The Possibility of Finding Workable Coal-Seams under the London Area

Abstract

IN a lecture recently delivered at the London Institution, an attempt was made to lay before a popular audience the course of reasoning, by which geologists have demonstrated that productive Coal-Measures may not improbably lie at no great depth beneath the metropolitan districts. The verification of the prediction that a ridge of Palæozoic rocks would be found to extend at a moderate depth beneath London, which has resulted from the borings made by Messrs. Meux and Co. in the Tottenham Court Road, and by the New River Company at Turnford and Ware, has renewed the interest which geologists have long taken in the question; and as the people of the metropolis now pay something like £5,000,000 a year for the carriage of coal from a distance, it appeared to be not unlikely that the general public might also be brought to take an intelligent interest in this important problem.