Details
AYLESHAM
1409/0/10008 Fan House and Winder House (Koepe) No.
18-MAY-07 2 at Snowdown Colliery
II
Fan house, 1920s or perhaps earlier, and attached winder house no. 2, built between 1952 and 1956, at the former Snowdown Colliery. Fan house is red brick, and winder house has concrete frame faced in red brick. Late-C20 closure of the site has resulted in the loss of machinery.
DESCRIPTION: The Fan house may survive from the first phase of colliery development here (1907), or from the 1920s modernisations. It features a tall brick chimney shaft, known as the evasé, which houses parallel, non-communicating chambers, flanked by a pair of fan housings which formerly held the Cappel fans. These are now open to the air, the fans having been removed, but the circular brick enclosures and some of mostly ruinous metal casings remain to both sides. The process, which entailed feeding fresh air into the mine shaft (no. 2 in this case) and removing fumes, is entirely legible and was of a type where the air flow could be reversed in case of fire in the shafts. The engine house that powered the fan house is mostly demolished, with areas of glazed tile on the now external party wall. Attached to the south is a low brick gabled link building (believed to be a former engine house) which links to the winder house.
Winder house (Koepe) no. 2)is a tall cubic building with a lower side wing, with several prominent square pane windows (50 panes in the main range and 18 in the lower) set within slightly proud concrete frames, and with a run of 4 square windows more widely spaced above; this pattern is repeated on the rear elevation. There are now-blocked openings indicating the former position of the winding gear as it left the winder house and connected to the headstocks. Early photographs show the interior much as it is in 2007, albeit with the loss of the Koepe winding machinery, the chambers for which have been in-filled, but the large overhead gantry survives. It is a large open space, generously lit and a striking cubic volume. Inside, the walls have an expressed concrete frame with brick infill.
HISTORY: The coalfields of Kent were developed from the end of the C19, which is late in national terms, but nonetheless its discovery and harvest is an interesting story of entrepreneurship. From the mid-C19, discovery of coal in northern France led to exploration of whether coal measures would extend beneath south eastern England as well. At the same time, consideration of a Channel tunnel was being investigated and it was suggested from 1886 that the same borings could be used to search for coal. The Kent Coalfields Syndicate Ltd was formed in 1896 to take over the rights of the Channel Tunnel Company at Dover, and a further consolidation of a number of enterprises 1899 formed the Consolidated Kent Collieries Corporation Ltd in response to the realisation that fortunes were not guaranteed. The history is a complicated tale of companies and ventures, but in summary, four sites became productive areas of mining, including Snowdown. Snowdown was the first, with initial sinking in 1907 and the first hoppit of Kent coal brought to the surface in 1912. The others were Betteshanger, Tilmanstone and Chislet, but almost all traces of the buildings here have gone. Snowdown was also the deepest site, with the coal bed being more than 3,000 feet below ground, and the hottest, bearing the nickname of 'Dante's Inferno', with miners apparently working naked to bear the extreme heat.
Snowdown was the initiative of Arthur Burr's Foncage Syndicate in 1907, but it had early sinking problems, with 22 miners drowning when the first shaft was sunk. They persevered, however, and Kent's first hoppit of coal was recorded proudly in a 1912 photograph taken at the foot of Snowdown's winding gear tower, or headstock. Following a miner's strike and subsequent receivership, the colliery closed in 1922, but the enterprise was revived two years later when Pearson & Dorman Long, the well-known Middlesbrough steel manufacturers, took over the site. Pearson & Dorman Long's modernisation of the site included replacing the steam winding plant with electric winders, and they may have installed the Cappel fan house. The Cappel fan was invented by the Rev. George Marie Cappel in the 1880s, and operated by drawing air into a cylindrical chamber and then forcing it out through holes in the walls of the chamber at high centrifugal force. The Koepe winder house no. 2 was added by the Coal Board after 1952, replacing the remaining steam winder and adopting a technology (known as Koepe). This system, which uses a single loop of rope and a powered pulley, essentially being under balance and requiring less power, was a German invention of 1877. It was introduced to England in 1914 at the Plenmeller Colliery, Northumberland, but the earliest surviving example of this technology is the winding tower at Murton Colliery, Country Durham (listed Grade II), although the technology did not take off widely until after the post-war period.
Since Kent did not have an indigenous mining industry, miners were brought from pits in northern England and Scotland (as well as France and Belgium), creating pockets of northern residents in this far south eastern reach of the country. Pearson & Dorman Long's patronage extended to the construction of houses for 650 families a few miles north in the model village of Aylesham in the 1920s, much of which survives. The Kent coal mines were relatively short-lived: Chislet closed in 1969 as did the others following the miners' strike of the mid-1980s. Snowdown saw much industrial unrest during the miners' strike, and was one of the most militant pits of all. Very little, if anything, survives at the other three Kentish sites, and Snowdown has by far the most surviving buildings. There is a memorial in Aylesham to the colliery and its miners, erected in 2003.
SUMMARY OF IMPORTANCE: The attached early-C20 fan house and 1950s winder house no. 2 at Snowdown Colliery have special interest as the last vestiges of the coal industry in Kent, and as industrial buildings of merit in their own right. Fan houses are rare survivals in a national context, and Snowdown's Cappel fan house, while not intact, retains its landmark evasé and paired fan chambers; a comparable but more intact example is listed Grade II*. Winder house no. 2 makes a distinctive modernist, post-nationalisation contribution to the site. Architecturally it is dramatic in its detailing and cubic volumes, and is a fairly early manifestation of the 'Koepe' winder system. Together, these buildings represent architecturally distinctive components of this C20 industrial landscape. The historic context of Snowdown is special, too, and while Kent coal was late to develop in national terms (the county's first hoppit of coal was surfaced at Snowdown in 1912), its discovery and harvest represents ingenious and entrepreneurial reaches of the mining industry nationally. Snowdown was the country's deepest, hottest and hardest coal mine, and the buildings that powered and ventilated this terrific endeavour for much of the C20 are endowed with a particular symbolic importance, even without their machinery. Given the severe rates of attrition since the 1980s, coal mining buildings are increasingly rare; furthermore, these are the last distinctive mining buildings in the Kent coal fields, an unusual, south-eastern outcrop of industry that eloquently tells its own part of the national coal story.
SOURCES
John Hilton. (1986) 'A History of the Kent Coalfields'.
Gould, S. & Ayris, I. (1995) 'Colliery Landscapes', English Heritage.
Thornes, R. (1994) 'Images of Industry: Coal', Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England.
Alan Baxter & Associates (2007) 'Snowdown Colliery: Historic Buildings Assessment'.
