There are enthusiasts for every imaginable aspect of history. Some fields of interest are less penetrable than others: if you want to know about most sports there’s no shortage of sources for arcane data, and the same is true of transport by air, land and sea.
I discovered recently that there are people who collect material on petrol filling stations: Old Garages and Filling Stations – Sheffield History, Memories & Ex-Pats – Sheffield Forum.
A little-known and remarkable example that attracted my attention is the former Coronet Filling Station on Effingham Road, between the canal and the River Don in the Lower Don Valley, of which there is a superb photograph dating presumably from the early 1950s when the site first opened.
The only online image of this picture – Coronet Petrol Station – Sheffield History Chat – Sheffield History – Sheffield Memories – appears to be from Kathryn A Morrison & John Minnis, Carscapes – The Motor Car, Architecture and Landscape in England (Yale University Press/Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art 2012).
Effingham Road acted (and still acts) as a relief road from Attercliffe to the city-centre, in the 1950s giving direct access to Victoria Station; nowadays, as the B6071, it’s still useful to reach Sheffield Parkway en route to the M1 southbound.
The location was ideal for a petrol station but, as one of the posts in the accompanying thread points out, the footprint of the site was crammed between the road and the Sheffield Canal.
The need to spread the fourteen pumps and their associated tanks laterally, however, gave the architect a pretext for a spacious, eye-catching modern design.
Very few new buildings appeared in the East End in the fifteen years after the war and those that had survived the Blitz were grubby, blackened by atmospheric pollution and dated. The Coronet filling station was by comparison glamorous – and glamour was in short supply in 1950s Attercliffe.
A guest contributor to the Sheffield History Forum, ericsson, reported his family connection with the Coronet:
My dad, Eric Shaw ran this petrol station in the very early 1950s just before I started at Whitby Road Infant School. My dad was 90 years of age on Jan 24th 2015. I’m 65 now and was born Dec 21st 1949. The name changed to Effingham Road Filling Station when my dad had it. NB the wall behind is the canal wall! We then moved on to Staniforth Road Service Station, which is still a mainly vacant lot, but eventually moved on to Abbeydale Road Filling Station, now a Tesco station. That’s progress for you.
According to two contributors to the Sheffield Forum website, Simon Tow and coffeebean, the site changed hands in 1963 and the company that owned it was wound up in 1966. [Coronet filling station – Sheffield History, Memories & Ex-Pats – Sheffield Forum]
Recently most of the clutter of a scrap business has been removed, making it easier to recognise the visual impact of the Coronet.
In fact, most of this structure remains and could be restored if anyone thought of a compatible, appropriate use for the site.
Attractive though it was in its heyday, it’s almost inevitable that this brave piece of 1950s design will disappear.