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| ‘As the bowler runs in, it’s so quiet you can hear the creak of the gasometer,” the cricket commentator, Henry Blofeld, once mused during a broadcast of Test Match Special from the Oval. For Blofeld, and countless cricket fans, many of whom have never set foot in south London, the looming skeletal frame of the gasometer is not just part of the landscape but of the atmosphere of the ground on match days. | ‘As the bowler runs in, it’s so quiet you can hear the creak of the gasometer,” the cricket commentator, Henry Blofeld, once mused during a broadcast of Test Match Special from the Oval. For Blofeld, and countless cricket fans, many of whom have never set foot in south London, the looming skeletal frame of the gasometer is not just part of the landscape but of the atmosphere of the ground on match days. |
| The Oval gasometer, like others that have outlived their use across the country, is under threat of demolition, its presence measured in the hyper-inflated value of the land on which it stands rather than its historical or architectural significance. When demolition plans were announced by Southern Gas Networks in 2013, Blofeld reacted in characteristically lyrical fashion. Cricketing legends such as WG Grace and Jack Hobbs had played in its shadow, he noted: “In comparison, pulling down the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace would be child’s play.” | The Oval gasometer, like others that have outlived their use across the country, is under threat of demolition, its presence measured in the hyper-inflated value of the land on which it stands rather than its historical or architectural significance. When demolition plans were announced by Southern Gas Networks in 2013, Blofeld reacted in characteristically lyrical fashion. Cricketing legends such as WG Grace and Jack Hobbs had played in its shadow, he noted: “In comparison, pulling down the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace would be child’s play.” |
| In 2013, though, National Grid announced plans to demolish a total of 76 gas holders across England, and Southern and Scottish Gas networks followed suit with their proposal to get rid of 111 over the next 16 years. That process will leave the urban landscape denuded of what, since Victorian times, has been one of its defining elements. | |
| As I write, that landscape is already being altered by the removal, section by section, of the solid-type Battersea gas holder near the iconic power station, a landmark for generations of Londoners on their daily commute by train into and out of south London. The novelist Will Self describes its disappearance as “just another casualty of the relentless spatialisation of international capital flows that is London’s new skyline”. Likewise, Christopher Costelloe, director of the Victorian Society, which has campaigned for the preservation of several historically important examples: “Gasometers, by their very size and structure, cannot help but become landmarks. [They] are singularly dramatic structures for all their emptiness.” | As I write, that landscape is already being altered by the removal, section by section, of the solid-type Battersea gas holder near the iconic power station, a landmark for generations of Londoners on their daily commute by train into and out of south London. The novelist Will Self describes its disappearance as “just another casualty of the relentless spatialisation of international capital flows that is London’s new skyline”. Likewise, Christopher Costelloe, director of the Victorian Society, which has campaigned for the preservation of several historically important examples: “Gasometers, by their very size and structure, cannot help but become landmarks. [They] are singularly dramatic structures for all their emptiness.” |
| It was the late Scottish poet Edwin Morgan who most successfully caught their mutable character. “I have seen your stark ring taking sunlight till you were something molten, vanishing, magical...” he wrote in Gasometer, which also celebrated the unremitting modernist thrust: “You don’t care about the wildness of the sky,/ my old gasometer!.../ You cannot hide where your strength comes from./ You are constructivist to the core.” | It was the late Scottish poet Edwin Morgan who most successfully caught their mutable character. “I have seen your stark ring taking sunlight till you were something molten, vanishing, magical...” he wrote in Gasometer, which also celebrated the unremitting modernist thrust: “You don’t care about the wildness of the sky,/ my old gasometer!.../ You cannot hide where your strength comes from./ You are constructivist to the core.” |
| With all gasometers, whether solid or telescopic (their inner cylinders rise and fall inside the steel frame as gas is pumped in and sucked out), form follows function. That last phrase was coined in 1896 by the pioneering American modernist architect Louis Sullivan, based in turn on the Roman architect Vitruvius’s belief that a structure must be solid, useful and beautiful. Vitruvius would surely have approved of the gasometer. | With all gasometers, whether solid or telescopic (their inner cylinders rise and fall inside the steel frame as gas is pumped in and sucked out), form follows function. That last phrase was coined in 1896 by the pioneering American modernist architect Louis Sullivan, based in turn on the Roman architect Vitruvius’s belief that a structure must be solid, useful and beautiful. Vitruvius would surely have approved of the gasometer. |
