Southern Electricity Board Constituents

When the Southern Electricity Board began operations on 1 April 1948 it incorporated the distribution services and areas of 22 local authorities and 26 companies.[2] The constituent areas varied enormously in size. Wessex Electricity covered over 1,000 square miles while Dorchester Corporation occupied an area of less than three square miles. Portsmouth Corporation’s electricity department served an area of 192 square miles, considerably larger than the county borough. As in many places, electricity service areas did not always coincide with those of local authorities.

With a total area of about 6,528 square miles and an estimated population of about 3,716,000, the Southern Electricity Board covered every type of district from rural parts of Dorset to densely populated areas in Portsmouth and parts of Middlesex. Domestic sales at 45.6 percent were considerably higher than industrial sales at 32.9 percent.[3]

Unlike some of the regions, there was no single dominant centre in the SEB area for the location of the head office. Office accommodation at this time was very scarce, so the new board acquired two properties at Littlewick Green on the Bath road (A4) west of Maidenhead.[4]

Table 1 Southern Electricity Board Constituent Undertakings 1948

[2] SEB, First Annual Report and Accounts, HC240 (London: HMSO, 1949), p.2.
[3] The averages for the area boards in England and Wales were 34.5 percent domestic and 50.2 percent industrial in 1948/49. Calculated from data in Electricity Council, Handbook of Electricity Supply Statistics 1977 edition, pp.64-65.
[4] SEB, First Annual Report, 1948/49, p.2.

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