Summary
A gas street light comprising a column dated 1910 with an Upright Rochester lantern manufactured by William Sugg and Company Limited, probably around 1930.
Reasons for Designation
The lamp post on the corner of Chandos Place and Bedford Street, with a 1910 column and an inter-war lantern, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
Historic interest:
* as a good example of an historic lamp column with a later, improved lantern, illustrating the evolution of gas lighting technology in the C20;
* as one of a number of lamp posts originally installed around Covent Garden in 1910 to mark the beginning of George V's reign.
Architectural interest:
* for the well-crafted, decorative column in cast iron, which is a good example of early C20 street furniture;
* for the design of the interwar Upright Rochester lantern, one of the most popular and enduring designs of inverted, 'shadowless' lamps of the C20.
Group value:
* as part of an adjacent set of historic lamp posts on Chandos Place and a wider group across other key streets within the Covent Garden area.
History
Gas street lighting first appeared in London in June 1807 when Frederick Albert Winsor gave a public demonstration of gas lights in Pall Mall. The expansion of the railways coinciding with the development of urban gas works in the 1840s facilitated the proliferation of cast iron lamp posts with open-flame gas burners across the capital in the mid-C19. This feature of industrialisation was seen to contribute to London’s international standing and also facilitated the development of modern urban living, increasingly unconstrained by daylight hours.
Electric street lighting was introduced from the 1880s and the gas industry responded by making technological improvements to gas lights, principally the incandescent gas mantle in 1896. This significantly increased the efficacy of gas light, but it was not until the introduction of the inverted gas mantle in 1905 that gas street lights were really able to match the efficiency and brightness of the rival electric carbon filament lamps. In the 1920s and 1930s, many gas lamp posts in Westminster were upgraded with new, 'shadowless' lanterns fitted with inverted mantles. Gas remained an important source of power for street lighting as late as the mid-C20, and smaller numbers of lamps have continued to run on gas into the early C21.
Chandos Place (known as Chandos Street until 1937) takes its name from the fourth Earl of Bedford's father-in-law, the third Lord Chandos. It was developed from the 1630s but most of the present buildings date from the second half of the C19.
The lamp post on the corner of Chandos Place and Bedford Street was probably installed as part of a planned lighting scheme in 1910 to mark the beginning of King George V's reign. The Upright Rochester-type lantern was supplied by William Sugg and Company Limited, probably around 1930 to replace an earlier, outdated lantern.
Founded in Westminster in 1837, the company became an important supplier of interior and exterior gas lighting and received important commissions such as lighting the exterior of Buckingham Palace in 1901. After initially operating from Marsham Street, for most of its lifetime the company was based at Vincent Works, Regency Street. Lighting manufacture was paused during the First World War while the company produced munitions, but post-war work picked up with the production of conversion sets for pre-war street lanterns, many of which still had upright mantles and required updating to more efficient inverted mantles.
Details
A gas street light comprising a column dated 1910 with an Upright Rochester lantern manufactured by William Sugg and Company Limited, probably around 1930.
MATERIALS: cast iron lamp post, with a glazed lantern of iron, spun copper and enamelled steel.
DESCRIPTION: the lamp post consists of a tapering, fluted column, identified as model 1275 in the William Sugg catalogue and known as the 'Eddystone', with an Upright Rochester lantern. The base of the column has the Westminster City Council crest embossed on one side and a registration plaque bearing number 7412. On the other side is the royal cypher G V R and a date of 1910. The lantern has a circular, weatherproof chimney above a teardrop-shaped glass enclosure with a drainage whole to its base. This glass enclosure contains a six-mantle burner and a Horstmann automatic gas controller that probably dates from the mid-C20. The main body is supported on a pair of upright arms, which project at right-angles from the cast iron control clock box and pass the horizontal enamelled steel reflector to provide the gas supply to the burner. These arms retain their original decorative ironwork scrolls, which were typical of interwar Rochester lanterns, although the lower part of one of these scrolls has been lost.
