Book review: The Art of the Ventilation Shaft

Adventurous Vents

Adventurous Vents: A Journey through the Ventilation Shafts of Britain

Lucy Lavers, Judy Owens and Suzanna Prizeman

Particular Books, £20 LINK

In the centre of Paternoster Square, there is a tall column sitting astride a rather heavy octagonal base that provides a few seats and shelter from the winds whipped up around St Paul’s. If you look closely, you see a mishmash of styles with the Corinthian column topped by a gold-covered flaming urn and various baroque flourishes. Passers-by might be surprised to find such an ode to eclecticism amid the rather modern neoclassicism of what was once a highly controversial development that attracted the attention of the then Prince of Wales. What few of them will know is that the column is not just a decorative addition to a dull square but has a functional purpose. It is a ventilation shaft, or vent for short, its primary use to extract air and, crucially, fumes, from the car park below.

Readers of a certain vintage will remember the I spy books. They followed themes such as the seaside or history and you got points for finding the location of certain objects. I remember Edward VIII postboxes as being worth 40 points though I am not sure whether any really existed. When you had spotted all the relevant items in the book, you could write off to claim your certificate and, oddly, a feather. There was never an I spy on vents but the authors thereby missed a trick, as demonstrated by this revealing book on the subject.

‘Revealing’ is the operative word as the book shows the reader all kinds of structures that are hidden in plain sight but are revealed to be vents. These are in fact the transition points between the two basic elements of earth and air; they serve a wide variety of purposes and take remarkably different forms.

The earliest vents were crucial lifesavers, making the difference, as the authors put it, between life and death for miners. The poor canaries were hardly sufficient to prevent disasters ranging from asphyxiation from the odourless carbon monoxide to explosions resulting from methane, known at the time as ‘firedamp’. While safety lamps were helpful in reducing explosions, it was the invention of sophisticated ventilation systems, bringing both fresh air in and allowing smoke out along with other potentially dangerous volatile substances, that made mines immeasurably safer.

Another crucial need for vents arose out of the spread of the railways. When I was growing up in Campden Hill in west London, I used to be terrified by scary noises in the night; it was only many years later when I became a trainspotter that I learned that these haunting noises were in fact train horns sounded to warn the trackworkers, and they emanated from the vents created for the Underground line between Notting Hill and Kensington High Street. These were built in the 1860s, not surprisingly, given the 19^th-century penchant for creating infrastructure. T

As the technology for building tunnels improved, making the construction of ever longer ones feasible, they started being dug from above using shafts that would eventually be the vents. Once dug down to the level required, two teams would work in opposite directions carving out the tunnel and when completed the vent would serve its permanent purpose. These mysterious structures can often be seen in the countryside as strange which the Victorians enjoyed playfully topping them with castellated ramparts or giving them a Gothic veneer ’Mummy, mummy why is there a castle in that field?’

Vents are equally essential for sewers. Before their need was recognised, the combination of rotting vegetation and faeces risked creating substantial explosions. While these would mostly be triggered by lights held by the sewage workers, sometimes the gases would seep out into a house with devastating effect if the fumes found their way to a lighted candle. While the story of the construction of London’s sewer system by Joseph Bazalgette is well known, little consideration is given to the vents that were an essential part of this system. They could be found on almost every street corner, tall cast-iron columns ‘often with beautiful detailing and sometimes topped with crowns [that] are mostly mistaken for defunct lamp posts’.

It is not by any means all Victoriana. Modern architects have had great fun with vents too, giving them form that does not in any way reveal their true purpose. Just around the corner from the tower in Paternoster Square, Thomas Heatherwick has created a pair of huge crenelated angel wings to ventilate the electricity sub-station buried beneath. From chess pieces to bollards, citadels to chimneys (spoiler alert: there is one outside the Albert Hall in Kensington), vents are everywhere, hidden in plain view. Time to make your own I Spy book by taking this guide with you and trying to spot them.

The authors have focussed on their 100 favourites across the Uk and surprisingly they suggest that this is nowhere near an exhaustive list of interesting examples. Further volumes would definitely be a treat.

Thanks for your support.

Christian Wolmar is author of The Subterranean Railway, the story of the London Underground, published by Atlantic Books