Seven years ago, I began my transformation from history professor and teacher to historical novelist. I travel for both the pleasure of being in the UK, and to feel the past by visiting the locations that remain. My next several posts will feature research finds and the connections to my Victorian mystery novels.

My Tommy Jones mystery series begins with Murder at the Gasworks. To me, Victorian London is  more than just a setting. The city, and the locations within, are like a character within each book. I strive to make the stories both atmospheric and immersive. 

The series begins in 1860, when Tommy Jones is a 10-year-old boy who works at the City of London Gas Light and Coke Company. The gasworks were north of the River Thames near Blackfriars Bridge. Phoenix Gasworks, just across the river, is also part of the story. Although neither is there today, their impact is everywhere.

Gaslight and gasworks

If you’re like me, your vision of Victorian London includes gaslight. Gas lamps, both for street lighting and in homes, features in our imagination as much as the famous London fog.

That fog, however, was actually an acrid and nasty smog, a combination of smoke and fog. Some of the smoke came from bonfires, steam engines, and coal. Some of it came from the manufacture of coal gas, the gas that burned in those lovely Victorian lamps.

I was curious as to how this gas was made, and how it got into homes and street lighting. In researching Murder at the Gasworks, I discovered not only historical information, but rivalries between companies, political corruption, and business consolidation. I also discovered today’s fight over saving some very large architectural remnants of the industry.

These huge wonders are called gasholders (some call them “gasometers”, but they don’t meter anything). They are made of iron, large and circular and, being Victorian, richly decorated. Many have been torn down, although the last few are being saved. 

But how did they come to be? And how are they surviving today?

The Gasworks

In 1860 London, the setting of my mystery story, gas was created by burning coal in large retorts, or furnaces. Stokers shoveled the coal in. It was a tough job, so most stokers were big and strong. It was not a terribly skilled job, so most stokers were not well-educated men. Their work was hard, and the era saw efforts to unionize gasworkers at the same time as gasworks competed with each other to monopolize certain neighborhoods.

Laying gas lines throughout London, delivering the gas into homes and businesses at all hours, meant that large storage units were needed. The gasholders contained large balloons or collapsible tanks of coal gas, releasing it as needed to the surrounding neighborhood. Imagine living near one of these, or near a gasworks with its furnaces and chimneys.

In addition to smoke, the by-products of gas production included chemicals like ammonia, coal tar, and coke. Ammonia could often be sold to farmers, since it supplies nitrogen. Coal tar is sticky and disgusting, although it has some folk use for skin conditions (until recently it was the prime ingredient in dandruff shampoo). Coke could be used to provide cleaner fuel than coal for household use, and cider ash was sold to brick makers. But none of these markets was enough to take up all the waste. There was always more than could be disposed of.

Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century (1876)

Dumping these by-products was common, despite laws passed to prevent it. In a way, dumping toxic waste into the Thames was a time-honored tradition. The river received runoff rainwater from the filthy streets, untreated animal and human waste, and industrial waste products such as dye for cloth, tannin for leather, turpentine, and more. It had done so since Roman times. Unfortunately, the Thames is a tidal river, limiting its “flush it out to sea” capability.

The gasworks being such a dirty business, Parliament made a lot of rules controlling their pollution and production. In 1870, an act would force gasworks to consolidate in an effort to end wasteful competition. 

Saving the Gasholders

Eventually, electricity would supersede gas, and the gasholders would become useless. London kids from the 1950s onward grew up playing near them or seeing them on the skyline. Cricketers at The Oval could hear them creaking during matches. Ghosts on the landscape, many have been torn down to make room for the ever-expanding city.

But now there is an effort to save them. Two of the big recent success stories are King’s Cross and Bethnal Green.

At King’s Cross, an area of blight recently rebuilt as an upper middle-class enclave, a group of gasholders has been lovingly restored as part of the design for condominiums. 

The same idea is part of a new Bethnal Green development, at the Marian Place Gasworks Station. The Bromley-by-Bow Gasworks holders, and gasholders in other towns, are being similarly developed, many by a company called The Berkeley Group.

One of the most famous gasholders, seen from the cricket ground at The Oval, is now also converted into apartment homes by the same company.

While it may seem strange to build expensive housing inside a gasholder, doing so guarantees their preservation and appreciation, even while it does little to increase affordable housing.

A note on sewer gas

There was another way to fuel streetlamps, and that was sewer gas. 

During the Victorian era, Joseph Bazalgette had created a new and badly needed system of sewers in London. But occasionally, especially in hilly areas, methane from the sewer could build up and become dangerous. Sewer gas “destructor” lamps could use the gas from the new catacombs of sewers below the city to burn it off and directly provide light, an ecological idea. And it could be done above people’s heads.

There is only one sewer light that remains from these ventures. At first, there wasn’t always enough methane to keep the lamps lit, so the air around an unlit lamp would start to smell. Lamplighters were great, but they couldn’t be continually on call for individual lamps that went out. Joseph Webb, the original inventor, figured out how to mix the sewer with the coal gas that was being delivered by the gasworks for city use. Eventually other methods were used to vent sewers.

But one lamp, likely a replica after it was hit by a truck, has been left for historic purposes. It’s located behind the Savoy Hotel, in Carting Lane.

In my novel Murder at the Gasworks, the gasworks at the City of London becomes the site of a murder. The victim is a stoker, one of the men who shoveled the coal into the retorts. The Phoenix Gasworks, just across the river, has also lost a stoker in a similar manner. Are the two deaths connected? In my story, the Victorian challenges of pollution, corporate corruption, and new technology are all part of the tale.

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Except as indicated, all photos by the author.

Recommended Reading

Fiction

• Murder at the Gasworks by Lisa M. Lane — A Victorian mystery set against the grimy industrial world of London gasworks, in which young Tommy Jones is accused of murdering his only friend, a gasworks stoker. A useful atmospheric pairing for readers who like their history with coal smoke, danger, and a good corpse. 

Non-Fiction

• London’s Lost Power Stations and Gasworks by Ben Pedroche — Explores the history of London’s vanished power stations and gasworks, tracing their role in supplying energy to the growing metropolis during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ben Pedroche combines historical research with photographs and maps to document these once-prominent industrial landmarks and their lasting impact on London’s urban development.
• Gas Light and Coke Company by Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History — A concise industrial-history profile of the pioneering gas company that helped bring manufactured gas lighting to London and became an important ancestor of Britain’s modern gas industry. 
• Industrial Explorings in and Around London by R. Andom — An 1895 illustrated ramble through Victorian London’s factories, workshops, and industrial marvels, including the processes, machinery, labor, and sometimes comic human details behind everyday manufactured goods. 
• A Brief Introduction to Gasholders by Historic England — A clear, image-rich overview of Britain’s gasholders: those great iron industrial sentinels that once stored gas for light and warmth, and are now disappearing from the urban landscape. 

Lisa M. Lane is a novelist and historian who writes in several genres, including historical and cozy mystery, literary fiction, and academic work in history and education. She lives in San Diego, California.

The Tommy Jones Mysteries immerse the reader in the bustle and noise of Victorian life. Each novel features a stand-alone mystery with fascinating characters, actual historical figures, and intriguing plots among the gasworks, hospitals, theatres, and galleries of the 19th century. https://grousablebooks.com