Gunfleet Lighthouse

Gunfleet Lighthouse stands six miles off Frinton-on-Sea in Essex, a hexagonal iron tower built in 1850 on seven steel piles driven into the North Sea bed. James Walker of Trinity House designed it, while George Henry Saunders handled the construction and Walker and Burges served as engineers. The structure rises 74 feet above the waves and was painted red when new. It replaced a light vessel that had marked the spot since 1850 and first showed its revolving red beam on 1 May 1856. Two keepers once lived inside the single-storey corrugated-iron dwelling beneath the lantern, where a living room doubled as a kitchen. The lantern housed Argand lamps and reflectors mounted on a triangular frame that turned by clockwork. Each group of lamps shone through red glass, flashing once every thirty seconds at first and later every fifteen. A fog bell struck once every ten seconds in bad weather, also driven by clockwork. The light was upgraded in 1908 to use lenses instead of reflectors and remained active into the 1940s. By 1951 it had been decommissioned, though it still marks the northern edge of the Port of London Authority’s waters. Visitors today find a weather station run by the Port of London Authority, still using the old tower. The iron piles and corrugated-iron rooms remain, though no keepers live there now. The red-painted lattice frame juts from the sea like a slender skeleton, a relic of 19th-century engineering. The revolving lens and fog bell no longer turn or toll, but the structure endures as a sea mark. A failed attempt in 1974 to turn it into a pirate radio station adds another layer to its story. The lighthouse stands silent above the shifting sands, watched over by the authority that once lit the way for ships.