Pantechnicon

A Pantechnicon van, currently usually shortened to pantechnicon, was originally a furniture removal van drawn by horses and used by the British company "The Pantechnicon" for delivering and collecting furniture which its customers wished to store. The name is a word largely of British English usage.

The word "Pantechnicon" is an invented one, formed from the Greek pan ("all") and techne ("art"). It was originally the name of a large establishment in Motcomb Street, Belgrave Square, London, opened around 1830. It combined a picture gallery, a furniture shop, and the sale of carriages, while its southern half was a sizable warehouse for storing furniture and other items. Seth Smith, originally from Wiltshire, was a builder in the early 19th century, and constructed much of the new housing in Belgravia , then a country area. Their clients required storage facilities and this was built on an awkward left-over triangular site with a Greek style Doric column façade, and called Pantechnicon, pseudo-Greek for "pertaining to all the arts or crafts". Subsequently, special wagons were designed with sloping ramps to more easily load furniture, with the building name on the side. The very large, distinctive, and noticeable horse-drawn vans that were used to collect and deliver the customers' furniture came to be known as "Pantechnicon vans." The building was largely destroyed by fire in 1874, but the facade still exists and the usefulness of the vans was by then well established and they had been adopted by other firms. As of 2015 the façade and the building behind it has been leased by its owner, Grosvenor Estates, to Cubitt House, a company specializing in pubs and restaurants in the Belgravia area, and is to be redeveloped into a "food and retail emporium" over six floors, including a basement and a roof-terrace, due to open in 2017.

From around 1900, the name was shortened to simply Pantechnicon. The Pantechnicon Ltd, a furniture storage and removal company, continued to trade until the 1970s.

Though small by modern standards, the vans were impressively large by those of their own time. They came in lengths of between 12 and 18 feet, and were up to 7 feet broad. The roof was a segment of a cylinder 8 inches higher in the middle than at the edges to ensure ready drainage but it had boards round the edges to allow stowage of extra items. Below the roof-line the body was a cuboid box except that behind the space required by the front wheels when turning tightly, the floor was lowered to permit greater internal headroom. This was achieved by cranking the back axle downwards as in a float. The lowered floor also saved some of the lifting which was a feature of using normal horse-drawn lorries and vans, which needed a deck high enough to fit the steering mechanism below it. Access was obtained through hinged doors at the rear. Outside these, the tailboard was hinged upwards from the level of the well.

...
Wikipedia