| In the 1960s, the stark, functional beauty of gas holders inspired Bernd and Hilla Becher, founders of the Dusseldorf School of Photography, whose students included Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer. The Bechers spent 40 years chronicling the industrial buildings of Europe, Britain and America: water towers, blast furnaces, factory facades, water tanks and, inevitably, gas holders of every kind. Their obsessive, formalist approach – each structure was photographed in monochrome from the same distance and angle on a large-format camera – led to a series of typologies in which multiple photographs of each subject were presented in grids to further emphasise the uniformity of their design. | In the 1960s, the stark, functional beauty of gas holders inspired Bernd and Hilla Becher, founders of the Dusseldorf School of Photography, whose students included Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer. The Bechers spent 40 years chronicling the industrial buildings of Europe, Britain and America: water towers, blast furnaces, factory facades, water tanks and, inevitably, gas holders of every kind. Their obsessive, formalist approach – each structure was photographed in monochrome from the same distance and angle on a large-format camera – led to a series of typologies in which multiple photographs of each subject were presented in grids to further emphasise the uniformity of their design. |
| The Bechers’ work has become one of the touchstones of contemporary landscape photography. For all its austere formalism, though, it was founded on Bernd Becher’s nostalgia for the fast-disappearing industrial landscape of his native Ruhr which gathered pace during Germany’s postwar economic boom. He realised that the same process was inevitable elsewhere in Europe and began photographing water towers and gas holders. Decades later, the British artist Idris Khan made a work entitled Every… Bernd and Hilla Becher Prison Type Gasholders, in which he overlaid photograph after photograph until a blurred, composite image emerged: a kind of ghostly shadow structure that, as the actual gas holders disappear, becomes ever more haunting. | |
| As they fade into history, gasometers are also inspiring a growing network of amateur enthusiasts. Sarah O’Carroll, a software engineer from London, spends her spare time photographing gasometers. (She refers to them, as the gas networks do, as “gas holders”, which seems altogether less poetic.) “I’ve always loved them as structures,“ she says, “but, about a year and a half ago, when I realised most of them were coming down I started going out to track them down. People only appreciate them when they go and then, after a while, they are not remembered at all. So, I am keeping track of them and their disappearance for posterity. | As they fade into history, gasometers are also inspiring a growing network of amateur enthusiasts. Sarah O’Carroll, a software engineer from London, spends her spare time photographing gasometers. (She refers to them, as the gas networks do, as “gas holders”, which seems altogether less poetic.) “I’ve always loved them as structures,“ she says, “but, about a year and a half ago, when I realised most of them were coming down I started going out to track them down. People only appreciate them when they go and then, after a while, they are not remembered at all. So, I am keeping track of them and their disappearance for posterity. |
| O’Carroll sees the gas holder as a symbol of the city itself. But surely, I suggest, it is the nature of a modern city to constantly reinvent itself. “I know all the arguments – they are expensive to maintain, we need the land for development – but they are part of our character as well as our industrial heritage. It was, after all, gas that helped build the modern city of London.” | |
| Costelloe agrees: “Gasometers were crucially important to the growth of London as a modern city and to Britain as an industrial and post-industrial nation. The use of gas in street lighting, for instance, is a central element in the creation of the modern city and these amazing floating structures are where the gas was eventually stored. They are important as scientific as well as architectural icons and we should preserve the best of them.” | Costelloe agrees: “Gasometers were crucially important to the growth of London as a modern city and to Britain as an industrial and post-industrial nation. The use of gas in street lighting, for instance, is a central element in the creation of the modern city and these amazing floating structures are where the gas was eventually stored. They are important as scientific as well as architectural icons and we should preserve the best of them.” |
| Gasometers appeared on the British urban landscape in the first half of the 19th century to store the gas produced in adjacent gasworks. In 1824, the first floating or telescopic gas holder was built in Leeds. It used an external circular frame supported by columns of a fixed height which allowed the enclosed container to rise and fall on a floating water reservoir. As gas from coal was pumped in, the giant domed container would silently rise inside the cylindrical steel frame. Visual poet Victoria Bean imagined one thus: | Gasometers appeared on the British urban landscape in the first half of the 19th century to store the gas produced in adjacent gasworks. In 1824, the first floating or telescopic gas holder was built in Leeds. It used an external circular frame supported by columns of a fixed height which allowed the enclosed container to rise and fall on a floating water reservoir. As gas from coal was pumped in, the giant domed container would silently rise inside the cylindrical steel frame. Visual poet Victoria Bean imagined one thus: |
| A great grey lung suspended insidea rusty lace cage that rises and falls | A great grey lung suspended insidea rusty lace cage that rises and falls |
| when I’m not looking. | when I’m not looking. |
| It was this strange, imperceptible movement that mesmerised the young Will Self. “As a child, their mysteriousness – at once of this world and the netherworld – ushered me into the world of engineering delights. When my father explained how they worked, with them sinking back down into the ground as the gas was siphoned off, I was thrilled: this was an astonishing fusion of the built environment and our quotidian fuel. If natural gas was the stuff of life, the gasometer was its cradle.” | It was this strange, imperceptible movement that mesmerised the young Will Self. “As a child, their mysteriousness – at once of this world and the netherworld – ushered me into the world of engineering delights. When my father explained how they worked, with them sinking back down into the ground as the gas was siphoned off, I was thrilled: this was an astonishing fusion of the built environment and our quotidian fuel. If natural gas was the stuff of life, the gasometer was its cradle.” |
