|
Street furniture supplies the fixtures and fittings of urban life – the add-on extras which offer a touch of convenience and sometimes comfort. The red telephone box is the most iconic item, but there are also pillars and post boxes, stink pipes and coal holes, gas lamps and street signs.
And Muswell Hill has a comparative rarity in this not always glamorous architectural category – on the corner of Leinster and Linden Roads, in the area between Cranley Gardens and St James’s Lane, is an early, lovely, electricity supply feeder pillar. It’s painted in an unattractive camouflage green and has been a go-to for the local canine population for more than a century. But stop by and look at the design detail and reflect on this remnant from the time that electricity was first introduced into homes and you can see why Historic England has given it a Grade-II listing.
These pillars, as the name suggests, distributed power from an underground supply cable to houses and other buildings in the neighbourhood. This one is cast iron and was made in around 1900 by Hardy and Padmore of Worcester, a foundry set up at the time of the Napoleonic wars and which survived into the 1960s. It specialised in, of course, street furniture: lamp posts, tram wire supports, bollards and manhole covers, as well as the gubbins of electricity distribution.
The design is more than simply functional. The side panels have scrolling interlaced around the manufacturer’s name; the door panel is decorated (says the listing perhaps a little generously) in Moorish style; and on top there’s a finial, a decorative feature which adds that touch of distinction that N10 has come to expect.
The design is more than simply functional. The side panels have scrolling interlaced around the manufacturer’s name; the door panel is decorated (says the listing perhaps a little generously) in Moorish style; and on top there’s a finial, a decorative feature which adds that touch of distinction that N10 has come to expect.
A handful of feeder pillars and street junction boxes have been given the accolade of a heritage listing – but this one is in particularly fine condition. Later feeder pillars are simply cabinets, with no design worth mentioning, no Moorish decoration and certainly no finial flourish. Ours is something special: in the words of Historic England, ‘an unusual relic from the first age of electricity’. And you can’t get much more curious than that!