North Thames Gas: History and Tradition

North Thames Gas has several histories. On one level it is the history of a once distinct, autonomous, and many-sided undertaking, which gradually lost that autonomy and many of its activities, becoming in 1973 a ‘mere’ region of British Gas. In the process the number of employees has fallen sharply, from some 25 000 in the 1950s to only some 8000 today. Change has, indeed, been immense. Before 1973 the Chairman, Deputy Chairman and the Board members were all Ministerial appointments. The Board was in turn responsible directly to the Minister and submitted to him its own financial accounts. Each individual Board was then responsible for its own tariffs, capital investment projects, customer service, sales initiatives, internal organisation, and so on. The Boards’ activities included then gas production as well as gas distribution and sales. Today North Thames makes no gas. Now, throughout the country, all is central and similar, from the colours of the vans to the layout of gas bills. Even the financial performance of an individual Region is buried in the anonymity of British Gas’s aggregate accounts. But, even if North Thames is now just a Region of British Gas, there still remains a distinctiveness which has survived centralisation and privatisation, just as it survived nationalisation.