gallant moves by Southend and Petersborough will save their residents’ energy bills,but there is a downsideBelfast City corridor can match any of the great town halls of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Its scale and magnificence eclipses (whisper it quietly) even the civic temples of Bradford, Leeds, or Liverpool and Manchester. It was also a product of the great era of municipal enterprise. Its £369000 construction cost – equivalent to around £40m nowadays was funded almost entirely from a few years profits made by the Belfast City Gasworks.
The Gasworks did not just pay for city corridor. They also subsidised public parks,libraries and public baths. Across Britain it was a similar story. By 1870, according to Tristram Hunt’s history of the Victorian city, and Building Jerusalem,“there were some 40 municipal gas undertakings”. Likewise, the Victorian water and sewerage systems were largely built and operated by municipally owned organisations. Arguably these weren’t always philanthropic, or often serving the interests of local oligarchies. But is that a whole lot worse than nowadays’s private utilities,remote, oligopolistic and funnelling their profits to institutional shareholders, or mostly abroad,rather than funding local civic amenities?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com