Ice house (building)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  An ice house is a building made to hold ice through the whole year, and one of the oldest records of such a place is pressed into clay. A cuneiform tablet from around 1780 BCE describes Zimri-Lim, the King of Mari, building an icehouse in the northern Mesopotamian town of Terqa. The tablet boasts that it was a structure "which never before had any king built." That pride suggests how remarkable it once seemed to hold on to winter after winter had passed. This documentary follows the idea across thousands of years. How did people keep ice frozen in the heat of summer without any machine? Why did kings and engineers in different parts of the world arrive at similar solutions? And how did a humble store of ice end up shaping royal parks, shipping fortunes, wartime shelters and, in one corner of the United States, the very meaning of a word?

  22627

• 2. Winter Stored for Summer

  ›

  At the height of the commercial ice trade, a typical ice house held about 3000 short tons of ice. The method behind that mountain of frozen water was simple. During winter, workers cut ice and snow from lakes or rivers and carried it into the building. There they packed it in insulation, often straw or sawdust. Kept this way, the ice could last for many months, frequently until the following winter. Some ice houses were underground chambers, usually dug by hand near natural sources of winter ice such as freshwater lakes. Many others were ordinary buildings with various kinds of insulation. Food preservation was the main job for all that stored cold. Ice also chilled drinks and went into desserts such as ice cream and sorbet. The habit of storing frozen water is much older than the ice trade, and its oldest physical traces lie in pits dug in antiquity.

  26272819

• 3. Ancient Pits

  ›

  Archaeologists in China have found the remains of ice pits dating to the 7th century BCE. Written references hint that such pits may have been in use as early as around 1100 BCE. Around 300 BCE, Alexander the Great stored snow in pits dug for that purpose. Rome took the practice into the city centre. By the 3rd century CE, snow was imported from the mountains, kept in pits covered with straw, and sold from shops devoted to it. Customers who visited those snow shops found that the pits produced two products. Meltwater that refroze at the bottom formed ice, and buyers paid more for that ice than for the snow piled on top of it.

  345

• 4. Persian Yakhchals

  ›

  By 400 BCE, Persian engineers were building yakhchāls in the desert, a setting where keeping anything cold seems almost absurd. These structures stored ice and food, and sometimes even made ice. To do it they combined evaporative cooling, radiative cooling, a solar chimney and a diurnal heat reservoir. Water was often channelled from a qanat to the yakhchāl, where it froze whenever conditions allowed. The most common design had a conical shape above ground, with storage space beneath the surface, shade walls and an ice pool. Many yakhchāls built centuries ago are still standing.

  67295

• 5. Royal Britain

  ›

  In 1619, James I commissioned what is described as the first modern ice house in Britain, in Greenwich Park. Another followed at Hampton Court in 1625-6. The Hampton Court structure, also called a snow conserve, was a brick-lined well 30 feet deep and 16 feet wide, covered by a timber building with a thatched roof. In 1660, Charles II had one built in the upper part of St James's Park in London, now known as Green Park. Travellers had brought the idea home from Italy, where peasants gathered ice in the mountains and used caves to keep food fresh. British ice houses usually followed a common pattern, although designs varied with the date and the builder. Most were brick-lined domes with the bulk of their volume underground. The base was typically conical or rounded so that melted ice collected there, and a drain carried the meltwater away. People also called them ice wells, ice pits or ice mounds. During the 18th century, construction increased, particularly at large manor houses and their estates.

  26102728

• 6. Hidden in the Grounds

  ›

  Ice kept arriving in Britain by ship from Scandinavia until the 1920s. From around 1900, imports fell sharply, because factories in the country had begun producing artificial ice. Purpose-built ice stores were mostly the privilege of large mansions, but some served business. Great Yarmouth's ice house supported the town's fishing industry. The largest surviving ice house in the United Kingdom is the Tugnet Ice House at Spey Bay, built in 1830 to supply ice for packing salmon from the River Spey before it travelled to market in London. In King's Cross, a pair of commercial ice wells survives beneath what is now the London Canal Museum. The Swiss entrepreneur Carlo Gatti built them in 1857 and 1863. They measure around 30 feet across and were originally 42 feet deep.

  Between 1939 and 1945, during the Second World War, old ice houses found new uses. Some still held ice and food. Others, being underground and solidly built, became air raid shelters.

  In 2018, workers discovered the very large Park Crescent West ice well in London. Samuel Dash had it made in the early 1780s for commercial use, years before John Nash began building the surrounding crescent in 1806. The well is 9.5 metres deep and 7.5 metres wide, only a few metres from the Jubilee line of the London Underground. It first stored local ice taken from the River Thames in winter. In the 1820s, the ice merchant William Leftwich took it over and used it for ice imported from the frozen lakes of Norway.

  In Ireland, a passage found beneath Ardgillan Castle in County Dublin in 1985 turned out to be the estate's ice house. Its existence had been known, but nobody had located it again until then. Other Irish survivors include examples on the Woodstock Estate near Inistioge, at the former Rockingham Estate in Boyle, now inside Lough Key Forest Park, and in the grounds of Dunsany Castle in County Meath. In England, fine 19th-century examples can be seen at Ashton Court in Bristol, Petworth House in Sussex, Croxteth Hall in Liverpool and Burghley House in Stamford. Near Norton House in Somerset, a redundant brick springhead was converted into an ice house.

  Not every building marked as an ice house on a map was one. Game larders and venison larders were sometimes labelled that way on Ordnance Survey maps. Bruce Walker, an expert on Scottish vernacular buildings, has suggested that the many long-ruined ice houses on country estates help explain why Scotland has so many legends of secret tunnels.

  1415161718

• 7. New England Ice Kings

  ›

  Boston's "Ice King" was Frederic Tudor, who formed the Tudor Ice Company in the early 19th century. Ice houses allowed a trade in frozen water to become a major part of the early economy of New England. Fortunes were made by shipping ice, packed in straw, to the southern states and across the Caribbean Sea. In winter, workers chipped ice from a lake surface and often dragged it by sled to the ice house. In summer, icemen carried it to homes in ice-wagons, and families kept it in an icebox that worked much like a modern refrigerator. As refrigeration became common in homes and businesses, ice houses fell into disuse. The home delivery business shrank until it had virtually disappeared by the late 1960s. Small ice houses lingered, sometimes just a sawdust pile under a makeshift roof or tarpaulin, to supply ice for local events such as fairs. Most ice for daily use now comes from a home freezer, while bulk ice is manufactured and sold like other retail goods. At least two ice houses are still run in the traditional way as tourist attractions, one in New England and one in DuPage County, Illinois.

  1920127

• 8. Texas Ice Houses

  ›

  In the 1930s, ice manufacturers such as the Southland Ice Manufacturing Company ran ice houses in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. Merchants in Texas added groceries and cold beer to their stock, and their stores became early convenience stores and local gathering places. The widespread 7-Eleven chain, first known as U-Tote'm Stores, grew out of this kind of business. Southland was not the only Southern company to build a convenience-store corporation on ice. Munford Inc. of Atlanta began in the early 20th century as the Atlantic Ice and Coal Company, selling ice and coal from mule-drawn wagons. By the 1970s it was running a large chain of convenience stores called Majik Market. The company was sold in 1988 and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1990.

  From San Antonio and the Texas Hill Country down to the Mexican border, ice houses took on yet another role as open-air bars. The difference between South Texas ice houses and those elsewhere in the state and the South has been linked to the region's Catholicism, its deeper-rooted Mexican culture and the influence of German immigrants. In that part of Texas, the word icehouse has come to mean an establishment that earns most of its money from selling cold beer.

  2122232425