How electricity has powered many changes
GLOUCESTER’S skyline silhouette lost one of its most prominent features when on June 25, 1978, Castle Meads Power Station was demolished along with its brickbuilt, cloud-clipping chimney stack that could be seen from afar and all approaches.
Work began on the new electricity generating plant, located on Alney Island, in 1940. Castle Meads and another at Reading were two war emergency plants intended to reduce the risk of disruption that might be caused by enemy bombing during the Second World War.
Castle Meads was opened by the Duke of Beaufort in 1943. Costing £1,300,000 it was one of the largest construction projects undertaken in the country during the war years and could generate 38,000 kilowatts.
It replaced the generating station in Gloucester’s Commercial Road that introduced electricity to the city in 1900 and was demolished in 1946.
Perhaps some readers will recall that Castle Meads Power Station displayed wartime camouflage until its final days.
During Castle Meads’ working life, coal arrived by rail on the Great Western Railway’s Docks branch from Over and from pits in the Forest of Dean by barge. Once at the power station, coal was transported around the site by a fireless locomotive, one of only 162 ever built in Britain.
After the closure of Castle Meads, this locomotive was taken to the National Waterways Museum in Gloucester. Castle Meads’ generators were shut down and the facility closed in 1969.
Gloucester’s first electric arc street lamp stood at the Cross on the corner of Westgate and Southgate Streets.
Prior to this, gas lighting illuminated the city centre’s streets and first appeared in 1819. Gas lighting became widespread in city homes after 1823 when gas works near the Quay were rebuilt.
Electric street lamps arrived in Cheltenham in 1897. Designed by borough engineer Joseph Hall, who was also responsible for Neptune’s fountain in the Prom, they featured an onion and dragon design in cast iron. Examples can be seen about town to this day in St Mary’s Minster churchyard, Crescent Place, Trafalgar Street and elsewhere.
The town’s first form of street lighting was fuelled by whale oil.
It’s an appalling thought that countless denizens of the deep were slaughtered so that in the heyday of Cheltenham’s spas ladies and gents could see their way home after an evening’s merriment at the ballroom.
A reminder of those times can be seen today towards the town end of Cheltenham’s Bath Road where a pair of oil lamp brackets stand on stone pillars opposite the Eagle Star tower.
Gas street lamps ousted their oil predecessors in September 1818 and the Cheltenham Chronicle enthused over the innovation in a glowing report. “Never within recollection has Cheltenham appeared so gay, so brisk, so animated.
“The recent introduction of gas light gives a new and captivating appearance to our town by night.”
In contrast, the introduction of electricity to local street lights and homes met with apathy. Nobody had a fridge, TV, radio, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, microwave, food or word processor. Who needed electricity?
In some outlying parts of the county the prospect of the new-fangled electricity was treated with suspicion. Bishop’s Cleeve, for example, was without electricity until 1932. One villager of ripening years resisted the appeal of having his house wired up, until eventually a kind relative paid for the installation.
After a year, the electricity board, puzzled by the fact that his meter barely registered a reading, sent an official to look into the matter. The villager explained that he turned on the electric light only long enough to find the matches for his oil lamp.