Cast Iron Newel Post

Wooah! We are quite excited about finding something we didn`t know we had, some people may think "so what", but to me finding that we have uncovered an original intricate Victorian cast iron product under our noses is as good as it gets!
You see, during the stair paint stripping process her ladyship was working on the Newel post and was having difficulty getting it back to bare wood when it suddenly dawned on her that this post was not like the spindles, she was finding it very hard to scrape and under the paint it was very dark in colour? Further investigation revealed that the post in fact was metal! So, with angle grinder at the ready we set about with a wire brush attachment and started to remove the paint, little by little we started to uncover a beautifully intricate metal Newel post, the detail is amazing, and this has been covered up for years with layers of paint, onwards as we now need to get this back to bare metal and restore it to it`s former glory, a real beautiful piece of iron work to catch the eye as you enter the house from the front door, just as it would have been when new in 1871.
It was during this time period we loosely call the Industrial Revolution era that iron casting became a prominent style, Foundrymen had mastered the art of casting liquid iron into sand moulds in thinner, lighter shapes and designs, cast iron was relatively cheap, widely available the became the number one choice in elaborate architectural designs of the period over traditional stone carvings, iron castings were certainly much less expensive than Brass castings and modern steel had not yet been developed.
We can see all around us evidence of ironwork used at this time from ornate garden railings to the beautiful architecture of St Pancras railway station built in the same time period.
Britain pioneered the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries when new production methods led to cast iron being produced more economically and had enough manufacturing capacity and capability to allow iron to be used in more and more large scale projects such as the first cast iron bridge built during the 1770`s in Shropshire by Abraham Darby, still standing to this day.
I could waffle on for an eternity about the development of iron casting but perhaps that the subject of another blog.......




first attempt at the Newel post

 


St. Pancras station iron work