Liptrap

 I have rather avoided getting tangled up in speculation about the three or four very early gas works which seem to have been located in Whitechapel.  However it must be about time to say something about one of them.

 

The only evidence, as far as I know, for this works is in the Boulton and Watt archive in Birmingham. Scribbled on a piece of paper which, from other evidence, dates from around 1811, are the words 'Liptrap, Whitechapel'. The words seem to be associated with a sketch of a gas making plant -probably somewhere else  in Whitechapel. [Thank you Tim Smith for drawing my attention to this].

 

Liptrap were certainly customers of Boulton and Watt who had supplied them with a 17 inch rotative engine in 1786.  Dickinson   (James Watt and the Steam Engine. Encore 1989, p. 185] gives some detail of their unusual gearing arrangement.   Several of Boulton and Watt's customers diversified into gas making equipment when it was available, and so why not Liptrap.

 

The next question is - who were they?  That took a lot more answering. I eventually tracked down Davey E.Liptrap in the Mile End Old Town Rate Books but that wasn't too clear as to the site.  At that time, around 1800, in a dense urban area like Whitechapel there were a number of authorities able to levy rates. Mile End Old Town were after money to support the (no doubt very numerous) poor. Money to pay for sewage disposal went to the Spitalfields Sewer Commissioners, and it was in their rate books for 1818 that I found two entries next to each other, under 'Tickle Belly Common' - they were  'Liptrap. Prop, 8 Bucks Row' and 'Liptrap & Thomas Smith, whole premises'.  

 

Bucks Row is not hard to track down.  It is today, Durward Street and I can see it from my office window. It is a strange triangular open space at the back of Whitechapel Station, on which an old school is currently being renovated for flats.  On the 1813 edition of the Horwood plan it is quite clearly shown  but called 'Ducking Pond Row'. All of which seems to point to a rural past for Whitechapel which, I am sure, was just a memory in 1800. 

 

Who was Thomas Smith? D.L.Munby  (Industry and Planning in Stepney, Stepney Reconstruction Group, 1951) says  from evidence he found in a Parliamentary report ''The firm of T.&G.Smith of Whitechapel .... .. in Durward Street ..... was one of twelve distillers in England in 1832, and the second largest of these'.  On the Horwood plan there is indeed a large distillery site on the north side of the street - today it is under a Sainsbury store (what else?).  So - we have come a long way from a tiny scrap of paper to the second largest distiller in England! 

 

Did they have an on site gasworks? I really don't know and there may be no way of  ever really finding out.  What I do know is that if we add in all the distilleries around East London, that area  must have been producing a very, very large percentage of the total alcohol produced in this country.   The distillery out at Three Mills was I believe the largest one .... and they really did have a gas works