Electrical Service / section pillar (near Blanchflowe Park) Holywood Road, Belfast BT4 1SJ

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Freestanding cast-iron electrical 'service' or 'section pillar', sited at the inner edge of a pavement, which originally housed electrical components probably relating to Belfast’s former trolleybus network and as such probably of the 1940s, when the service appears to have been extended to this part of Belfast. It is located on the north side of the western side of Holywood Road, just south of the entrance to Blanchflower Park / Stadium, opposite and just south of the junction with Marmont Drive and Marmont Park.

The 'pillar' is actually a tall cabinet, roughly 1.3m in height, rectangular in plan (about 0.75m x 0.5), and broadly Classical in styling. It has panelled faces with an oversailing cushioned cap with hipped shallow-pitched top. On both of the longer east and west faces is a hinged door upon which is the arms of the City of Belfast. On the N face there is a small round opening close to the top end of the panel; this is possibly where a conduit may once have been attached (there may originally have been a pole attached to the overhead cabling next to this pillar). The pillar's original paint finish has largely weathered away, though a few fragmented patches of green paintwork remain.

Materials:
Cast iron

Setting:
The pillar is located on the north side of the western side of Holywood Road, just south of the entrance to Blanchflower Park / Stadium, opposite and just south of the junction with Marmont Drive and Marmont Park in East Belfast.

Historical information

This metal cabinet was a ‘service pillar’ or ‘section / isolation pillar’, whose function was to house electrical equipment, most commonly a junction for the general power supply, or an isolator for electrically powered transport systems. The latter were required by legislation to be positioned every half mile, and were used to isolate part of the tram / trolleybus route, stopping the electricity running through a particular section, or to make the current bypass the pillar, enabling engineers to work on it whilst the network itself continued to run.

This particular pillar is likely to have served the trolleybus service, route No25, which appears to have been extended to this section of Holywood Road sometime between c.1940 and 1948 (possibly before 1942).

The pillar was presumably ‘decommissioned’ when the trolleybus successors to the trams were taken out of service in 1968.

References - primary sources
1 ‘Belfast News-Letter’ - 14 June 1905, p.7
2 ‘Belfast Evening Telegraph’ - 6 December 1905
3 ‘The Engineer’ - 15 April 1927
4 OS maps – 1938, 1954
5 ‘Northern Whig’ - 29 February 1940, p.8
6 ‘Belfast Telegraph’ - 14 January 1942, p.3
7 ‘Belfast News-Letter’ - 3 March 1948, p.3

Secondary sources
8 Maybin, Mike, ‘Ireland in the age of the trolleybus - Belfast 1938-1968’ (Silver Link Publishing, 2005)
9 Maybin, Mike, ‘Belfast transport’, (Fonthill Media, 2018)

Secondary sources - online
10 http://www.historywebsite.co.uk/articles/lucy/lucyboxes.htm
11 https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/BTH#cite_note-19
12 http://www.tramwaybadgesandbuttons.com/page148/page4/page213/page213.html

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

A. Style
B. Proportion
C. Ornamentation
K. Group value

Criteria for listing: historic interest

R. Age
Z. Rarity
S. Authenticity
T. Historic Importance
W. Northern Ireland/International Interest
Y. Social, Cultural or Economic Importance

Evaluation

Freestanding cast-iron electrical 'service’ or 'section pillar' sited at the inner edge of a pavement, on Holywood Road, Belfast, which is likely to have housed electrical components relating to Belfast’s former trolleybus network. Broadly Classical in styling and dating to c.1940, it is thought to be one of only three such pillars to have survived (the other two are HB26/28/170 Wellington Park & HB26/30/116 Linenhall Street) and is quite possibly one of the very few remaining structures associated with Belfast's trolleybuses. It is largely intact externally and aside from its rarity, remains an attractive piece of mid-20th century street furniture in its own right.