Coal by barge: the St Pancras gasworks
London's first public gas street lighting was installed in Pall Mall in 1807, and within fifteen years the technology had reached the northern suburbs on an industrial scale. The Imperial Gas Light Company was founded in 1821 to serve the districts north of the Thames, eventually supplying an area running from Pimlico to Whitechapel. Its first engineer, Samuel Clegg, advised that its works should be sited along the Regent's Canal so that coal barges could unload directly into each works' coal store.
That advice is the reason the same waterway that curves past the foot of Primrose Hill also carried the fuel that lit the district. The company built its St Pancras works at Battlebridge Road from 1822; the works was opened by Sir William Congreve on 16 June 1823 and from 1824 served as the company's headquarters. By 1860 it had six retort houses over eleven acres, and the Imperial claimed it as the largest and best gasworks in the country. The company amalgamated with the Gas Light and Coke Company in about 1876.
The gasholders that dominated the skyline north-east of here were built in 1860-67 and enlarged in 1879-80 with interconnected guide frames and telescopic lifts. Gas production at the site ended and the works was decommissioned in 2000. The frame of Gasholder No. 8 was dismantled in 2011, refurbished by a specialist engineering firm in Yorkshire, and returned in 2013 to be re-erected on the north side of the Regent's Canal, overlooking Camley Street Natural Park and St Pancras Basin. The triplet of holders 10, 11 and 12 is now listed.
Gaslight in the streets, and the lamps that remain
Gaslight was not a passive service. Every lamp had to be lit at dusk and put out in the morning by teams of lamplighters, who moved through their beats on bicycles with long poles for sparking the mantles. It was a nightly, weather-proof routine that shaped how the streets around Primrose Hill were used after dark for the better part of a century.
Some of that equipment survives on the district's southern boundary. Twenty-seven lamp standards on the Outer Circle of Regent's Park, running north and east from Hanover Gate to the Camden borough boundary, were listed Grade II on 1 December 1987. Across London as a whole something in the order of 1,300 gas-fuelled lamps remain in service, roughly 270 of them in Westminster, still lit and maintained by a small professional team.
St Pancras Vestry and the first municipal current
Electricity arrived here through local government rather than through a private undertaking, and unusually early. The Vestry of St Pancras was the first London local authority to apply to provide an electricity supply, authorised by the St Pancras (Middlesex) Electric Lighting Order 1883. It was also the first London authority to begin transferring street lighting from gas to electricity and to supply private consumers.
Its first generating station stood in NW1, on the ground east of Regent's Park bounded by Stanhope Street, Longford Street and Wybert Street. Construction started in 1890 and the Regent's Park Power Station began generating in November 1891, with an initial capacity of about 1,000 kW — enough, as designed, for some 10,000 incandescent lamps and 90 arc lights. It ran for thirty-four years and closed in 1925.
A second and much larger station followed in Camden Town, on the site bounded by King's Road, Pratt Street, Georgiana Street and Great College Street. Work began in 1893 and the King's Road Power Station was commissioned in late 1895. It was designed to burn domestic and commercial refuse alongside coal, an early experiment in what would now be called energy from waste; in practice the destructor handled only a small proportion of the borough's rubbish and was abolished in 1920. Capacity reached 12,500 kW by 1927.
The end of local generation
The administrative arrangements changed before the machinery did. The London Government Act 1899 replaced the Vestry with St Pancras Metropolitan Borough Council, which took over both stations. King's Road went on generating for seventy-three years and was decommissioned in 1968, after which the area drew its power from the national system rather than from a works a few streets away.
What that century left behind is largely invisible. The coal wharves on the canal have become towpath and housing; the retort houses are gone; the surviving gasholder frames stand empty as monuments. The practical inheritance is buried: the gas mains and electricity ducts beneath the pavements of Primrose Hill still follow, in places, routes first laid out to serve Victorian lamps.