Coal in St Leonard’s

Strange as it may seem to young people, houses with central heating are a relatively recent phenomenon.  I grew up in a house built in the 1950s; even at such a recent date, outside the back door was a coal-shed integrated into the house, and every so often a lorry loaded with sacks of coal would arrive to deliver fuel for the open fires and anthracite for the kitchen range.  One pair of grandparents, in an older house, had a coal-cellar, reached by a flight of steps from the garden.  The other grandparents, in a more modest property, had a coal-bunker outside the back door.   By the time I left home, central heating and electric fires had replaced the dependence on coal; the coal-cellar and coal-shed had become store-rooms, the bunker had been taken away in pieces.  

Scattered around St Leonard’s there are, I am sure, similar reminders of the use of coal in our homes.  Some people still buy coal, but few need deliveries measured in hundredweights as the earlier generations did.  So the storage spaces have disappeared or found alternative uses, laundry rooms, a place for garden tools, and so on.  Such reminders of the past are on private land, we are not aware of the changes in other people’s homes.  

Of course, house chimneys are a permanent reminder of an age of open fires, and I wrote about them in an earlier issue.  But at ground level, there is one kind of public and visible reminder of how we used to use and store coal.  And that is the coal-hole cover.  If a house boasted a coal-cellar then it needed a way of filling that cellar.  The family could access their fuel from inside, but they did not want dusty tradesmen traipsing through the front door to deliver a dirty, coal-encrusted sack.  The solution was a chute, large enough for the fuel, but small enough to prevent intruders entering the property.  And the chute needed a cover, usually a heavy cast-iron circular cover, set into the pavement outside the property or into the garden paving around the house.  

There are still a few coal-hole covers in pavements to be found in the neighbourhood.  Many will have been lost over the years as houses are altered and pavements resurfaced.  I have only found a handful, in Colleton Crescent and Matford Lane, or between us and the city centre, in Southernhay.  If you are passing, take a look at the attractive designs on these utilitarian pieces of ironwork. 

Circular coal-hole cover in Matford Lane

Friends in the older parts of the neighbourhood tell me that there were examples outside their front doors, in shallow front gardens; but those front gardens are now parking spaces for cars, and the pieces of ironwork have been thrown away – though one at least has been retained for decoration and is visible in Wonford Road.   

Rectangular and circular covers in Colleton Crescent

 

Bloggers in London and Cheltenham (and elsewhere) have recorded the coal-hole covers in their cities, with pictures. 

Are there any other surviving coal-hole covers locally?  This is an open-ended article; I would be delighted to get further information about this topic.

 

Keywords: St Leonards, Exeter, history, geography, beauty  

coal-holes

Have you ever noticed the streetlights in St Leonard’s?

Over the last few years, I have encouraged you to look at different aspects of the neighbourhood, features that you may or may not have noticed before.  This time, I want you to look at the lamp-posts and lights in St Leonard’s, and other features which are vertical.

Let’s start with the latter, the vertical dimension in our pavements, and consider a couple of one-offs.  First, in St Leonard’s Road, there is a concrete pillar, which marks the site of a former bus stop.  Removing the metal bus stop sign was inexpensive; removing the pillar was too costly, so there it stands.  Second, at the end of Cedars Road, there is a utility pole without any modern purpose – again, too costly to bother to remove.

Apart from these, there are numerous utility poles, carrying telephone wires from the underground cables to houses.  Most of them are wood and have small tags to indicate when they were inspected, and reference numbers and details appear.  Sometimes these are carved into the wood.  A few poles are metal.  The number of cables emerging from the top varies, as do the fittings on the base and close to the top, where there may be small pieces of telephone equipment.  Some have ladder rungs close to the top.  (The rungs never go from the ground up, but are accessible from a short ladder, allowing workmen to climb the pole but making them inaccessible to thrill-seekers.)  Our mobile phones connect to “communication monopoles” on the edges of St Leonard’s.  There are several of these in Barrack Road, one in Gladstone Road.

Street light designs are quite varied.  In one road, you may find three or four different designs; for example, the uprights on one side of College Road are clearly much newer than those opposite.  One side has modern galvanised poles, the other, iron poles, painted green (and the paint is flaking).  The lamps on the tops are generally similar, and follow a standard across most of the neighbourhood.  For the technically minded, most lamps are sodium discharge lamps, which give a slightly orange glow.  Such lamps are held in place by frames which do not spill much light into the sky and cause unnecessary light pollution.

