Bolding’s Grosvenor Works

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civil engineering

Bolding’s factory, or to give them their full name, John Bolding & Sons Grosvenor Works, were situated at 56-58 Davies Street from 1891 to 1969. The building nowadays holds Grays Antique Centre with small antique shops positioned around a visible stretch of the Tyburn river (see here), but it was for many years the workshop, salesroom and despatch department of one of the major manufacturers of sanitary appliances. The decorations on the outside of the building are a reminder of the Bolding history and have fortunately been left as they were and have not fallen victim to someone’s misguided idea of modernization.

The firm was established in 1822 by Thomas Bolding in South Molton Street. In the 1841 census, Thomas could be found at that address with his two sons Thomas junior and John, all three listed as ‘brass founders’. The 1841 census does not give any house numbers, but from Thomas’s will (he died in 1849), we learn that the business was situated at number 19. Thomas leaves his share in the business to the two sons he was in partnership with, Thomas Edward and John Lupton, no doubt the two sons already mentioned in the 1841 census as being brass founders. Thomas Edward lived at Hammersmith and died in 1866. John Lupton could be found above the business in South Molton Street in the 1851 census as brass founder. One of his sons, George, is also living there and has the same occupation as his father. By 1871, John Lupton had moved to 27 Elgin Road, Chelsea. In 1881 and 1891 he can be found at 23 Elgin Crescent and is listed as ‘retired brass founder’. In the mean time, in 1871, 19 South Molton Street was occupied by son John Thomas Bolding, the only son of John Lupton to show a lasting interest in the business.

In August 1879, John Lupton announces that he is retiring in favour of his son John Thomas and from the notice in The London Gazette (12 August), we learn that the firm has branched out and that they are no longer just situated at 19, South Molton Street, but also at 14, Barratt’s Court, Wigmore Street, and at 304, Euston Road. They describe themselves as ‘wholesale and retail brass and metal founders, lead, iron, tin, and general metal merchants’.

The activities of the firm must have slowly evolved from brass founding to sanitary appliances and that is what they became known for. Already in 1871, John Lupton and John Thomas, together with one Joseph Titsink, acquire a patent for “improvements in water closets and in valves and regulating apparatus for the same” (The London Gazette, 20 January 1871). South Molton Street was outside the City of London and there was no need for a member of the brass founding family to become a member of one of the Worshipful Companies of the City, but in 1883, John Thomas nevertheless deemed it in his interest to do so and he became a member of the Company of Painters by redemption. This membership gave him the right to apply for the Freedom of the City, which he duly did.

1893-1895 Ordnance Survey

At the end of the 1880s, the firm moved the business to a new building on a triangular plot on the corner of Davies Street and South Molton Lane, not very far from their old premises in South Molton Street (see for the whole building Google Street View here). The building was designed in the northern Renaissance style by John Thomas Wimperis and William Henry Arber who were strongly associated with the Grosvenor Estate who owned and still owns large swathes of Mayfair and Belgravia (see here). It is thus no wonder that Bolding named their business Grosvenor Works. The new building had showrooms, a warehouse and workshops on three of the floors, but, no doubt to the relief of the neighbours, the foundry was moved out in 1894 to Eden Street. John Thomas, according to one story, always came to Davies Street in a brougham and would not allow any females to work in the business. All the administration had to be entered by hand by the clerks or salesmen. John Thomas retired in 1824 and shortly after, the firm became a public limited company, although members of the Bolding family remained on the board.

1932 trade catalogue

Despite John Thomas’s old-fashioned practices, Bolding’s were one of the first companies to grant their employees holidays with pay and a sickness benefit fund. In 1932, the building in Davies Street was modernised with a new entrance and the basement workshop was turned into a showroom. New workshops and garages were constructed in Davies Mews. The 1930s were a busy time for Bolding’s as the taste in sanitary appliances moved away from the solid Victorian designs to more elegant bathroom furniture that was easier to clean and could be supplied in more colours than just plain white. In 1963, Bolding’s was able to buy their competitor Thomas Crapper & Co., but only a few years after that, the Bolding business was wound up, while Crapper still exists and, as they proudly announce on their website, is still producing bathroom fittings (see here).

1898 advertisement (Source: Graces Guide)

Basin from Bolding’s (Source: English Salvage)

‘Plate 21: No. 58 Davies Street, Boldings’, in Survey of London: Volume 40, the Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair (London, 1980), online via British History Online here

Postage stamp with Bolding’s name as a commercial overprint (Source: COSGB)

More information on Bolding’s can be found in “A History of John Bolding & Sons” in The Plumber and Journal of Heating, vol. 84 July 1962 issue, p.474-478.

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A gate at the Royal Exchange

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civil engineering, coat of arms, Mercers' Company

Anyone even slightly familiar with London knows the impressive Royal Exchange building, but have you ever looked further than the massive porticoed front? Oh, you have been inside, have you? Great, but that was not what I meant. Have you, for instance, gone round the whole building on a Sunday morning when it was still shut? No, I did not think you had, but you should, because if you had done so, you would have seen this very elaborate fence closing off the northern entrance.

