The boundary marks today: Numbering of the marks

It appears from mentions in the minutes of the Coal and Corn and Finance Committee that when in use the marks were referred to by numbers. However no contemporary list has been found so the details of the numbering system are not clear.

The numbers used on this site are therefore not part of any official numbering system but derive from the list of posts published in 1972 in my The coal duties of the City of London and their boundary marks. Although most articles on the boundary marks give numbers to those covered, my booklet was the first to deal with the marks along the whole boundary, and the numbers in it seem to have become a de facto standard. I have therefore retained them, with additions where necessary.

The marks are numbered anti-clockwise from the Thames at Dagenham round to where the boundary meets the tidal Thames again at Crayford Ness. The final two posts (218 and 219) were made for the 1851 Act and not reused on the 1861 boundary but were at Stockers House, Rickmansworth, a house built by the City for the collector of coal duties on the Grand Junction Canal -- see Bawtree's articles on Stockers House.

The booklet did not attempt to list missing marks so I have now given those marks numbers which end with a lower-case letter, so that 75a is a missing mark between nos 75 and 76, and 44a, 44b and 44c are three marks missing between nos 44 and 45. The six missing marks before no 1 have been numbered 0a to 0f. I have have used the same logic to give numbers to extant markers which I had missed. So the List of extant marks includes two marks numbered with a letter suffix, and the List of missing marks contains both:

plain numbers without a letter after them (which are markers which were listed in the booklet but which are now missing); and
numbers with a letter (which are markers not listed in the booklet).

I had previously, in 1965, produced a list of City posts in Kent and Surrey for a display of material relating to the marks at Advances in archaeology: the second exhibition of recent discoveries in Surrey and adjacent counties. The numbers in this list were adopted by one or two other publications (Bourne Society Bulletin (1966), Taylor's The City of London coal duties (1971), and the Wheeler Systems web pages Coal Posts).

Go to: The boundary marks today | List of extant marks | List of missing marks | Individual boundary marks

Page created by Martin Nail: Contact me. Last revised 4th March 2010

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