Gas monitors were quite common things 30 plus years ago but for some reason they slowly started to disappear!
The most famous one was the monitor that was just outside The Oval cricket ground in London which was built in 1853 and is now a listed building. There were quite a few around the North East of England too.
The one below is the only one left from three that stood on Commercial Road in Sunderland. I’m not sure when these monitors were built but 1863 is a year I’ve read but I can’t confirm this. These pieces of engineering have stood for generations and been in operation for at least 150 years, so why now in this age of energy security why are we not using and maintaining these structures? On a trivial note my first house used to have a view of these engineering marvels from the rear bedroom window (they were about a 1000m away).
I decided to make a photo grid and make use of the shapes within the frameworks. I’m not sure the monitor actually still works like it used to – the ‘container’ would rise as the gas was stored inside with the framework holding the structure in place.
I used a Nikon 105mm F2.5 lens from about 1969 that’s been Ai converted so it can be used with a modern Nikon camera, this time on a Nikon D3x. Then images were then converted into mono in Adobe Lightroom Classic.
Seeya mb
