The Gasworks

Another defining feature of the Southall was the old gasworks. I remember as a boy watching the two or three smaller gasometers going up and down within their frames and looking up at the big one, which seemed to be made out of giant planks and is still there. It used to be possible, up to the middle of the 1960s, to walk into the gate on Beaconsfield Road, cross through the works and walk out into White Street, a tiny street with two terraces of smallish houses, almost completely surrounded by the oppressive gasworks.

I remember the smell of the works, a mixture of coke, various sulphurous fumes, the gas itself, which was sickening, and other less definable chemical fumes. The streets all around the gasworks, on both sides of the railway and between Beaconsfield Road and the Uxbridge Road, were often filled with these smells. The works used to have huge piles of coke and other things around the edges. As a child I climbed in from the canal wall side and climbed on them. If there were security guards they didn't try very hard in those days. My grandfather, who was an engine driver and no stranger to dirty working conditions in the days of steam engines, said that if you worked in the gasworks the smell could never really be washed off.