Town, gown and clergy in Cambridge’s first industrial revolution
Extended, updated version (September 2020, running time approx 1hr) to coincide with the first online Cambridge University Alumni Festival.
Cambridge is renowned as an ancient university town, an even older market town, and as a modern centre of the high-technology industry.
Cambridge’s industrial history and legacy tends to be less well known, since much physical evidence of earlier industrial activity has now disappeared from the city’s landscape and skyline.
This Cambridge Museum of Technology webinar provides a glimpse into the story of the Cambridge University & Town Gas-Light Company.
Exploring Cambridge’s industrial heritage
The gas works was one of the town’s largest industrial sites during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Occupying land adjacent to the Pumping Station (now Cambridge Museum of Technology) on the Halingway (now Riverside), the gas-works operated for over 150 years prior to demolition and (retail/residential) redevelopment in the early-21st century.
However, traces of the company’s legacy exist in archives across Cambridgeshire and nationally. Featuring previously unpublished maps and time-lapse photography of Cambridge gas-works, this webinar captures the transformation of an area once described as “brick kilns and pasture”, before steel gas-holders rose above the east-Cambridge skyline during the Victorian era.
This webinar explores social, political, economic, antiquarian and aesthetic implications of industrial archaeology: get a different view of Cambridge with the Museum of Technology!
Acknowledgements
Allan Brigham (2004) Grafton & Gas: New technology comes to Cambridge.
Cambridgeshire Archives
Cambridgeshire Collection
Cambridge University Library Map Room
Christopher Evans, Cambridge Archaeological Unit
HistoryWorks
Jon Harris and Lutterworth Press
Dr. Russell Thomas @Gashistory
Photo credits reproduced with permission
Audience Q&A: responses by authors
Responses to gas-industry technical questions by Geoff Winckles (Chartered Engineer and Member of the Institute of Gas Engineers and Managers) and author of Seeing the Light.
Responses to questions about the archaeology of the gas-works site by Gordon Davies, author of Cambridge University & Town Gas-Light Company.
Q. How did the water seal work?
A. The seals on the gas holder were water troughs. The major issue was losing the seal creating a gas leakage, the water also had to be kept replenished (evaporation) and there were issues in the winter with freezing.
Q. How many tons of raw material (coal) would be required to fill the 3-millon cubic-feet holder (erected at Cambridge gas works in 1927) with manufactured gas?
A. This answer will always be an approximation since there are many different production methods! The gas holders erected at Cambridge in 1927 were supplied by horizontal and inclined retorts: roughly a ton of coal would produce 12,000-14,000 cubic feet of gas, so 214-250 tons of coal would be required to fill the 3 million cubic-feet holder.
Q. What was done with all the coke by-product ?
A. This varied depending on the specific gas works. At Cambridge the coke produced would probably, in part be used to fuel the gas retorts and the rest sold to industry or as domestic smokeless fuel.
Larger gas works used coke to generate producer gas and carburetted water gas to supplement the coal gas from the retort, but from the plant description of 1927 this does not seem to have been done at Cambridge.
Q. How does natural gas compare with coal gas say in terms of calorific content/cost?
A. Coal gas varied a lot in quality up to the Gas Regulation Act of 1920, prior to that date the Calorific Value (CV) was not important for lighting. Following the 1920 Act gas companies had to declare the CV of their gas (there were government inspectors). The CV typically varied from 270 to 540 British thermal units (BTUs)/cubic foot. 500 BTUs/cubic foot became the norm as networks became amalgamated and nationalised in 1948.
Natural gas is around twice the CV of town gas. However, cost of manufacture was a separate (commercial) consideration and had no relationship to the CV.
Q. How was a gas-works cleared of industrial pollution before site redevelopment?
A. The by-products of gas production, as illustrated in this webinar, became a lucrative business, in fact, sometimes by-products were more profitable than the primary product: town-gas!
From the gas process, tar, ammonia had to be removed. Evil smelling liquids were stored in underground tanks (which often leaked) resulting in spillage into soil and water table.
Water scrubbing produced contaminated water which had to be disposed of sometimes illegally to the river or soil. Hydrogen sulphide and sulphur compounds were removed by passing the gas through iron oxide, this could be further processed but left the spent oxide which had no commercial value and prior to removal was stored on site and leached contaminates into the soil: cyanides are the main health hazard involved.
The environmental report (Environment Agency 2000-2001 Planning Consent) for the former site of Cambridge gas works cites:
excavation and removal of large amounts of material from up to 9 metre depth on the residential site
a combination of removal and containment by bentonite cut-off barriers on the retail site
removal of pipework, storage tank and demolition to the base of gas-holders
back-filling of excavated area with compacted material (Mepal quarry) back to ground level
groundwater monitoring/control wells.
Q. How did villages get their gas to local storage facilities?
A. From the 19th century many small towns and large villages developed gas production plants with very small networks run by independent companies supplying gas with a low heat value for lighting.
As the requirement for heating increased in the later 19th-century, these companies often lacked the capital to invest in plant equipment to supply a higher a calorific value gas. These locations would be dependent upon larger gas companies, where extensions to gas pipelines were viable .
In 1948 gas energy was nationalised. Larger gas works enlarged their networks, effectively on Government money and gradually took over the small works, closing them down and feeding the network from bigger works (such as Peterborough for the Eastern Division).
Coal was phased out and gas reformed from naphtha. By the mid-1960s Natural Gas was introduced; the pipeline network developed further, leaving only the large “super works”. Manufacture of gas at works such as Cambridge was decommissioned by the 1960s. With better pipe materials and high pressure available, natural gas is now stored in pipes, reservoirs (on land and in the sea) or in exhausted gas wells.
More information: Russell Thomas (2014) History and Operation of Gas Works, www.academia.edu
REFERENCES
Allan Brigham (2004) Grafton & Gas: new technology comes to Cambridge,
Cambridgeshire Local History Review
Jon Harris (2018) Artist About Cambridge
HistoryWorks Creating My Cambridge: Gas Works
Dr. Russell Thomas (2014) History and Operations of Gasworks, academia.edu