Coal sold in the City of London had been taxed since mediaeval
times and, as it was all brought in by sea to one or two riverside
wharfs, the collection of the duty had been relatively easy. A
similar duty was collected on all wine landed in London. By the
nineteenth century, however, there was increasing trade by canal
and rail, and various acts of parliament extended the catchment
area to a radius of about twenty miles from London. The City is a
small (one square mile) but influential part of London and in 1851
an Act was passed specifying the points, far beyond its boundaries,
where the collections could be made. Marker posts, inscribed with
this legal authority, were erected. Following enlargement of the
Metropolitan Police District in 1861 a further Act was passed and
new marker posts were set to show the boundary inside which the
duty was payable. Most of these later posts survive.
The erection of these posts was very much a last ditch attempt
to retain the tax in the face of growing opposition. The tax had
been running for at least two hundred years but within twenty years
of the posts going up it was abolished. The Industrial Revolution
was in full swing, London was expanding rapidly. The outer suburbs
were becoming towns and their residents beginning to resent paying
a tax which had very little direct benefit for them. One extreme
case is Caterham which lay (and still lies) outside the
Metropolitan Police District (MPD) but if coals were to be brought
there by rail they had to pass through the MPD and presumably were
subject to the tax.The powers to extract these taxes were abolished
in 1889.
Most posts were made of cast iron and stood at four or five feet
tall, but the railway posts were large and impressive obelisks of
granite fourteen feet in height. All bore the City coat of arms.
Most of those surviving are painted white, with the arms picked out
in red, but the stone ones are often of a sombre black, still
bearing the stains accumulated on the smoky track side. There are
five different forms of Coal Tax boundary markers in all. Most of
the posts are Grade II listed buildings.