Gas Light and Coke Company

• 1. Introduction

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  The Gas Light and Coke Company was incorporated by royal charter on the 30th of April 1812, under the seal of King George III, and it would spend the next 137 years supplying coal gas to a city that had never seen anything like it. Frederick Albert Winsor, a German-born entrepreneur, was the driving force behind its founding. Parliament granted authorisation, the charter was issued, and the Court of Directors met for the first time on the 24th of June 1812. The original capitalisation was one million pounds, divided into 80,000 shares. What questions does that raise? How does a brand-new company, armed with a royal charter and a technology most Londoners had never encountered, build the infrastructure of a modern city from scratch? And what becomes of it all when the state decides the age of private gas is over?

• 2. Piping London

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  Samuel Clegg, formerly of Boulton and Watt, served as the company's chief engineer and pushed the network outward at a remarkable pace. By 1819, nearly 290 miles of pipes had been laid beneath London's streets, supplying 51,000 burners. Clegg also designed a practical gas meter, giving the company a workable way to charge customers for what they used. The early offices sat at Pall Mall, with a wharf at Cannon Row for deliveries. In 1817, Clegg oversaw the installation of gas works at the Royal Mint itself. In 1818 alone, the company opened a tar works in Poplar and expanded its operations at Brick Lane and Westminster. The GLCC was not simply selling light; it was quietly laying the arteries of a new kind of urban life. Those service valve covers, cast during the company's operating years, can still be found embedded in London's pavements today.

• 3. The Beckton Colossus

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  Beckton Gas Works opened in 1868 on the East Ham Levels, east of the city, and the site was named after Simon Adams Beck, the GLCC's own chairman. At 550 acres, it dwarfed the earlier Nine Elms site and sat downriver of the Pool of London, meaning it could be reached by significantly larger colliers than any upstream works could accommodate. The scale came with friction. In 1872, five men were imprisoned for twelve months after striking in support of two workers sacked for requesting a pay rise; the sentences were later reduced to four months. In 1889, layoffs at Beckton prompted the founding of the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers, a body that eventually became part of what is now the GMB Union. Joseph Newell Reeson became Resident Engineer in 1906 and conducted the world's first experiments in welded gas holder construction. At the moment of nationalisation in 1949, Beckton was the single largest gas works on earth, capable of producing 119,120,000 cubic feet of gas per day.

• 4. Wartime on the Water

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  Coal did not move through pipes; it arrived by sea. The GLCC maintained a large fleet of colliers and flatiron vessels, and those ships paid heavily during both world wars. SS Lanterna was mined in the North Sea off Cromer on the 6th of October 1916; all crew survived. SS Ignis went down off Aldeburgh on the 8th of December 1915, again with no loss of life. SS Grovelea was less fortunate: torpedoed off Scarborough on the 31st of October 1917, fourteen of her eighteen crew were killed. SS Horseferry was sunk by the German E-boat S-27 on the 11th of March 1942, with eleven crew members lost. One vessel, SS Gasfires, survived a torpedo attack by S-27 on the 17th of October 1940 that killed eleven crew and blew off her stern, returned to service after repairs, then hit a mine and sank on the 21st of June 1941. The GLCC named one of its colliers SS Mr. Therm after the advertising character that illustrator Eric Fraser had designed for the company in 1931.

• 5. Gasworks as Landmarks

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  Not every gasworks was simply functional. At Fulham's Sands End site, construction of the Imperial Gas Company's works began in 1824, and the number two gasholder there dates to 1830, making it reputed to be the oldest gasholder in the world. The Imperial Gasworks' neoclassical office building was completed in 1857, and a laboratory designed by architect Sir Walter Tapper followed in 1927. All three structures are now Grade II listed buildings. At Harrow and Stanmore, when a waterless gasometer was installed in 1931, the headmaster of Harrow School was among those who protested it would ruin the view from Harrow Hill. The response was to paint the holder in undulating green lines that grew lighter in tone toward the top. At Bromley-by-Bow, a site that was once described as a "vast white elephant" because of its unsatisfactory coaling arrangements eventually became a heritage case in its own right: its gasholders were listed in 1984, decades after the works closed in 1976.

• 6. Nationalisation and Legacy

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  By 1948, the GLCC supplied gas across a service area of 547 square miles, stretching from Egham in Surrey to Southend-on-Sea in Essex, and north to Pinner in North West London. It served a population of 4.5 million and employed 21,250 people. In that year alone it sold 276.7 million Therms of gas. On the 1st of May 1949, the Gas Act 1948 brought those operations to a close as a private concern; the GLCC was nationalised and became the principal component of the new North Thames Gas Board, one of twelve regional boards created across Britain. The headquarters at Horseferry Road in Westminster passed into different hands. Nine Elms Gas Works, which had once employed 800 people on a 20-acre riverside site, closed in 1970 as Britain converted to natural gas from the North Sea. Beckton followed in 1976. The GLCC is identified as the original corporate ancestor from which British Gas plc descends.