This is a very exciting thread about iron railings. I recently went somewhere called 'outside', for a walk, and decided to take a few photos of iron stumps, because I have always found them very interesting: a mix of history, urbanism and intrigue

growing up, I always wondered why I'd see iron stumps on walls - and then when I moved to the area I live in now they were everywhere: did someone go mad with an oxyacetylene torch back in the olden days? Kind of...

if you read this entry from Hansard from 13 July 1943 on 'REQUISITIONED RAILINGS', you'll see it was all to do with the war and the need for scrap metal, so all across the country railings were chopped off at the base (see link - v interesting)

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1943/jul/13/requisitioned-railings

by the way, that Hansard link includes the use of the world 'obloquy', which hints at how people weren't best pleased about having their railings chopped off! (noun: strong public condemnation)

anyway, the railings were all chopped off and often never replaced - you can see it all over the UK - and now you get a mix of stuff that just isn't as nice, but fair enough

did they all go into making munitions and suchlike? How much metal was recovered this way? Well, there are competing ideas about all that, including stories of much of it being dumped in the Thames Estuary - in truth, I think it's hard to say for sure

the Minister of Works - the magnificently-named Lord Portal - talks of how in August 1941 they had to stop importing scrap from America. So they had to find their own (it also saved valuable shipping space) - it seems 3.5 million properties were affected

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1943/jul/13/requisitioned-railings

how much metal was recovered this way? This is what it says in Hansard: "The total tonnage of railings cleared up to June 12, 1943, by the British Iron and Steel Corporation (Scrap), Ltd., was 532,189 tons." So, this explains quite a lot about my area.

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1943/jul/13/requisitioned-railings

but what did the original railings look like? I always wondered this and thankfully there are a couple of examples near me, including on my street

in these cases I like to imagine they were working away cutting them off and someone comes out of their house after hearing on the wireless that the war is over, so they just stop right there and go home (this one is at Hillsborough Barracks in Sheffield)

anyway, I find it interesting though I'm by no means an expert on any of this - I just happen to walk past them all the time and find myself wondering what it would be like if there had been no mass chopping and no obloquy

people were I believe entitled to compensation, but the Hansard entry suggests only a very small percentage claimed it

and that's all I have to say about that - someone else can talk about London's stretcher railings, another interesting World War II remnant in our built environment: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/london-s-stretcher-railings

for anyone wondering (and because we need a chart) the peak year for obloquy looks to have been 1832, with quite a lot of it about then

https://hansard.parliament.uk/search?endDate=2020-07-16&partial=False&searchTerm=obloquy&startDate=1800-01-01