Post Office: Cogan

This building is a mystery. It stands on the corner of Windsor Road and Pill Street in Cogan, near Penarth, south Wales and, though it is now private accommodation, at first glance, you might well assume that the building once housed the local post office.

The corners of the rectangular addition to the building, on the side facing Windsor Road, are each adorned with impressively decorated stone half-pillars, and, in a peculiar position, down at pavement level, there's a semi-circular-shaped stone with the carved inscription 'Post Office 1881'.

However, when I checked old maps of the location on the National Library of Scotland website, in particular the 'Glamorgan Sheet XLVII', where the area was surveyed between 1878 and 1879, and the map was published in 1885, the post office in Cogan was located on Pill Street, near the corner with Hewell Street, and there were no buildings at all along Windsor Road. And, according to further information found online, the post office in Cogan remained on Pill Street until it was closed in April 2008.

By coincidence – or perhaps not? – a new post office to serve Penarth was opened on Windsor Road in July 1881, the same year as that shown on the Cogan stone inscription. The Western Mail, of 14 July 1881, reported as follows:

PENARTH. OPENING OF A NEW POST-OFFICE. – The post-office at Penarth has been removed to Windsor-road, where Mr. E. W. Jones commenced his duties as postmaster on Tuesday. The premises have been fitted in a much more convenient manner than the old office, and the public generally fully appreciate the increased postal facilities given them.

I wondered if perhaps the stonework on the Cogan building had come from the 1881 Penarth post office building (that post office was also closed and relocated in 2008). However, I found a photograph of the former Penarth post office on the Peoples Collection Wales website, and that building does not have the same stonework.

So, as I wrote at the beginning of this post, the building is a mystery. If I manage to solve this mystery at some future date, I will update this post.

Dinas Powys: stink pipes

When I first noticed them, I wasn't sure what these pipes were but the proximity of one of them to a present day utility cover in the pavement was a clue.

These are stink pipes, also known as stench pipes, once used to allow gases and noxious smells to escape safely from the sewer pipes below the ground. From what I've been reading, pipes like these were first introduced during the Victorian era. An article on the Designing Buildings website explains

The summer of 1858 was known as 'the Great Stink' in London as there was a strong smell of untreated waste throughout the city, affecting those at work in the House of Commons. Joseph Bazalgetter, the chief engineer of London's Metropolitan Board of Works, proposed channelling waste through street sewers, into main intercepting sewers. These would transport waste towards the tidal part of the Thames so that it would be swept out to sea.
The network of wide sewer tunnels required venting, which is why stink pipes were incorporated into the system. Based on the concept of a blastpipe – an idea allegedly invented by a Victorian-era surgeon, chemist and engineer named Sir Goldsworthy Gurney – stink pipes were made out of cast iron and placed along main sewer routes.

Many stink pipes were much taller than those I've found, the better to catch any breeze and dissipate the noxious smells away from people at ground level. The Historic England website reports on one, in the town of Shifnal in Shropshire, that has been grade II listed due its height.

I imagine those much taller structures were the types built to release the city smells emanating from London's large sewer system, whereas the shorter pipes were more appropriate in a suburban or small town setting like Dinas Powys. Also, these local pipes are most probably Edwardian rather than Victorian, as the road and houses where they're located were built some time between 1901 and 1910, according to old maps of the area.