Concrete and Reinforced Concrete

At the early part of the summer I visited my cousin Anne who lives in the village of Sway in the New Forest. In the main, the New Forest is the main location for this article, but it has tenuous links with Swansea.

The New Forest today is one of the largest remaining areas of unenclosed pasture land, heathland, and forest in southern England and is located in the counties of Hampshire and southeast Wiltshire.  William the Conqueror proclaimed the forest as a Royal Forest, in around 1079.

The first stop in this article is the Sir Walter Tyrrell pub (top right) in Brook, which is a stone’s throw from the Rufus Stone memorial (right) in Lower Canterton.  So picture the scene, in August 1100.  A royal party is out hunting in the forest when a “mysterious arrow” is fired, and it finds its target. King William II aka William Rufus has been killed.  It was thought that William was shot one of his own men, Walter Tyrrell, as an early statement by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported.  William’s body was quickly transported to be buried at the nearby Winchester Cathedral; he is the last royal to be buried there.

Other notable burials at the Cathedral, include novelist Jane Austen, Mary Sumner, founder of the Mothers’ Union and Thomas Thetcher (left).  Now many won’t know who Thetcher is, so please allow me to give you more details.  Thetcher, a grenadier, died in 1764; the inscription on his headstone states that he died of a violent fever contracted by drinking small beer when hot on 12th May 1764.

The word small here does not relate to the size of the glass but that it was a weak brew. In the mid 18th century most people drank weak beer rather than water which was contaminated with cholera and typhoid. In all probability, the violent fever which killed Thetcher was caused by one of these diseases – if he’d been drinking a strong beer with a high alcohol content he might have survived!

One would think that is the end, but at the end of the First World War, in 1918, a young American officer called Bill Wilson (right), visited the cathedral and read the inscription on Thetcher’s headstone, and  taking inspiration from it formed Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in 1935.

Sway, is located on the southern edge of the woodland and heathland of the New Forest.  The village has shops, a pub and a railway station, which opened in 1888.  Also in the village is St. Luke’s church built 1839.   During the Second World War, Sway was subjected to Luftwaffe bombing as located nearby was the RAF base at Christchurch. The base was operational from 1926, and military operation commenced between 1941 and 1943.

Also located in Sway, is the Sway Tower (left) which is Grade II listed.  When it was built between 1879 and 1885 it was the first concrete tower, standing at 218 ft tall. The architect was the amateur Andrew Thomas Turton Peterson.  Peterson an Anglo-Indian barrister and spiritualist, who during the build claimed to have been guided by the spirit of Sir Christopher Wren.  The tower was designed to be used as Peterson’s mausoleum, with a perpetual light on the top, but Trinity House wouldn’t allow the light as this would be confusing to shipping. Today, the tower is visible for miles around the New Forest and can be spotted as far as Southampton and Solent Waters. It remains the world’s tallest non-reinforced concrete structure.

11 miles from Sway is Minstead, a smaller village with a shop, a pub and also All Saints Church (top right).  This  church dates back to the 13th century, and is where Sir Arthur Canon Doyle (below right) is buried.  Doyle is best remembered for his Sherlock Holmes works, including 4 novels and 56 short stories.  Doyle died in 1930 at his home Windlesham Manor, in Crowborough, East Sussex.   It was here that he was initially buried, but  Doyle was exhumed, and buried alongside his second wife, Jean Elizabeth, at All Saints ((far right).

Between 2010 and 2017, the BBC aired Sherlock, a British mystery crime drama based on Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.  Benedict Cumberbatch, who starred as Sherlock has traced his ancestry back to William the Conqueror, who is his 25 times great grandfather.  This is where the tenuous link with Swansea is, as a number of locations in Swansea, including the old law courts in the Guildhall were used in the making of the program.  So, here we are back in Swansea.

Weaver building image – Courtesy of swanseadocks.co.uk

Today situated by the River Tawe, is the supermarket Sainsbury’s, which opened during 1985.  This building replaced the Weaver building (above).

Frenchman Francois Hennebique (right), was a self-taught builder and engineer who came up with the central concept of concrete that is used in the building industry.  Hennebique patented his pioneering idea during 1892, and in 1897 built his first reinforced-concrete building, The Weaver Building, in Swansea.

Located alongside the half-basin in the North Dock, the Weaver Building, was a 10-storey building used as a mill and for flour storage.  It survived the bombing during the Second World War but was demolished in the 1980s when the Maritime Quarter was redeveloped. There is still evidence of the Weaver Building to be found in two different places, one piece is located in the Swansea Museum and a further piece found at Amberley Museum, West Sussex.  There is also a small “memorial” (below) located on the south side of the River Tawe.

Copywrite - The Bay Magazine, September 2022