Three different designs of lamp-post in Spicer Road

Those green poles are widespread across our streets.  They are gradually being replaced, since sometimes it is cheaper to replace one than to repair it.  Enjoy this bit of our history while you can!  Have a look at the shape of the metal.  Most have a broad eight-sided base, rising to a collar about two feet above the ground, and then a narrower fluted upright until the neck for the lamp fitting is reached.  Why eight-sided?  A square base would have sharp corners, more dangerous if you ran into one, and more prone to rust at the corners.  Five or seven sides would be awkward to make, and six sides would not fit neatly into pavements where the flagstones and kerbstones were rectangular.  So eight is the norm, sometimes keyed into a square iron “foot” in the ground.  The collar and fluting are there to shed rainwater, as well as being decorative.  If you look closely at the bases, some have the name of Willeys, the Exeter iron foundry.  Minor details on the columns mean that there are at least half-a-dozen different designs around, including those which have twelve fluted channels to the upright section.  Fashions change in street furniture, just as they do in clothing.   Higher up, a lot of these poles still have struts to support ladders, a reminder of the time when it was considered safe to repair lamps that way.  Nowadays, scissor lifts or cherry-pickers provide a safer and more convenient way of accessing the lamp and its support neck.  But, there is a challenge about this at the end of the article.

Two well-known children’s books feature streetlights; the first chapter of the first Harry Potter story features Professor Dumbledore moving down the street, extinguishing the lamps with his magic “Put-outer” (or deluminator); the children in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe enter into Narnia’s Lantern Waste, under a street lamp in the forest.  C S Lewis was influenced by the gas-lights in iron lanterns of Malvern, where he went to school.  There are a few old and some modern lantern-type lights around the city – they are attractive features on the Quay, and in Colleton Mews.  Old Abbey Court has a modern design.  Surprisingly, for a university with good eco-credentials, the lights around the residences off Magdalen Road spill light in all directions without any shading, so causing some light pollution.  (However, by early 2017, these lights had been replaced with more modern designs.  Did this article have any effect?  I do not know.)

Exeter’s street lights used gas until the end of the nineteenth century, and the city council held a vigorous debate in the 1890’s about whether or not to adopt electric lights (“new-fangled technology”!)  The eventual adoption of electric street lighting here, as in many other cities, meant that cables were laid and this was a spur to the wider use of electricity in homes.

We haven’t exhausted the variety of the street lights of St Leonard’s.  The necks vary in shape.  Some are curved, and extend the lamp outwards from the pole; others are curved and the lamp is directly above the pole; modern steel poles simply have an angled neck, extending as far as is needed for that location.  And there are lights attached to some utility poles.

A street light used to carry signs: this one (Wonford Road) has a bus stop sign, two speed limit signs, a plate banning stopping (except buses), a plate with the bus stop location to obtain a text about bus times, and a plate warning about penalties for dog fouling.

Here’s the challenge.  There are some streetlights in St Leonard’s which have hinges in their poles.  The hinges allow the pole to be lowered to be parallel to the ground for repair or maintenance.  Can you find any of them?

Published in the March-April 2016 edition of St Leonard's Neighbourhood News 

 

Keywords: St Leonards, Exeter, history, geography, beauty  

The (almost) last word

Have you ever noticed?

The title for this, my final article, is a little different.  Instead of asking if you have ever looked at things, I want to bring together a few oddments that didn’t fit into the categories of the set of articles.

Trees:  Although there are many fine trees in St Leonard’s, we should praise the city council for the beautiful line of maples in Denmark Road by the swimming pool.  At the other end of the neighbourhood in Wonford Road there is a monkey puzzle which is hemmed in by other tall trees, and another can be seen across the river near the allotments.  The Veitch nurseries were in Gras Lawn, and they popularised monkey puzzle trees for rich Victorian land-owners (including the avenue at Bicton College). 

Stones:  In the article that I wrote for the last issue (Nov-Dec 2012) I asked about the stones which face the terrace in Barnfield Road and the front walls of the houses.  Thanks to an interested reader, I discovered that they are part of our city’s history, as these stones came from the second Exe Bridge.  This was built in 1778 and was demolished in 1903.  The building firm of Woodmans built the terrace, and bought the stonework when the bridge was taken down to make way for one which was flat enough for trams to use. 

