Skegness Magazine

Old Skegness Gas Lamps For Sale

Source: Skegness Standard 1960

Photo: Wrates Skegness

Want a lamp post for the garden?
COUNCIL’S ‘BARGAIN’, OFFER

PSSST ! Want to buy a lamp post ? If you have a couple of guineas to spare, and want to decorate an odd corner in your garden, Skegness Council can offer you a genuine, cast-iron lamp standard—stamped with the Lincoln coat-of-arms, if you wish—complete with lantern and clock controller.
The lamp posts–all ten tons of them – are the old ones which have been taken from streets in Skegness and replaced with new electric lighting. Now the Council are offering them for sale as scrap, in bulk if possible. But Mr. Oswald King, works superintendent at the Council Depot in Richmond Drive, where the columns are stacked in a yard, said that they can be bought individually.

It is rather an odd coincidence that the lamps, some of which have stood in the town since gas lighting in the streets was first introduced, should come into Mr. King’s care.
Looking at the green painted ones stamped with the Lincoln coat-of-arms, he said: “My dad in Lincoln used to help to cast these things. He was a moulder there at one time. I don’t know how they got here. They were probably bought secondhand.”

FOR U.S. MARKET
Most of the lamps are from the avenues and crescents in the Drummond Road and Wainfleet Road areas. The Council started taking them down three years ago, and there are now only 228 left (chiefly at Winthorpe), but these, too, will have to be removed eventually, even though they were only erected just after the war.

Said Skegness Surveyor, Mr. H. M. Cooper : “There’s no point in keeping a man on to do the cleaning and lighting, and changing the clocks.”

What is the price of the old lamps?
Originally the standards cost about £9 each, the clock controllers £5, and the lanterns between £5 and £6 apiece.
Now. second-hand, the standards are selling at about £1 and the lanterns at a guinea. Since the clocks do not fetch very good prices on their own, they are having to be sold in bulk.

What sort of people buy them?
A recent article in a national Sunday newspaper shows that there is a big market for them in the U.S.A. —Americans have been known to buy them as “genuine British gas lamps” to decorate their gardens and houses—and already Skegness Council have been approached by a firm of antique dealers who are, apparently, interested in shipping the lamps across the Atlantic.

ON CARAVAN SITES
They have also been put to use locally. Mr. King said: “We have been selling them to various caravan sites around here. They have .been converting them and using them themselves.”
Street lighting at the moment is costing Skegness a lot of money. Mr. Cooper said: “Theoretically, the switch-over from gas to electricity was to have been much cheaper. But it is not. This is because most of the 800-odd new installations are being paid for on a form of hire purchase.
“It is only the main road lighting in the town, like the fluorescent strips in Lumley Road, which have been purchased by the Council. The other, ordinary-type street lamps, known as Grade “B,” are still being paid for.
“When we have bought them,” said Mr. Cooper, “there should be a big reduction in the cost.”

Source: Skegness Standard 1964

Councillor slammed for call to preserve Skegness history!

Wants gas lamp returned
WITH Skegness U.D.C. Surveyor’s Department advertising redundant gas lamp columns and lanterns for sale —they have over 100 to dispose of — one Skegness councillor wants one gas lamp kept in being as a reminderof olden days.
Told at Skegness Council meeting recently that only the gas lamps at the northern end of Richmond Drive, and a lamp opposite the Pier, remained to be replaced under the street lighting conversion programme. Coun. D. Williamson entered a plea for the retention of the lamp at the Pier. “And I’m serious!” he told smiling colleagues.
“I think at least one gas lamp should be left standing for its future historic interest — providing it causes no inconvenience. that is.”
No one seconded his proposition and Coun R. E. Enderby told him : The Council has plenty of old gas lamps for sale. If you want one so much, go and buy one for yourself!

Seems like he got his own way though, as there are, standing today, what appears to be old council gas lamps outside the Grosvenor Hotel, opposite the Pier.