| AdminHistory | The company appears to have been formed by charter in 1812, a committee appointed and offices taken in Moor Street. March - July 1819 was however a significant period for the company, as within that time it purchased the gas equipment and gas works, in Gas Street, of John Gostling, for the sum of £25,000. Gostling had supplied gas, by agreement of the Street Commissioners, to Gas Street, Broad Street, Paradise Street, New Street, High Street, Digbeth, Bull Street, Snow Hill, Dale End, Cannon Street, Spiceal Street, Cherry Street, Union Street, Temple Row, Carrs Lane and parts of Moor Street and Steelhouse Lane. The company immediately took over this contract on the same terms,
By October 1824, the company had been requested by the Commissioners to cover the whole Town, or as far as the Company was able, with gas lighting. The Company set about this in stages. By 1830, the company was large enough to enter into a contract with one of its rivals, the Birmingham & Staffordshire Gas-Light Company, not to solicit each others customers and later they moved into new offices in Cherry Street.
Despite the company having further competition from the Birmingham Old Gas Company, which forced down gas prices and service costs to the consumer in the 1840s and 1850s, by 1852 it was generating more gas than ever at its two stations in Windsor Street and Fazeley Street.
In 1855, the company expanded and issued new shares and went on to move into new offices in Union Street. An act of that year allowed the Company to trade outside Birmingham and by 1860, gas production reached a record high, which led to further price reductions in 1863 and 1864. Despite a strike by stokers in 1870, productivity continued to rise, until 1875, when along with the Birmingham & Staffordshire Gas-Light Company, the company was taken into municipal ownership, at a cost of £450,000, under the terms of the parliamentary act of that year. |