| What price childhood wonder against the march of capital? Can the gasometer find a new function in our globally corporate age? The current wave of redevelopment transforming London’s King’s Cross may suggest a possible answer. For decades, several gasometers stood silent and towering near the railway lines and the canal. Charlie Chaplin grew up near the Cheney Road gasometers and they were the backdrop to a scene in Ealing comedy The Ladykillers (1955), in which the gang of bumbling crooks led by Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness) rob a security van. They were also a constant landmark for generations of clubbers and cinephiles on their way to parties and raves in the deserted goods yards near York Way or the all-nighters at the nearby Scala cinema. In the 1980s, I attended several pre-rave warehouse parties there, and have fond memories of another nocturnal London altogether darker, dirtier, and much more edgy. The gasometers were the backdrop to all kinds of seediness: the dealers, pimps and prostitutes who congregated around the station and along the side streets off York Way as well as the bands of dissolute revellers that straggled home as daylight broke. Somehow, in the new King’s Cross, the gasometers have survived. | |
| Originally built in the 1850s, the ornate Grade II-listed Gasholder No8 was painstakingly dismantled a few years ago and transported piece by piece to Yorkshire to be restored by specialists. Returned to London, the reconstructed frame will soon encircle a new park and a space for live events designed by Bell Phillips architects and situated on the north side of the Regent’s canal. Morwenna Wilson, an award-winning mechanical engineer – and, fittingly, the great-granddaughter of Brunel – has been appointed to oversee the remaining renovation of the area around King’s Cross station, which was built in his lifetime. Gasholders 10, 11 and 12, known as “the Siamese triplets” because their frames were connected by a common steel spine, are currently being refurbished and will be re-erected around new apartment buildings. | Originally built in the 1850s, the ornate Grade II-listed Gasholder No8 was painstakingly dismantled a few years ago and transported piece by piece to Yorkshire to be restored by specialists. Returned to London, the reconstructed frame will soon encircle a new park and a space for live events designed by Bell Phillips architects and situated on the north side of the Regent’s canal. Morwenna Wilson, an award-winning mechanical engineer – and, fittingly, the great-granddaughter of Brunel – has been appointed to oversee the remaining renovation of the area around King’s Cross station, which was built in his lifetime. Gasholders 10, 11 and 12, known as “the Siamese triplets” because their frames were connected by a common steel spine, are currently being refurbished and will be re-erected around new apartment buildings. |
| “The King’s Cross gasometers may yet be an example of successful repurposing,” says Costelloe, “and an argument against the notion that the size and structure of the frames do not give you much space for architectural adventure.” | “The King’s Cross gasometers may yet be an example of successful repurposing,” says Costelloe, “and an argument against the notion that the size and structure of the frames do not give you much space for architectural adventure.” |
| That argument has already been won as far away as Oberhausen in Germany, where a gasometer 112 metres high is now an epic exhibition space, and Vienna, where a thriving, culturally vibrant neighbourhood around four gasometers is now known as Gasometer City and in Amsterdam, where the annual Unseen photo festival is housed in and around the sprawling Westergasfabriek. In Tokyo, giant gasometers have been customised by commissioned graffiti artists, making them seem suddenly contemporary. | That argument has already been won as far away as Oberhausen in Germany, where a gasometer 112 metres high is now an epic exhibition space, and Vienna, where a thriving, culturally vibrant neighbourhood around four gasometers is now known as Gasometer City and in Amsterdam, where the annual Unseen photo festival is housed in and around the sprawling Westergasfabriek. In Tokyo, giant gasometers have been customised by commissioned graffiti artists, making them seem suddenly contemporary. |
| In the 1960s, the combative critic and writer on urban England, Ian Nairn, likened the location of a gasometer in suburban Stepney to “keeping a hippo in a patio garden”. And he was an enthusiast. Gasometers do tend to divide opinion among the general public, as a glance at any of the blogs, Twitter feeds and Instagram accounts devoted to them attests. For every amateur enthusiast championing their preservation and celebrating their overlooked formalist beauty, there is a curmudgeonly voice against. It was ever thus, as Edwin Morgan noted in Gasometer. “I hear those who talk of eyesores…” he wrote, but: | In the 1960s, the combative critic and writer on urban England, Ian Nairn, likened the location of a gasometer in suburban Stepney to “keeping a hippo in a patio garden”. And he was an enthusiast. Gasometers do tend to divide opinion among the general public, as a glance at any of the blogs, Twitter feeds and Instagram accounts devoted to them attests. For every amateur enthusiast championing their preservation and celebrating their overlooked formalist beauty, there is a curmudgeonly voice against. It was ever thus, as Edwin Morgan noted in Gasometer. “I hear those who talk of eyesores…” he wrote, but: |
| Day of tearing down, day of recycling,wait a while! Let the wind whistle through those defenceless arms and the moon bend a modicum of its glamorous light upon you, my familiar, my stranded hulk…” | Day of tearing down, day of recycling,wait a while! Let the wind whistle through those defenceless arms and the moon bend a modicum of its glamorous light upon you, my familiar, my stranded hulk…” |
| • This article was amended on 14 June. It originally attributed the role of Professor Marcus in The Ladykillers to Alastair Sim, rather than Alec Guinness. This has now been corrected. |