Ice house (building)

An ice house, or icehouse, is a building used to store ice throughout the year, commonly used prior to the invention of the refrigerator. Some were underground chambers, usually man-made, close to natural sources of winter ice such as freshwater lakes, but many were buildings with various types of insulation.

During the winter, ice and snow would be cut from lakes or rivers, taken into the ice house, and packed with insulation (often straw or sawdust). It would remain frozen for many months, often until the following winter, and could be used as a source of ice during the summer months.

The main application of the ice was the storage of foods, but it could also be used simply to cool drinks, or in the preparation of ice cream and sorbet desserts. During the heyday of the ice trade, a typical commercial ice house would store 2,700 tonnes (3,000 short tons) of ice in a 9-by-30-metre (30 by 100 ft) and 14-metre-high (45 ft) building.

A cuneiform tablet from c. 1780 BCE records the construction of an icehouse by Zimri-Lim, the King of Mari, in the northern Mesopotamian town of Terqa, "which never before had any king built." In China, archaeologists have found remains of ice pits from the 7th century BCE, and references suggest that these were in use before 1100 BCE.

Alexander the Great stored snow in pits dug for that purpose around 300 BCE. In Rome, in the 3rd century CE, snow was imported from the mountains, stored in straw-covered pits, and sold from snow shops. The ice that formed in the bottom of the pits sold at a higher price than the snow on top.

By 400 BCE, Persian engineers were building yakhchāls in the desert. The structure used evaporative cooling, radiative cooling, solar chimney, and diurnal heat reservoir techniques to store ice, food, and sometimes make ice. Water was often channeled from a qanat to a yakhchāl, where it freezes when the conditions were right. The most common structures have a conical shape above ground with a subterranean storage space, shade walls, and ice pool. Many that were built centuries ago remain standing.

The ice house was introduced to Britain in the 1600s. James I commissioned the first modern ice house in 1619 in Greenwich Park and another in Hampton Court in 1625–6. The Hampton Court ice house (or snow conserve) was a brick-lined well, which was 30 feet (9.1 m) deep and 16 feet (4.9 m) wide. A timber building with a thatched roof covered it. In 1660 Charles II had one built in London's upper St James's Park (now Green Park).

Various types and designs of ice house exist but British ice houses were commonly brick-lined, domed structures, with most of their volume underground. Ice houses varied in design depending on the date and builder, but were usually conical or rounded at the bottom to hold melted ice. They usually had a drain to take away the melt-water. It is recorded that the idea for ice houses was brought to Britain by travellers who had seen similar arrangements in Italy, where peasants collected ice from the mountains and used it to keep food fresh inside caves. Ice houses were also known as ice wells, ice pits or ice mounds.