This building was a DW Sports shop and will soon be the JD Gyms building at the junction of Honeybourne Way and Gloucester Road. The circular footprint of the building was necessary because it was constructed on the very deep footings of a gasometer. The storage tanks of gasometers – or gasholders – floated on a brick-encased body of water that might be 10 meters deep.
Cheltenham Gas Works had been between Tewkesbury and Gloucester Roads since 1825. The gasworks expanded over the years, adding new buildings, retort houses and gasholders to meet the growing demand for gas. The Gloucester and Cheltenham Tramroad and, later, a branch from the main line brought coal from the docks and took away coke and tar. The gasworks were one of the most prominent features of the town’s landscape, visible from the air and from nearby hills.
The works were decommissioned in 1971, but the site wasn’t cleared until the early 1990s. The late nineteenth-century office building and much of the retaining wall were spared and are now Grade II listed. The site of our gasometer fell outside the land allocated for the Tesco supermarket and car park.
The loss of the nation’s gasometers has changed our townscapes. They had a dramatic presence despite their emptiness. But our view of gasometers has changed over the last twenty years, with a growing interest in repurposing – rather than demolishing – redundant industrial buildings. Gasometers on the Coal Drops Yard development at Kings Cross have become blocks of flats and an urban park. A similar plan is afoot in Bethnal Green. There are many similar schemes around the world. If our gasometer had survived, who knows, it might now encircle a high-tech hub.
The South London connection? The gasometers at The Oval are probably the most famous group of all, but even they have been under threat.