In an earlier article, I wrote about the granite kerbstones and setts at the edge of some roads, as well as the carved markings in some of them.  You can deduce when some of our local roads were developed by looking at the kerbstones.  The newest roads have concrete kerbstones; older ones have narrow stones, and some of the oldest ones have quite wide stone kerbs.  Even when the kerbs have been lifted and relaid, the stonework remains.  In the developments that date from between the wars, there are stone setts in the road opposite the shared drives.  The craftsmen who laid the kerbs took pride in shaping stones into curves at junctions and bends - concrete kerbs are less imaginative.  I have also noticed unusual dropped kerbstones in Spicer Road and Rivermead Road at house entrances which have been cut with grooves to give better traction.  And in the parts of the gutters of Lyndhurst Road and Fairpark Road, there are slates instead of the local granite.

A different kind of stone is to be found on a few street corners.  These are the conical stones built into the corner of a wall to protest that corner from cartwheels.  If a wheel came too close, the hard, shaped stone would force it away from the wall.  Look for one in Radnor Place.

House and other walls:  the terrace of houses at the southern end of Marlborough Road was originally called Queen’s Terrace.  There is a space on the wall where the name-plate used to be.  In Barnfield Road there is a house with a Jack in the Green; there are roses on the east side of the Lord Mamhead flats – just visible from the gateway.  And, don’t forget the demon which broods over the bottom of Holloway Street, the imposing number 3 on the wall over the toilets on the Quay and the date 1878 on the wall of the Antiques Centre on the Quay

There’s a lion in Manston Terrace (in a garden not on a wall) and a fan-tailed pigeon on a gatepost in West Grove Road, and a gate with spider and web in Baring Crescent.  Someone asked about the rabbit between the eagles on two houses in Wonford Road.  It turns out to be a recent addition, as it does not appear in the photograph in the Civic Society’s book about St Leonard’s.  There are two similar eagles on a pair of houses in Salutary Mount, Heavitree

Inscriptions Have you noticed that there are the names of the maker on some lamp-posts.  There are several which have the inscription “ …. Engineers, Exeter”

And in this month of the RSPB’s Great Garden Birdwatch: have you looked at …our fellow inhabitants?

I was glad when “Home Information Packs” ceased to be required by sellers of houses.  Not, I hasten to say, for political reasons, and only partially for financial reasons, but because the packs didn’t describe a home.  They were about the dwelling, the house, the flat, and not about the home. 

Now, suppose you were creating a real information pack about your home.  It could make an interesting story, as you interwove the story of your life and your family’s adventures with the way that it was affected by the place where you live.  What stories would you tell? 

A Home Information Pack really should mention the creatures that share our neighbourhood.  What would you include for your home? 

During last summer, I read the remarkable book, “Wildlife of a Garden” by Jennifer Owen.  For thirty years, she monitored the birds, animals, insects etc that shared her garden in Leicester.  The list went on and on.  She was a biologist, and had access to specialists who could identify what she found and collected.  The book reveals the range of creatures who share a suburban garden, many of which are easily overlooked. 

So instead of telling you what you might see, why not investigate for yourself, looking at birds, butterflies, moths, animals and insects.  The results will surprise you!

A second book from my recent reading list would make a good present for anyone interested in wildlife.  Stephen Moss’ “Wild Hares and Hummingbirds” is a diary of a year looking at the wildlife of a village in Somerset, seen through the eyes of one  of the BBC’s Springwatch producers

Thank you

Thank you to the many people who have commented on these articles.  I have included some of your comments in my pieces.  However, I refused to write one article.  Someone asked me to write “Have you ever looked at … eyesores in the neighbourhood?”

Meanwhile, I hope that some of the readers of the Neighbourhood News are going to look at their surroundings with fresh eyes.  (And perhaps, when you are visiting other parts of the city, or going further afield.)  Please let me know of anything in the future that you see which catches your interest.

In the St Leonard's Neighbourhood News for January-February 2013

postscript: As many readers will know, I returned from exile to write further columns for the Neighbourhood News.  These can be found in the blog.