Tin Tabernacles
The open-sided turpentine shed built around 1830 as part of the extension to the London Docks was praised by contemporaries for its elegance, simplicity, and elegance. What was particularly notable about the building was its roof, which one commentator described as “the lightest and strongest roof (for its weight) since the days of Adam”, built from a material which Henry Palmer called in his patent application of April 1829 “indented or corrugated metallic sheets”. It was the first building to use what we now know as corrugated iron.
Richard Walker, who bought the patent from Palmer, recognized that this new material was particularly suitable for building with large roof spans such as warehouses, but there was one problem. The corrugated sheets were made from wrought iron and quickly corroded. By 1837, though, a French engineer, Stanislav Sorel, had realized that by coating the surface of the iron with a layer of zinc he could dramatically increase the resistance of the iron to corrosion, immediately transforming it into a long-lasting material.
Commander HV Craufurd RN introduced the process of galvanizing to Britain which he patented and he is credited with erecting the world’s first galvanized buildings, storage sheds, at Pembroke Docks in 1844. By then several manufacturers, encouraged by the expiry of Palmer’s patent in 1843, were producing corrugated iron by passing red-hot sheets of wrought iron through a rolling mill, rather like a mangle with interlocking rollers, a technique still used today. The distance between the rollers could be adjusted to vary the thickness of the sheets.
Companies such as William Cooper Ltd of London and Francis Morton of Liverpool started issuing catalogues showing their range of prefabricated iron buildings that could be easily transported and quickly assembled on site. The list was almost endless and it was only a matter of time before the wonders of prefabricated corrugated buildings were spread around the world, enterprising firms like Samual Hemmings of Bristol leading the export charge.
The great platform provided by the Great Exhibition of 1851 to showcase the British entrepreneurial spirit helped further as did royal patronage, Prince Albert ordering a corrugated iron ballroom for Balmoral. Now a joiner’s workshop it is probably the oldest metal sheet building in the world. Although the rash of buildings were pejoratively known as tin buildings, there is no evidence to suggest that anything other than zinc was used to coat the iron.
These technological advances, coinciding with the dramatic demographic changes that Britain was undergoing and the increasingly fissiparous nature of the established churches, provided a new and unanticipated opportunity for the use of these buildings. With the diaspora of people from the countryside to towns and cities, there was either a shortage of churches or they could not accommodate the increased size of congregations or they were simply in the wrong place. Stone and brick churches took too long to build to meet the immediate need. Tin churches or tabernacles seemed the obvious answer, as we shall see next time.
