Show me the way to go home
Gas lamps might sound like relics belonging to the past or the land of Narnia, but look closely and they are still illuminating our streets with their warm glow, reveals Harry Wallop
Harry Wallop admires gas lamps
IN Westminster, 4, Carlton Gardens— a short walk up the Mall from Buckingham Palace—is one of those rare historic buildings in London: a double Blue Plaquer. Home to Lord Palmerston in the 1840s (before he became Prime Minister), it also sheltered Charles de Gaulle and his government in exile during the Second World War. William Gladstone was also briefly a resident, but, somehow, doesn’t merit the distinctive English Heritage plaque. It’s quite a trio.
During the day, with vans making their deliveries and office workers on mobile phones, it can be hard to feel the historic atmosphere in this little corner of the city— but wait until dusk. Then, you can be transported back in time, thanks to the wonder of Carlton Gardens’ gas lamps.
If you look carefully at the lamp posts on this grand old street, you can see the royal cipher of George IV picked out in gold against the black base, as heavy and solid as an obelisk. It’s not only the posts and lanterns that are close to 200 years old, it’s the technology inside them, too. The 20th century and the electric revolution have passed by this street—these lamps are still gas-powered.
You may think this street is a museum piece. It isn’t. London has 1,480 gas-powered lamps still in operation, across the Royal Parks, around the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey and stretching through the West End into Islington in the north and Bromley-by-bow in the east.
Further afield, if you look hard enough, you can find pre-victorian ingenuity still illuminating the streets in Cambridge, Nottingham, York (near the Minster), Edinburgh and, most notably, Malvern.
For lovers of children’s literature, the Worcestershire town will always be twinned with Narnia. C. S. Lewis, on glimpsing gas lamps on a snowy evening, lighting a path up the Malvern Hills, immediately realised he had found the enchanted image he was searching for to start The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Malvern has 104 working gas lamps.
There’s something incurably romantic about a gas lamp. ‘It’s psychological,’ says Brian Harper, a retired government scientist who spearheaded a campaign in Malvern to restore many previously defunct lamps. ‘Man conquered fire about 500,000 years ago and, ever since, we’ve evolved with fire and associated a flame with light and warmth, protection from wild animals and the ability to cook.’
The light generated by modern LED lamps or, worse, the sickly orange glow of a 1970s sodium street lamp, can never hope to compete with the elegance of a gas lamp.
You only have to walk down Carlton Gardens, enjoying the candle-comfort of gaslight, and come out onto electric-fuelled Trafalgar Square to realise how harsh and unnecessarily ugly modern lighting is—even if it’s housed in a stylish, cast-iron lamp. Walk a street lit by gas and you’re Holmes chasing Moriarty or Dickens working on his next plot by pounding the night-time cobblestones. The reason Godwin’s Court, a rickety alleyway off St Martin’s Lane, feels like Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley isn’t only due to the Georgian bow windows, but also the wallmounted gas lamps casting a magical spell.
Gas lamps are a testament to the lasting engineering genius of the Industrial Revolution. Lamps outside homes and shops existed in the late 18th century, but these were powered usually by oil: dirty, unreliable and simply not very bright.
The first man successfully to demonstrate a gas-powered lamp was Frederick Winsor, a few feet away from Palmerston’s home in 1807. To celebrate George III’S birthday, he burnt coal in a furnace in his own home on Pall Mall to create gas and then pumped it 250 yards along Carlton Gardens in either direction into lanterns, which were lit by a lamplighter with a wax taper. The crowds were ‘much amused and delighted by this novel exhibition,’ an eyewitness wrote. The early days of gas saw many explosions and mishaps, but, by 1813, Westminster Bridge was lit by gas lamps—the first thoroughfare in the world to enjoy this modern marvel permanently—and soon they spread out across the capital, banishing dingy corners and dangerous backstreets. Victorian periodical The Westminster Review wrote that the introduction of gas lamps had done more to eliminate immorality and criminality on the streets than any number of church sermons.
London’s gas lamps are still tended by lamplighters, although there are a mere six remaining, employees of British Gas, compared with the 400 working up until the eve of the Second World War. Most lamps are operated by a timer, which the lamplighters have to wind up every fortnight. You can sometimes spot them up a ladder, silhouetted
On a street lit by gas, you’re Holmes chasing Moriarty or Dickens working on a plot
Up close, the mantles are silk-thin mesh sacks coated in lime-oxide, which glow white-hot
in winter by the celestial halo of their lamps. The ones in Malvern, rather cleverly, are turned on automatically by a light sensor in the top of the lantern.
The designs can be pretty striking, too. Most of our towns are littered with monolithic street furniture, but gas lamps are an exception, from the chunky Regency Classicism of the huge Grosvenor lamps along Horse Guards Parade to the almost Toy Town dinkiness of the Windsor lamps guarding the cycle route along the side of the Mall, small enough for a roistering Bertie Wooster-type to leap up and hang off the 8ft-high cross bar, designed as a ladder rest for lamplighters.
If you are indeed athletic enough to climb up, you can peer into the lantern itself and inspect the intricate mantles, a piece of technology introduced in the 1890s. From the ground, they look like small bulbs, but, up close, you can see they’re silk-thin mesh sacks coated in lime-oxide, which becomes white-hot to give the lamps their glow.
If you’re ever in doubt whether a lovely old lamp is gas or electric, look up. If it blinds you with its brightness, it’s electric; if you can stare at the lantern, its glass panes and mantles, at the dancing warm light, that’s a piece of technology still doing its job just as well as it did 200 years ago.