Coventry celebrates 200 years of gas

[dutchman]

This summer will see the 200th anniversary of the gas industry being celebrated in Coventry and Warwickshire.



National Grid will mark the milestone after it first began providing gas in 1812 with the Gas Light and Coke Company – which was the first company to set up a town gas works in London.

Coventry got its first gas works in Foleshill some years later in 1820.

Another gas works was also built in Gas Street in the city centre but this was demolished when the city’s inner ring road was built.

Soon after 1820 gas street lighting became available and Coventry became one of the very first places in the country to light up its streets in this way.

In preparation for the celebrations later this year National Grid staff at the Warwick headquarters have shared some of the photos from their archives which were taken in the city in 1940 and others from 1946/47.

The photos will be used by National Grid to commemorate 200 years of using gas and to pick out key points in the industry, including photos that show how promotions were used to encourage people to use gas and buy hot water boilers, ovens and even fridges during the 1940s.

This was a particularly tough time for the gas industry as electricity was becoming increasingly popular for lighting and so the gas workers needed to find other uses for their product.

More recently, in the late 1960s Coventry was one of the first regions to be converted to natural gas from the North Sea.

This was a massive project for National Grid where all 13 million gas customers across the country had their gas supplies changed from town gas made from coal to North Sea gas, which was found to be much cleaner and cheaper.

The project took 10 years from 1967 to 1977 and the Midlands was the first region to be completed