Coal-tax post

Coal imported into the City of London had been taxed since medieval times and, as it was originally all brought by sea to riverside wharfs, the collection of the duties was relatively easy.

The Port of London, within which the duties were payable, stretched far beyond the boundaries of the City, all the way along the Thames from Yantlet Creek (downstream from Gravesend) to Staines.

In 1845 the boundary was set at a radius of 20 miles from the General Post Office, London,[1] from Langley in the west to Gravesend in the east and from Ware in the north to Redhill in the south.

This stretched from Colnbrook in the west to Crayford Ness, at the mouth of the River Darent, in the east, and from Wormley, Hertfordshire, in the north to Banstead Heath, Surrey, in the south.

[3] The Queens Head Public House in High Street, Colney Heath, has a post standing close by and it has a "canted front bay said to have been used for the collection of coal tax".

[4][5] In other cases the railway and canal companies or local coal merchants calculated the sums due and paid the money to the Corporation.

Most of the cast-iron posts are painted white, with the cross and sword of the shield picked out in red, but the stone ones are often of a sombre black, still bearing the stains accumulated on the smoky trackside.

In the middle of the 18th century the income from the duties started to be used to finance public works in London, not only in the City itself but also in surrounding areas such as the West End, Southwark and Whitechapel.

The use of the coal duties to pay for public works continued in the nineteenth century: for example they paid for the rebuilding of the Royal Exchange and the construction of New Oxford Street.

The abolition was opposed with some underhand tactics: a parliamentary select committee sitting in 1887 found that signatures on a petition in support of keeping the tax had been forged.

By 1912, the folklorist T. E. Lones reported that an obelisk by the River Colne, near Watford, had become the subject of what would now be called an urban legend: Although the real purpose of the obelisk has been explained in the local newspaper, and is now known to many, the proximity of the structure to the river Colne has induced others to associate it with some drowning fatality, and during the past twenty years I have repeatedly heard people say that it was erected in memory of children drowned near the bridge.