers at Bean Ings Mill, Benjamin Gott was one of the town’s biggest employers and a powerful influence. He employed Boulton and Watt to provide a steam engine for his woolen mill when earlier, water-powered mechanisms proved unreliable. Bean Ings Mill also acquired its own gasworks (one of the first ever built), complete with a rigid gasometer, so that Gott’s weavers could work by gaslight late into the night. The exact date of this gasometer’s installation at Gott’s mill is unclear, but some years later, in 1800, much of the mill burnt down and Gott moved the enterprise to Armley.

William Murdoch was unable to patent his invention, it legally belonged to his employers who were not interested and allowed the opportunity to lapse. So gas lighting for streets and many homes using Murdoch’s method spread from other sources and some parts of the UK were lit by gas for longer than they have been since by electricity. The last gas lights in Huddersfield, in the Old Court House, finally went out less than ten years ago when the building became a private club.

The first public gas supply was not in Yorkshire, but to a row of street lamps along Pall Mall, London in 1807. This was soon followed by the new London and Westminster Gas Light and Coke Company under the guidance of inventor and entrepreneur Frederick Winsor. In Great Peter Street in 1812 the company opened the very first commercial gas works. Great Peter Street leads down to the Thames at Millbank, enabling coal to be easily shipped in for the gas production process. The company laid wooden pipes to light up Westminster Bridge by gaslight for New Year’s Eve celebrations in 1813.

Spiral guided gasometers, Hunslet, Leeds

The very earliest gas holders were rigid and sealed, the use of the telescopic gasometer, in which the gas expands and contracts the holder according to its volume above a seal of water, began in 1824. The first working telescopic gasometer was built in Leeds. The greatly increased and flexible storage these gas holders provided for local gas works was soon apparent, gasometers became essential as demand grew for gas as a fuel for cooking and heating as well as lighting.  By the 1860’s there were examples across the UK. The spirally guided gas holder was devised in 1890 in Manchester by William Gadd and the first was built in Northwich, Cheshire. This strengthened design did away with the columns and steel lattice to support the telescoping gas holder and relied on spiral rails as guides.

The term ‘gasometer’ for these structures was coined by Murdoch, amid some argument that they are not ‘meters’ as they do not measure the gas. However the term caught the public imagination and has stuck, the rise and fall of the gasometer’s dome proving sufficient measure of the available gas supply to reassure the person in the street. The prosaic term ‘gas holder’ is preferred by those of a more technical bent. 

The Huddersfield Gas Works, dating back to the 1820's, once covered an area of around six acres and by 1837 it had three gasometers. Over the years gasometers have come, gone and been re-built on the site. This last remaining one was constructed in 1916, it is 127 feet high and 220ft in diameter and the actual gas-holder (the 'bell') has 3 telescoping sections which would rise as the internal gas pressure increased. The gas works itself was decommissioned in 1972, when National Grid started distributing natural gas from the North Sea. 

Huddersfield's gasometer above the factory sheds

The last Huddersfield gas holder never rises these days, the curve of its bell is just visible above the roofs of the factory sheds in the photo above. The structure is obsolete, surplus to the requirements of modern technology which the grid uses today to distribute gas by less impressive methods. Huddersfield’s Gasometer has been immortalised by local artist David Blackburn, whose 1981 pastel painting Industrial Landscape with Gasometer is in the V & A Museum in London.

One or two gasometers, like the one behind St. Pancras’ station in London, have acquired listed status and National Grid (who own them all) say that they are working with English Heritage to archive and commemorate the ones which are being removed. But it is that enough? It shouldn’t be beyond modern capabilities to preserve a few more of these impressive structures by conversion for other purposes.  However, as it stands most gasometers up and down the country will be demolished, reduced to valuable scrap metal and even more valuable (once decontaminated) inner city land. It can only be a matter of time before the same fate falls to the Huddersfield gasometer. Then how will the Huddersfield Town fans find their way to matches?

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By Susan Gilbert, director of ArchiFACT Limited.