WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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Those big round things behind me are gasometers

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Or at least they were, now they're deactivated, disused, and awaiting demolition.

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But there used to be one or more of these in every town and every city up and down Britain.

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This was when gas was not a thing piped in from the North Sea and beyond

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but instead something that was made in a gasworks by burning coal

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and that gas would be stored inside these

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Now that blue one is a bit special, it had a piston that would go up and down inside

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depending on how much gas needed to be stored. But those scaffolding ones there

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they are currently empty and so the tank is down in the ground

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But it would telescope up - be pushed up by the pressure of the gas inside it in order to store however much needed to be in there.

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And they would rise and fall throughout the day, the gas works would spend day and night generating gas

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steadily the gasometer would rise

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And then, in the evening as people turned on most of their cookers, but perhaps their heating as well

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that gas would be pushed out of it, and it would steadily fall down to the ground.

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But now, well, they're not needed any more because that's a really inefficient way to store gas

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with modern technology, all the gas that would be in there can be stored in a 50 meter stretch of high pressure pipeline underground.

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So, there aren't that many left, they've been steadily demolished ever since the turn of the 20th century, perhaps a little earlier.

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And now there are very few left. What aren't up for demolition

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are either listed or protected buildings or aren't long for this world.

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So they are a bit of Britain's industrial heritage that we will soon be saying goodbye to forever,

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But in the meantime, if there's still one near you, well, that's what it used to be used for.

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Say goodbye because it probably won't be around for long. That's a gasometer, and that is something you might not have known.

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