The gas holder was designed to store large volumes of gas locally and they were common in many towns and urban areas for 200 years.
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Lots of people still call these ‘gasometers’, the name given to them in 1782 by the inventor of gas lighting, William Murdoch. His associates objected that his gasometer was not a meter at all, but a container, but the name stuck!
The first gas holder was built in Leeds in 1824 and gas was originally manufactured by thermally decomposing fossil fuels like coal, hence the original name ‘coal gas’. Starting in the 1850s gas holders were built all around the UK in great numbers. The first designs had two holder lift columns but later ones had three and four lift columns and were frame-guided, enabling them to hold much more gas, like the one at the top of the page.
Emsworth had its own gas holder off Palmers Road, built in 1853 when the Emsworth Gas and Coke Company was formed to serve the town. Works were built close to railways as they depended entirely on coal which was burned to create the gas. This then left a residue of ‘coke’ which local people used as fuel in their houses. Another by-product was ‘pitch’ which was collected in cans and used to seal roofs.
The current gas holder was built in 1933 on the site of the original gas works. It was made of steel in panels in West Yorkshire (top left), sent down by train and then reassembled on site. A 21 ton steam piling hammer (top centre) was used to drive 396 piles nearly 30’ into the ground!
- Capacity: 1,525,000 cubic feet of gas
- Ground floor: Diameter 149’ 71.5” Height 33’ 2”
- Third lift: Diameter 147’ 6” Height 32’ 6”
- Second lift: Diameter 144’ 6” Depth 32’ 6”
- Top lift: Diameter 141’ 6” Depth 32’ 6”
The Emsworth three lift spiral guided gas storage holder stored the gas supplies that came in a 15 inch pipe all the way from the Hilsea gas works near Portsmouth. Gas was stored at near atmospheric pressure and ambient temperature. The telescopic holder was moveable, rising and falling with the quantity of gas stored inside, sealed by 16,000 tonnes of water.
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Gas holders were a mystery to many, who questioned how they worked. Growing up, they were a big part of town life and most people knew the gas holder local to them by sight. Yachtsmen and women used the Emsworth gas holder as a marker as they sailed up the harbour to their moorings!
From 1967 to 1977, at a cost of £100 million including writing off redundant town gas works, all gas equipment around Britain was converted from town or coal gas to natural gas (mostly methane). For cookers, this was done by fitting different-sized burner jets to give the correct gas and air mixture for natural gas.
With this move away from coal gas to natural gas, and creation of the national gas grid network, gas holder use steadily declined. That was because the new gas pipe network both stored and transported gas directly into people’s homes, under pressure to satisfy peak demand, making the use of the local gas holders redundant.
Gasholders began to be demolished in large numbers all around the UK from about 2000 onwards. The Emsworth gas holder off Palmers Road was finally removed in 2016, leaving an enormous circle of concrete.
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The first public piped gas supply was for 13 gas lamps installed along Pall Mall, London, in 1807. People marvelled at the sight. This is also the reason many ‘heritage’ street lights still look like they do, as the design goes back 200 years and even though they now have no gas and LED lights!
By 1826, almost every large town and city in Britain had a gas works to light the streets and public buildings, together with a gas holder to store the gas. Most stores and large homes had gas lighting as well, but it wasn’t until 1875 that most working-class people could afford to light their homes using gas.
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Public gas lights were seen as a means to reduce crime and this was why, until the 1840s, they were all regulated by the police!
Probably the most famous gas holders are the pair next to Lords cricket ground, designed by Sir Corbet Woodall and erected in 1876. Each has an elegant neo-classical style frame and Tuscan columns. The gasometers were decommissioned in 2014.
Where it was more important to protect gas from extreme weather, in countries like the US, putting a special housing around gas holders was common. In other places gas holder ‘houses’ continued to be built and were also made architecturally decorative. Below is one in Simmering, Vienna, now converted into apartments!
The UK has had its own supply of natural gas from the North Sea since the 1970s and currently has reserves of about three times its annual consumption. UK coastal waters still contain enough oil and gas reserves to fuel the UK for 30 years. However, we now know these fossil fuels cause global warming, with July 2023 being the hottest globally on record for both sea and air temperatures.
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UK natural gas is high quality, so it’s all sold on the open market to the highest bidder, rather than any of it being used here at home!
Developing more North Sea UK oil and gas sites would bring in more tax to the UK Government, as well as more revenue to the mostly foreign oil companies running the sites, but would do little for UK energy security. We would still have to buy in oil and gas to meet current demand from countries including Norway, the Middle East and even Australia!
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With fossil fuels heating up the planet we all have to decide if we should invest more in oil and gas exploration. We could opt instead for alternative energy sources like developing hydrogen fuels, or green electricity from solar and wind farms, to power our homes and industry.
West Sussex is an increasingly ‘green’ county, operating two of its own solar power farms and redeveloping a waste management site to build a 20MW battery plant to store electricity, at Halewick Lane near Sompting.
Sussex also has Rampion 1, a wind farm 8-16 miles off the coast. Rampion 2 is the new wind farm being built to the SW which will have larger wind turbines, producing 1,200 megawatts of power to serve local homes and businesses.
- Read more about renewable energy in West Sussex – click here
- Read more about Rampion 2 offshore wind farm – click here