The present Royal Exhange building is the third on the spot. The first was built at the instigation of Sir Thomas Gresham in 1566-68, but that building was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. The same fate fell to the second building on the 10th of January, 1838, and the third was subsequently built in the early 1840s. Many plans were submitted for the new building, but the Committee could not decide on a winning design. Several architects were then asked to submit a design, but not many were willing to commit themselves, and after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing the classical design of Sir William Tite was chosen who characterised his design as a building “of grandeur, simpilicity and usefulness”. The fact that a classical design was chosen is no wonder as the remit was that the design was to be “of the Grecian, Roman or Italian style of architecture, having each front of stone of a hard and durable quality”.⁽¹⁾

Tenders for the actual building work were received in October 1841 and the firm of Messrs. Webb was chosen to lay the foundation. A second contract for the actual building itself was granted to Thomas Jackson, “of course”, as the Sydney Herald would have it, because he submitted the cheapest estimate.⁽²⁾ On 17 January, 1842, the foundation stone was laid by Prince Albert. The official opening took place on 28 October, 1844, by Queen Victoria herself.⁽³⁾

In the centre of the grillwork at the entrance in Threadneedle Street, a maiden can be seen, the symbol and coat of arms of the Mercers’ Company. Thomas Gresham, a mercer, had bequeathed the first Royal Exchange jointly to the Mercers and the City of London Corporation. You can see the coat of arms of the City on the gates at the southern entrance. The Mercers’ Maiden graces many buildings in London signifying their ownership. According to the Mercers’ website, she first appeared in 1425 on a seal and over the centuries her apparel has changed with the fashions of the day until 1911 when she was officially turned into the coat of arms of the Company.

On the bottom of the gate the name of the ironworks that supplied the gates can be found: H. & M.D. Grissell. Henry and his brother Martin De La Garde Grissell had a partnership between 1841 and 1858 as the Regent’s Canal Ironworks at Eagle Warf Road. Henry was the driving force behind the firm and had worked with John Joseph Bramah before he started his own business. After 1858, Henry continued the business on his own. The firm made ironworks for bridges, lighthouses, dockyards and other waterworks, both in England and abroad. Robert Stephenson and Grissell had the highest regard for each other and they often worked together on Stephenson’s engineering projects, such as on the bridges over the Nile. Other gates and fences that were supplied by the Regent’s Canal Ironworks can be found at Buckingham Palace and the British Museum. After Henry’s death, an obituary appeared in the Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers (vol. 73, 1883) in which Henry was given the sobriquet of “Iron Henry” and was said to be almost obsessed by the details of his work. This attention to detail speaks strongly from the gates at the Royal Exchange. Let’s hope that this Royal Exchange does not fall victim to a fire as its predecessors have done and that we can admire Grissell’s gates for a long time to come.

One question remains, however. What do the initials G.T. mean on the gates? The only two explanation I can come up with is Guilliam (Latin variant of William) Tite, the architect, or a combination of the first letters of Tite and Grissell. Any thoughts, anyone? Update: the initials are indeed of Sir Thomas Gresham, so the guess by London Remembers (see comment) turns out to be correct. Thanks go to Michael Moore, Building Manager at the Royal Exchange, for confirmation.

More on Henry Grissell and his activities on the school committee of Holy Trinity, Hoxton, at London Remembers.

(1) Wilson’s Description of the New Royal Exchange (1844), pp. 73-78.
(2) The Penny Mechanic and Chemist: A Magazine of the Arts and Sciences, 11 September 1841, p. 325; and The Sydney Herald, 8 February, 1842.
(3) Wilson, p. 80-81 and 116.

Greathead

Tags

civil engineering, transport

James Henry Greathead (1844-1896), also known as ‘the father of the Tube’, was born in South-Africa. In 1864 he became a pupil of civil engineer Peter W. Barlow (1776-1862) who had already patented a more basic tunnelling shield system in the 1860s. The shield they eventually came up with for the Tower Subway, which ran from Tower Hill to Bermondsey, was named the Barlow-Greathead shield. They combined this shield with the positioning of cast-iron segments to form the tunnel’s solid structure. Greathead also patented his idea of using hydraulic power to move the tunnelling segments forward. In this way, tunnels could be dug without disturbing the land above the tunnel. Up till then, the cut and cover method had been used, i.e. digging a trench in the road as deep as necessary, lining the sides with brickwork, covering the top with brick arches and filling it all in again,  causing a lot of disruption to the congested Victorian traffic in the process. Greathead and Barlow’s method caused a lot less destruction to the streets, not to mention the disturbance to everyday life.

Statue near the Royal Exchange

Greathead went on to work as an engineer with several railway lines, among them the Richmond extension of the Metropolitan District Railway. In 1884, he was engaged to work on the City & South London Railway, the section from King William Street to Stockwell (now part of the Northern line) which opened in 1890. It was the first electric railway to run underground.

His bronze statue by James Butler (1931-) was unveiled near the Royal Exchange in 1994 and seems to be positioned in an awkward place in the middle of the road, but that is because it is hiding a ventilation shaft for the Underground. In the photograph of the bronze plaque surrounded by Greathead’s name in marble, the workmen can be seen digging out the rubble while the cast-iron tunnel segments are clearly visible around them.

A photograph of the real working conditions underground can be seen here.

Plaque on the side of the marble base