I thought it was about time I wrote something about our poor doomed East Greenwich Gas holder. The campaign to try and stop demolition of the holder has had much greater public supports than we expected and this note is to say ‘thank you’ to everybody who signed the petition. We had meetings with gas company officials – many with Councillors and Council officials and we are very grateful for their support. So – with all this effort why is it still going to come down? Partly because Ofgem, the regulatory body, has called for all holders, apart from a very few which are listed, to come down. There have been several attempts to get our East Greenwich holder listed since the 1990s, all of which have been turned down. Gas company officials now tell us that it has to come down because of the Silvertown tunnel. However the tunnel won’t actually run under the holder, but it will go very near it and there seem to conflicting reports about how much of a problem that is.
It is worth saying, again, that the East Greenwich gas holder is an important structure – technically it is the second holder built to and developing the revolutionary ‘cylindrical shell principle’ which is very simple and very strong setting ‘a new bench-mark in gas holder design’. When it was built, holding over 8,000,000 cubic feet of gas, it was the biggest holder in the world -described at the time as ‘a mountain of iron against the sky’. It is designed to be very plain – foreshadowing ideas which culminated in the modern movement. It is also of course a dramatic feature in the landscape and from the river and one of the few remaining features of a Greenwich we are fast losing. Gas holders all over the country are being demolished while the many local campaigns and concerns are ignored - and this is something which cannot be right.
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