The London builder who led town out of darkness

The Soho factory in Birmingham utilised gas for lighting as early as 1798. This was known as coal-gas or town-gas and by 1806 the factory was using gas to light the roads within the works.

The first public street to be lit using coal-gas was Pall Mall, London, in 1814. These lights were not very bright and produced lots of smoke. By the 1820s many English towns were lit by gas. In the 1840s aerated burners were invented which improved luminosity and cut down on the smoke, leading to gas lighting being more widely used. Seaford, however, stayed in the dark.

Thomas Crook was a London building contractor who came to Seaford in 1860 buying land and building his house Telsemaure on the seafront. He was keen to bring the gas technology to Seaford and in the early 1870s he sponsored the first Seaford Gas Works in Blatchington Road, on the site now occupied by the Trek Club. He ensured that the first house in town to be lit by gas was his own. The works were powered by coal from Durham which was probably bought to town by train. The gasworks were a mish-mash of dirty buildings and it would have been hot and hard work to keep the furnaces full of coal. This would have been an unpleasant job and the manager of the works would have lived nearby, unable to escape the smell of town-gas which would have hung around the area. One by-product of the process would have been coke and sacks of this were sold to Seaford people to burn for fires and stoves. An early photograph of the works is shown.

Crook was obviously very proud of bringing gas to the town and a bust of the man was made and engraved with his achievement. The Crook family remained directors of the Seaford Gas Company until the early 1930s.

The clock in the tower of St Leonard's Church was erected in to commemorate the coronation of King George V in 1910 and the Seaford Gas Company agreed to provide the church with free gas to illuminate the clock faces.

By 1920 the gasworks was producing 38 million cubic feet of gas per year and supplying most of the town. In 1926 the Board of Trade granted the company permission to extend their area of supply to include the parishes of Alfriston, Litlington, and West Dean. Parts of the parishes of Bishopstone, Alciston, Berwick and Selmeston were also covered. In order to provide for the increase in demand, the gas company extended the gasworks and a huge Glover West vertical retort was built. This structure dominated the Seaford skyline for many years. A spiral-guided gas holder was built in 1927 on land closer to the junction of Chichester Road and this remained on the site until a few years ago when it was demolished. The land still remains undeveloped.

Coal was bought by road from the station and off-loaded into a large hopper. It was then fed along to a mechanism which broke the coal up. The coal was then lifted up to the top of the retort by a steam powered lift and tipped into one of eight bunkers arranged in units of two. The coal was then burnt to produce the gas. These improvements were so successful that by 1927 the plant was capable of producing 400,000 cubic feet of gas per day, which nearly doubled annual output to more than 62 million cubic feet.

Seaford gasworks were so advanced and modern that in 1928 they featured in a national magazine. After the Second World War the gasworks converted to natural gas and in the 1970s Seaford was linked to the national gas grid to ensure that there was a constant supply of energy.

KEVIN GORDON