Ch ch ch changes

early Ham Baker

typical later Ham Baker

Winter is kind of off season for stinkpipe hunting, in my opinion at least. The dark evenings and the cold temperatures make tramping about on suburban streets, photographing the finer details of Victorian street furniture, a little difficult. People seem far more likely to be suspicious of that strange person photographing - what? a lamp post? after dusk? So I come to rely more on the archive material, my own, and anything I can find on the world wide web. Therefore, and in order to shoe horn in a song title by David Bowie whose birthday it is this Sunday, I am reflecting on the ch ch ch changes in the design of a stinkpipe that has evolved over the years.

Today I'm taking a look at the Ham Baker. First though, just to remind you of what a Ham Baker looks like - you see examples above, on the left and on the right.

Already you can differences, but these two are also very similar.

and here's a close up of the name plate. The one on the left is near Oval, and you've got to look pretty hard to see the legend on there. On the right is how its supposed to look, this one positioned out in the wilds of London Borough of Bexley. 

So we move on what I presume was the earlier design - with a little bit of a pattern. Nice.

and I believe this to be the oldest design, this one found in Camberwell. There is no name anywhere on this one: 

And finally - here's the design towards the bottom of the pipe here...entirely gone in the later version. cost cutting I guess.

I will try to find other examples of design changes as I collect more examples.

I would also like to assure my readers that this stinkpipe blog is still very much alive and there is a lot of work currently going on in the background to consolidate and examine the data I have already collected.

Keep on stinkpiping!!