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Updated: June 5, 2025
Then suddenly the German air-fleets sweep across the scene, and we are in the beginning of the end. This story has already told of the swift rush upon New York of the first German air-fleet and of the wild, inevitable orgy of inconclusive destruction that ensued. Behind it a second air-fleet was already swelling at its gasometers when England and France and Spain and Italy showed their hands.
At their Pancras station they had marked out ground for six gasometers of 10,000 cubic feet each. In the year 1814, there was only one gasometer in Peter-street, of 14,000 cubic feet, belonging to the Chartered Gas-Light Company, then the only company established in London.
Here truly was a wondrous sight; the sight of three sets of the most powerful engines that have yet been placed in a battle-ship. Each of them had four cylinders, eighty inches in diameter; and all were driven by the hydrogen from the huge gasometers which our holds formed.
Around the field was a wide border of infinitesimal hats and pale faces, rising in tiers, and beyond this border fences, hoardings, chimneys, furnaces, gasometers, telegraph-poles, houses, and dead trees. And here and there, perched in strange perilous places, even high up towards the sombre sky, were more human beings clinging.
Works for producing a lighting gas had accordingly been established; the gasometers were ready for use, and the main pipes, running beneath the street pavements, would soon appear in the form of burners in the public edifices and the private houses of certain friends of progress.
The average number of lights during the year 1822 was 10,660 private, 2,248 street lamps, theatres, 3,894. At the Brick-lane works, the number of retorts which were fixed was 371, the greatest number worked 217, and the least 60. The number of gasometers 12, each averaging 18,427 cubic feet, amounting in the whole to 221,131 cubic feet; and their average working contents 197,124 cubic feet.
Tall chimneys and unlovely gasometers these last showing as collections of some monstrous spawn rose against the opaque sky, a sky rendered momentarily more opaque, dirtier and more dingy, by the masses of London smoke hanging along the eastern horizon. Usually Ludovic knew his own mind clearly enough. The atmosphere of it was very far from being hazy.
I felt, quite acutely, that it was a shame that he could not be for ever the central figure of a field of mud, kicking a ball into long and grandiose parabolas higher than gasometers, or breaking an occasional leg, surrounded by the violent affection of hearts whose melting-point was the exclamation, "Good old Jos!"
The handsome structure runs away in our rear; the Chinese Junk, with its tawdry flags, scuttles after it; we catch a momentary glimpse of Temple Gardens, lying in the sunlight, where half-a-dozen children are playing on the grass; then comes Whitefriars, the old Alsatia, the sanctuary of blackguard ruffianism in bygone times; then there is a smell of gas, and a vision of enormous gasometers; and then down goes the funnel again, and Blackfriars Bridge jumps over us.
The crust of roofs ends abruptly in a country which is a complexity of gasometers, canals, railway junctions, between which cabbage fields in long spokes radiate from the train and revolve. There is the grotesque suggestion of many ships in the distance, for through gaps in a nondescript horizon masts appear in a kaleidoscopic way.
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