Publication Account
Event ID 881873
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/881873
Cox’s Stack is the tallest surviving example of an industrial chimney in Scotland and is splendidly ornamental. It waserected in 1865–66 and is said to be 282 ft 10 in. high and is in the form of an Italian campanile in polychrome brick on an ashlar base. The battered-sided base is surmounted by a tall square cross-section plinth with angle pilasters and corbels in yellow brick. The main shaft has angle pilasters
with alternate red and yellow horizontal bands, topped by a large cornice above which is an octagonal top section, from which the coping has been removed. The
stack is of square cross-section externally with a circular section lining within.
The architect was James MacLaren and the engineer George A. Cox, one of the three brothers who owned the 30-acre Camperdown Works complex, then the biggest jute mill in the world. Cox also designed other buildings on the site such as the fire-proof High Mill (1857–68) which contains a great quantity of cast-iron in its bell tower and Gothic roofs.
Remarkable Scottish chimneys now long demolished existed at St Rollox Chemical Works, Glasgow, 455 ft high which was 13 ft diameter at the top tapering to 41 ft at the base. At Edinburgh Gas Works, New Street, the chimney, designed by George Buchanan and erected in 1845–46 mainly of brickwork, was 34112
ft high and accommodated smoke from 68 furnaces heating 178 retorts. Its design
parameters which were known may have influenced those adopted for Cox’s Stack. At Edinburgh bricks were used with a tested crushing strength of 440 ton/sq. ft. The chimney’s internal diameter was 11 ft 4 in. at the top and 20 ft at the bottom, but the bottom 70 ft had an additional lining of fire bricks which reduced the diameter to 13 ft. Buchanan designed for a vertical pressure on the base of
8 ton sq. ft, a wind pressure of 40 lb/sq. ft, and adopted a minimum wind overturning safety factor of 2.6.
R Paxton and J Shipway 2007b
Reproduced from 'Civil Engineering heritage: Scotland - Highlands and Islands' with kind permission of Thomas Telford Publishers.
