To the left, you can see the march of generic new-London ugly flats which will become slums within a generation. They are the first and only examples of this type. Look more closely and admire the nineteen elegant tee-sections which brace the frame with their intricate ironwork consisting of a vertical tapering lattice girder at right angles to a vertical tapering plate girder. It is the oldest example of a lattice-work framed gasometer in this country. Once you understand that this gasometer has dominated the skyline in this corner of Poplar for nearly a hundred and fifty years, and your eye attunes to the elegant proportion of its criss-cross braced structure, you recognise its similarity to the rope work on a regimental drum or that button-back, deep upholstery of which the Victorians were so fond. Designed in 1876 by Robert & Henry Edward Jones, father and son engineers of the Commercial Gas Company, the iron structure was manufactured nearby between 1876-78 by Samuel Cutler & Sons of Millwall on the Isle of Dogs, constructional engineers who specialised in the erection of gasometers. To visit now – and come upon it, as I did, lit by the last rays of the setting sun – is to be like one of those travellers of old who undertook the Grand Tour and saw the Coliseum for the first time, marvelling upon it as an heroic example of an earlier age of handmade engineering upon an epic scale. They are disappearing like slices of a cake devoured by a hungry ogre and, shortly, nothing will remain.
The pleasing circularity that once enclosed the sky diminishes with the loss of each segment. Already parts have gone and quite soon it will vanish entirely. This is the last gasometer in Poplar and, as you can see, it is not all there.
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