Historian Martyn Taylor explores the arrival of ‘town gas’ and creation of industrial district in the Tayfen area of Bury St Edmunds

Early in the 19th century it was discovered that by super heating coal a combination of hydrogen, methane and carbon monoxide was released, leading to coal gas or ‘town gas’ which, when properly controlled, was utilised in street lighting to begin with.

In 1834, the lighting and paving commissioners of Bury St Edmunds decided to make improvements to the town so two men – T S Peckston, of Jersey, and John Malam, of Hull – were contracted to establish a gas works in the Tayfen area ‘with all necessary equipment, machinery and pipework to public buildings and lamps in the town’.

The Tayfen area was probably chosen because of its unsuitability for any expansion of the town due to its obvious propensity to flood.

In medieval times, it was also a place of execution for those who had transgressed the law, the bleakness of the area adding to the last few sights the wretched condemned took.

Peckston and Malam’s company lasted only a few months and it was taken over by a consortium of local prominent interested business people, to be known as The Bury St Edmunds Gas Light Company.

Abbeygate Street was the first in the town to be lit up. Although slightly dimmed, the effect was amazing and gradually the rest of the town centre received the benefit of street lighting.

A telescopic gas-holder was erected in 1857, followed by a second in 1876 and a third in 1952.

The workers were issued with strict rules and regulations as to their conduct on site, for obvious reasons, as the Tayfen area would now become the industrial district of the town, with numerous public houses dotted around.

The classic two-up, two-down Victorian terraces, with their ubiquitous ‘privvies’ at the bottom of the garden, were synonymous for those workers.

These terraces, such as in Ipswich Street, Long Brackland, St Edmund’s Place and Cannon Street, would be swept away in the name of improvement in the early 1960s.

With the discovery of natural gas in the 1960s, the days of the gasworks were numbered as the cost to produce gas through heating became unviable.

Though the town was ‘electrified’, the last gas mantled house lighting was rumoured to be in Victoria Street.

In 1964, the gasworks closed and the remaining gasholder was used to store imported gas. This was demolished in 2016 for The National Grid by KDC, specialist decommissioning and demolition contractors, in preparation for part of the town’s Vision 31 development.

One subsequent anomaly was solved with the pile-driving of the site for a development known as Tayfields.

This was because, following the demolition of the last gas-holder on the site, investigations of the terrain discovered peat deposits some 3-4 metres down, a consequence of the very nature of the site’s past.

The pile driving was also required for what surely qualifies as one of the ugliest buildings in Bury, The Lantern, it too built on the site of one of the gasholders.

An inappropriate earlier name of the building – The Gaslight, with all its connotations – saw it fortunately renamed.

— Martyn Taylor’s latest book, Bury St Edmunds Through Time Revisited, is widely available.