Gas heritage in the UK

For many years the gas industry's professional body, The Institution of Gas Engineers and Managers, has allowed the convening of a body of gas historians under the title IGEM Panel for the History of the Gas Industry. This Panel meets twice a year and content from this blog will be heading for their newsletter, Historic Gas Times.

Gas museums - Fakenham

Fakenham Museum of Gas and Local History is based in north Norfolk and well worth a visit. See their web site for further details.

History of gas in Southend

Southend was part of the territory of the former Gas Light and Coke Co. The web page also features some other details about Ely from a book review by Mr J. Horne (member of IGEM Panel for the History of the Gas Industry), and a trip the gas Museum in Fakenham, Norfolk.

Gas Museums in the UK

As an opening statement you would usually avoid controversy, but in respect of the gas industry's view on it's history, fragmentation and indifference could be used as keywords, but let's concentrate on the efforts of the few to record nearly two hundred years of public service, and more history behind the early science and engineering of the pioneering Gas Light and Coke Company, Westminster, London, Act of Parliament, 1810, Royal Charter 1812.

When the gas industry was nationalised in 1949, Regions were formed to group the 1049 (source: Gas World) utilities into 12 areas such as Southern, South Eastern (my dad's territory), and North Thames (my territory). My background to the industry was as a library degree work experience placement who ended working from graduation for a further two years in The London Gas Museum. My role there as the Library and Information Services Officer was to establish a museum library and develop the enquiry service; unfortunately I did it too well and developed an international reputation for the London Gas Museum library which I think was frowned on by North Thames management (except when they wanted publicity), but I must stop throwing politics into this.

So where are we now in the UK gas museum situation? All the regional museums have closed with the exception of one, Leicester, and the contents from all the others have either been dispersed to other interested parties or crated in long term storage for the emerging concept of the National Gas Museum. It is interesting that with the development of the web one can see that the London Gas Museum is alive and well, and open for business! So the purpose of this blog is to record all the good and bad history found on the world wide web for your comments to try and see if opinion can be corrected. I presume that as the www is powered by this new fangled electrical stuff that could account for some corrupting of gas history, but the remainder of any errors is down to poor research and lack of access to suitable library collections.