Summary

A gas street light comprising an Eddystone column manufactured by William Sugg and Company Limited and dated 1910, with a replacement Upright Rochester lantern manufactured by Sugg Lighting Limited and probably installed around 1980.

Description

A gas street light comprising an Eddystone column manufactured by William Sugg and Company Limited and dated 1910, with a replacement Upright Rochester lantern manufactured by Sugg Lighting Limited and probably installed around 1980.

MATERIALS: cast iron lamp post, with a glazed lantern of iron, spun copper and enamelled steel or aluminium.

DESCRIPTION: the lamp post consists of a tapering, fluted, 'Eddystone' column with a late-C20 Upright Rochester lantern. The base of the column is embossed with the Westminster City Council crest on one side and on the other, the royal cypher G V R and a date of 1910. The bottom of the base bears the manufacturer's name: SUGG. The lantern has a circular, weather-proof chimney above an inverted, six-mantle burner in a teardrop-shaped glass enclosure with a drainage hole to its base. 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 through the horizontal enamelled steel reflector to provide the gas supply to the burner. Two additional, stabilising arms project from the clock box, indicating that this is a late C20 variant of the Rochester design.

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 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 streetlights were 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.

Rose Street was first laid out in the mid-C17, but its southern arm later absorbed by the construction of Garrick Street in the 1860s.The latter street is said to have been named in honour of the celebrated actor David Garrick, who was associated with the nearby Drury Lane Theatre.

The lamp post on the corner of Garrick Street and Rose Street was probably installed as part of a planned lighting scheme in 1910 to mark the beginning of King George V's reign. The column was manufactured by William Sugg and Company Limited. The replacement Upright Rochester lantern were supplied by Sugg Lighting Limited in the later C20, probably to replace a broken unit.

Founded in Westminster in 1837, the William Sugg 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.

Reasons for Listing

The lamp post on the corner of Garrick Street and Rose Street is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Historic interest:

* as a good example of an historic lamp column with the latest improved lantern, illustrating the final stage of 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 1980s Upright Rochester lantern, the final C20 evolution of the enduring, inverted and 'shadowless' gas lamp, designed by William Sugg and Company Limited and updated by Sugg Lighting Limited.

Group value:

* as part of an adjacent set of historic lamp posts on Bedford Street and King Street and a wider group across other key streets within the Covent Garden area.

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