The Victorian preoccupation with sanitation was at least as significant in its time as the current concern about climate change and global warning is in the twenty-first century.
For decades I’ve been giving lectures and running tours under the titles ‘Victorian Cemeteries’ and ‘Victorian Sewerage’ to illustrate the spectacular achievements of the Sanitary Movement but the topic is actually much wider than water supply, sewage disposal, cemeteries and crematoria.
It embraces such matters as awareness of hygiene, the development of cheap mass-produced soap, the water-closet, public lavatories and communal baths, improvements to hospitals and medical practice, vaccination, street lighting and paving, and garbage collection. It’s a huge topic which we tend to take for granted.
I’m presenting my ‘Victorian Sewerage’ lecture to the Friends of Zion Graveyard on Monday evening, October 20th, at the Upper Wincobank Undenominational Chapel, Wincobank Avenue, Sheffield, S5 6BB, when I’ll illustrate the Grade-II listed sewer gas destructors nearby – gas lamps with a sanitary purpose.
The installation of public sewers in nineteenth-century towns and cities was a huge public benefit, but it wasn’t a perfect solution. Tons of human ordure trickling underground to the sewage farms made their presence felt as vapours rose from the drains into the atmosphere at ground level, and methane in the sewers could in some circumstances cause explosions.
A Birmingham engineer, Joseph Edmund Webb (1862-1936), first patented his sewer gas destructor in 1892, connecting a conventional street lighting column to the sewer system rather than the town gas supply, so that sewer gas was ignited by the flame, at a temperature of around 700°F, destroying the methane and its persistent smell.
The amount of methane released sometimes failed to keep the lamp lit, until Webb’s subsequent patents provided for a back-up town-gas supply, and a system of filters and traps ensured that the flame remained lit twenty-four hours a day.
Ten local authorities had ordered destructors by 1896 and subsequently the company supplied towns and cities not only in Britain but to France, Spain, Canada, India and Singapore.
Because Sheffield’s hilly terrain meant that underground gradients could trap gas and cause dangerous concentrations of methane, the city installed eighty-four Webb destructor lamps, more apparently than any other public authority.
These unregarded public-health assets were gradually superseded by the practice of fitting ventilator stack pipes to buildings, venting the gas to the atmosphere at a sufficient height for it not to be a nuisance, and gas street-lights eventually gave place to electric lamps.
Sheffield’s Webb destructor lamps were disconnected from the gas supply in the 1960s, yet four in the Nether Edge area were restored as a heritage feature in the 1990s.
By the millennium only twenty-four survived, in various states of neglect, and twenty of them were listed Grade II and restored by a partnership of Sheffield City Council, English Heritage, Historic England and the bespoke lantern manufacturer, Pudsey Diamond Engineering Ltd.
No other British city has such a splendid collection of listed sewer lamps.
The listed lamps are once more a source of local pride as street furniture and they add to the public stock of harmless pleasure for those who wish to attempt The 6 Gas Lamps Race – Run Times or cycle past all twenty-four.
I’m grateful to Penny Rae, who invited me to speak to the Friends of Zion Graveyard, for alerting me to the two sewer lamps on the road from Shiregreen to Meadowhall which, to my shame, I’d never noticed before, though I’ve driven past them hundreds of times.