Eastside Community Heritage is searching for former employees of the South Metropolitan Gas Company to share their memories at a planned reunion.
The South Metropolitan Gas Works was the last gas works to be built in London, the brainchild of George Livesey. He received parliamentary permission to build the works on 140 acres of Greenwich Marshes (now called Greenwich Peninsula) in the December of 1880. In keeping with Livesey’s religious ideals, frivolous decorative features were not a part of his grand design for the works; however the two gas holders were the biggest in Europe. The works were grand, but plain. Livesey later introduced a profit sharing scheme with the workers, although this was a move unpopular with the union as it included a clause preventing the workers from striking.
Despite several problems faced in the early years of the South Metropolitan Gas Works, the works expanded over following years, providing not only employment but a plethora of social activities and venues which the workers could take advantage of.
The event to be held at the Greenwich Heritage Centre will be an opportunity for former employees of the Gas Works to get together and talk about old times. Participants are invited to bring along any old photographs, papers and artefacts to show to others, if they have any.
This is a part of the Working Lives of the Thames Gateway project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, that aims to record the experiences of working in industry in Havering, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Barking and Dagenham, Greenwich and Bexley.
The reunion will take place at Greenwich Heritage Centre on Friday 8th January 2010. To get in touch with Eastside Community Heritage, contact Judith Garfield, (office@ech.org.uk, 0208 553 4343) or Claire Days (claire@ech.org.uk, 0208 553 4343).
Thanks for advertising this Rob – and hopefully we can encourage more people to come. This note is just to say that I have agreed to do a loop presentation from my vast archive of pictures – mainly from East Greenwich Gas Works, but I will put some Old Kent Road and Bell Green ones in too.
Hi.
I hope you do not mind me contacting you, but I have come across this website by accident, looking for information regarding an ancestor of mine.
I am an adopted person.
I have been researching my family tree, and my Birth Mother’s birth certificate states that her Father was a Gas Labourer in 1926(JULY) year of her birth.
They lived at 106 Gypsy Hill in South London which as I now realise, could cover any one of the main Gas Works in that area.
Would you(or other employers) have records going back that far of employees?
My Gas Labourer (Birth Grandfather’s name) was George William Terry, and his wife was formerly Lily Cook. My Mother was born in 1926, at home, her name was Margaret Georgina , and I understand that this could have been rented accomodation(did the Gas Company rent out rooms)
I would really really appreciate any information you could help me with.
Interestingly I have read that your Gas Personnel were not allowed to strike, so 1926 being the year of the General Strike, was there anything relevant happening with Gas Labourers in that event in our history?
Thanks Pat Cooper.
Born Christine Anne Terry.
I was one of the last apprentices in the boiler shop, starting in January 1962 as a 15 year old with another boy,John Kitchener, I believe the last apprentice in the shop was a Jim Fisher, he joined at a later date, I’m not too sure if he served his time out. If my memory serves me, John at the completion of his time (6 years!) left to work in a ship yard, that being the last time I saw him.
Not the cleanest enviroment but an absolute mine of different disciplines to carry out our apprentiships, it has served me well all through my working life.