Arriving in Whitley Bay for a few days away, I made my way down to the sea front and the hotel I was staying in. After booking in, having a quick cup of tea and spending a few minutes staring out from the window of my room at a rough and booming winter sea, I went for a wander.
Outside, I admired the large bronze sandcastles while the wind licked my face with salt and the waves crashed against the shore. From the promenade railings Seagulls stared out forlornly to sea while a flock of starlings swirled in the sky like a little hyperactive cloud. A hungry little cloud that every so often swept down to crowd around anyone who sat down on one of the benches or who stopped to look out to the sea. Once in a while they got lucky and scraps of a sandwich or a burger bun were tossed to them and would bounce up between a hundred squawking hungry beaks before being downed in a crumble of crumbs.
Cutting up from the promenade and onto Marine Avenue I came to one of the objects I had been wanting to have a look at – an old iron, late Victorian lamppost. Nothing that special you may think, just a rather ancient and ornate bit of street lighting, but there you would be wrong. This was no ordinary lamppost, but rather an old sewer lamp. This, and the other two surviving sewer lamps in Whitley Bay are part of the sewer system from the days of old when raw sewage went straight out into the sea. The days when after arriving at your seaside holiday destination you could pop to the toilet and empty your travel weary bowels in the evening, then go for a bracing swim in the sea in the morning and watch your turds float past you. Ah, those good old days when men were men and Typhoid was rife.
Heading down from this lamp I found the next of the three sewer lamps just off the Links, standing proud next to a large street sign.
A bit further along and I came to the last of the lamps by the Promenade where it stood with a great view out to sea. These lamps were once part of a group of seventeen that stood in the Whitley Bay and Monkseaton areas. These, and lamps like them, were designed by Joseph Webb in the 1890s as ‘sewer gas destructor lamps’ and at one time were installed all over England. They were a vital part of the old sewer systems, which were poorly vented allowing the build-up of explosive gases such as methane. However, these lamps didn’t just vent the sewer system, they also burned off the sewer gases. They were lit from the local gas supply and had three mantles that created an intense heat within the hood of the lamp, this then drew off the gas from the sewer so that it was harmlessly burned away rather than building up. Clever stuff.
Now the remaining lamps are redundant and really just not much more than street ornaments, historical curiosities and roosting places for starlings.
In the railings by the Promenade sewer lamp, I left a Skulferatu as a thousand hungry starlings gathered around and gabbled noisily at me. Then, just as quickly as they had gathered, they flew off and zoomed over and around an old man who had sat down on one of the nearby benches.
The coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are –
Latitude 55.048014
Longitude -1.446351
what3words: nature.nature.feared
I used the following sources for information on the Sewer Lamps –
Historic England – Sewer Gas Lamp, Whitley Bay
.jpg "View of chimney from Leith Links")
.jpg "An architectural feature at Pillans Walk")
.jpg "The ‘water chimney’ or stink vent at Pillans Walk")
.jpg "The stink vent")
.jpg "The stink vent at Pillans Walk")
.jpg "A monument of Victorian endeavours in sewage disposal and public health")
.jpg "Skulferatu #92")
.jpg "Skulferatu #92 in a gap in the sandstone plinth")
.jpg "Map showing location of Skulferatu #92")
