In the 1870s a ship called a “snow brig” made its way through the North Sea. On board the Norwegian ice was being transported to the British Isles. In a few weeks time this ice would be lying on a slate shelf in a Cheltenham pub cellar.
The Victorian ice trade was a massive business, largely forgotten now. The Norwegian exporter Frederikstad’s Friele & Sons alone exported millions of tons of ice to Britain in the 1880s. There were many hotels, fishmongers, wine and spirits merchants and many pubs that required a regular supply of ice. A London fishmonger would typically go through half a ton of ice on a hot summer’s day.
As the ice was typically delivered by ship, and therefore could travel long distances before reaching its final destination, it was often stored in ice wells – massive cylindrical brick structures sunk into the floor of a cellar, packed tight with straw to keep the ice from coming into contact with the cold masonry. The physics at work here were clever: the thermal mass of the surrounding stone slowly released cool, humid air as the ice melted, and the temperature remained fairly constant at around 4-7°C. Many of the ice houses listed as protected structures across Britain today give some indication of the massive investment that went into creating such a system.
You would have known when an ice ship was late for the harbour. The casks of ale would have turned in a matter of days to a vinegar-like beverage. Wine would have been re-fermenting in the bottles of customers. It was a critical aspect of the trade and not something that one could afford to have failing. There is a useful background explanation of ice houses as listed structures.
The same problems exist today for a 150 year old Regency pub in Cheltenham. Thicker walls and more uneven room sizes make for a more difficult installation for modern cooling systems. More on Cellar Cooling Cheltenham can be found at https://www.acecc.co.uk/cellar-cooling/cheltenham/.
The Norwegian ice harvest finally gave way to mechanical refrigeration in the early 20th century and by the 1920s the last of the British imports of Scandinavian ice had disappeared. But the block of ice in the Norwegian lake had done its job well. It had sat on that Cheltenham pub’s slate shelf sweating slowly, and in doing so it had understood a fundamental truth about keeping cellars cold: it’s not the cold that is the problem, it’s how a building breathes around it and, by extension, around the cold.
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