Coal and Wine Tax Posts

These posts are to be found in a ring around London at about fifteen miles from the City of London.
They were erected under the London Coal and Wine Duties Continuance Act, 1861.

History

Details of the history, types, etc. of these posts are not given here because they are already well written up at:

	[CoL]	City of London site
	[Elm]	Elmbridge site
	[Bro]	Hertfordshire site - Brookmans Park
		Public Monument and Sculpture Association - see below also
		Wikipedia

Wonderful! Maps that mark the posts:

Old Maps site
Some of these maps have already been marked up and copied to the maps page here

Abstracts of various original documents:
- Committee stage of the London Coal and Wine Dues Continuance Bill, Hansard, 1861 June 25
- use of the Duties for building the Embankment
- allegations of fraud by supporters of the Duties (Wayback)

What's here

These pages provide:

A full list with links to pictures. Also: lists for the Bourne Society (see below) area from 1966 and 1957.
Photographs: (See note re links from Grid Refs in these pages.)
- North
- Spelthorne
- Elmbridge
- Epsom
- Reigate and Banstead
- Coulsdon
- Tandridge
- Bromley
- Work in progress: North
- Work in progress: South
- Numerical Index to Photographs
Maps

Other photos

At [Bro] the Brookmans Park site:
- Wormley
- Newgate Street
- Essendon - not a Tax Post
- Northaw
- Potters Bar
- Hawkshead - railway obelisk
- Colney Heath

Wheeler Systems Network in Orpington:

Images of England from English Heritage
- Search for Building Type = 'Duty Post' (must first login via the previous link).
  This search misses Posts 87, 216 & 217 and Post 83 (The London Stone) but is the best they can do. When this search returns something other than 167 hits it will be a sign that they have started to tidy their data.
- List here of Coal and Wine Posts found so far at Images of England
- Images of England with limited search facilities (use this if the first link stops working)

The British Isles GeoGraph project:
- Search for Coal Tax Post

One-post sites:
- Post 58 in Rickmansworth Road, Harefield from Vernon Maldoom.
  One post but eight photos - before and after - plus a phone box
- Post 166 in Ditches Lane on Hugh McCullough's Old Coulsdon site
- Post 186 on Leaves Green on a Biggin Hill site
- Posts 5 and 7 on the boundary of Hainault Forest as marked out in 1641

Other links

Interact with some of my images at JigZone

Public Monument and Sculpture Association
- Index to regions
- Regional page for East London - the only one so far that lists Coal and Wine Posts
- Annotated list of Tax Posts listed by PMSA

I was very flattered to be linked to by the BBC. This page still links to the "Beyond the Broadcast" page but the link is dead. Fortunately the Wayback Machine has kept this copy for me.

The Bourne Society covers the history of the area between Purley and Godstone. There are numerous Tax Posts in their area but their web site is virtually silent on the subject. However they have kindly agreed to let me reproduce here two extracts from their Bulletin:
- Parts of the 1966 version of Martin Nail's list
- 1957 list with recent marginalia and including some vanished posts not listed elsewhere.

I have told FreeFind to consider some other sites as being part of mine so they can be included in the searches.
- Recently modified pages

Photo policy

A collection consisting of nothing but full frontal photos of Tax Posts would be very boring. (Some will say that any collection of Tax Post photos is boring.) Anyway, wherever possible I like to include distracting foreground and background detail in my pictures.

My mother always accused me of making my subjects 'dots in the distance'. Thus this one in Woldingham Road - edited to show where the Post is. In the original the Tax Post is a full 4x20 pixels. Isn't that big enough?

If a photo caption disagrees with the description in the list then the latter should be taken as the correct version.

Author

Roger W. Haworth

RWH 2007 Sept 06