Gas lighting
Westminster City Council has announced that it has halted controversial plans to convert the central London borough’s gas lamps to LED versions, something that the council said was necessary to tackle global warming and cut down on maintenance costs (see ‘Sherds’, CA 383). Rachael Robathan, leader of Westminster City Council, said that work was being suspended so that the council could ‘take time to talk to local people and conservation groups’, though any idea that this might lead to a reversal of policy was undermined by her comment that the aim was ‘to ensure that where new electric lights go in, they are as faithful to the original as possible’.
Sadly, therefore, it seems that Dan Cruickshank, who has led the campaign against the replacement scheme, might be premature in claiming a ‘a victory for common sense’. Dan went on to say that the light cast by gas lamps is a powerful stimulus to the imagination and that ‘architecture lives by light – light matters’.
Stench pipes
Sherds will report on any further developments, but in the meantime, let us turn to the letter in CA 384 in which John Buglass drew attention to another form of gas heritage that is often overlooked: tall tubular items of Victorian and Edwardian street furniture variously known as stinkpipes, stenchpoles, or stench pipes, designed to vent sewer gas. Some years ago, Sherds suggested that the world needed a Stench Pipe Society to record and campaign for the conservation of these underappreciated examples of engineering heritage, and recently an organisation called ‘Our Hut’ published a book, Inventive Vents, celebrating ‘the vital structures that allow the vast city that lies beneath our feet – of tunnels, sewers, bunkers, and other underground spaces – to operate’.
Life and death