Wests Gas Improvement Co

A maker's plate carrying the name Wests Gas Improvement Co is fixed to a working structure inside the Bathurst Gasworks. The lettering is raised cast iron, painted over and re-painted across the years until the layers have lifted at the edges. Rust has bled across the housing from the bolt heads and along the lower edge. The structure the plate is mounted on is part of the working plant, weathered to the same finish as everything else on site. The name reads clearly despite the surface decay.

Wests Gas Improvement Company was a Manchester-based construction company serving the gas industry. Plant carrying its name turned up in council gasworks across regional Australia, including Bathurst, supplied as part of the international trade in gas-industry plant that ran from English manufacturers to Commonwealth municipal operators across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Bathurst Gasworks operated as a council facility from 1888 to 1979, with much of the surviving plant dating from the c.1960 rebuild. Equipment from manufacturers like Wests Gas Improvement Co was installed by council fitters and maintained by them across the decades that followed. The plate is one of the few pieces of evidence on the site that names the supply chain that built it.