Attached to the tower itself, there is an 'E' shaped building split into a terrace of four cottages. Three of the cottages were originally used to house the three resident keepers, their wives and families, with the fourth used as an office area and sleeping accommodation for the supernumerary keepers. They are now let as holiday cottages. Water was originally collected off the flat roof of the accommodation block and stored in an underground tank. Behind the cottages are three kitchen gardens. On the seaward side of the complex, the fog siren and its accompanying machinery is housed in a separate building.
Significance
The lighthouse, together with the attached keepers' cottages, are Grade II listed, as is the separate engine house, along with other associated buildings and the boundary walls. Pendeen's engine house is 'the only example in the country to have retained its 12" siren with associated machinery'.
Construction
decided to build a lighthouse and foghorn here in 1891 and the building was designed by their engineer Sir Thomas Matthews. The tower, buildings and surrounding wall were constructed by Arthur Carkeek of Redruth who had to flatten the headland before building could commence. The light was put into commission on 26 September 1900.
Lamp and optic
A five–wick Argand lamp was initially provided, by Messrs Chance of Smethwick, near Birmingham; it was replaced not long afterwards, however, by a Matthews 3-50mm dia. mantle lamp. Chance Brothers also manufactured the lens system: a large rotating optic made up of two sets of four panels, which displayed a group of four flashes every fifteen seconds, ; it had a range of.
Fog siren
The fog signal was sounded from a detached engine house a little to the north-west. In 1900 it contained a pair of Hornsby oil engines providing compressed air for the twin 5-inch sirens, which sounded a seven-second blast every one-and-a-half minutes, through vertical curved trumpets on the engine room roof.
Electrification
In 1926 Pendeen was the first Trinity House station to be fitted with a new, more powerful 12-inch siren. This was part of a general upgrade to the lighthouse, which saw new Gardner semi-diesel engines installed in the engine house and an electric filament lamp replacing the petroleum vapour light in the lantern. Pendeen was one of the first Trinity House lighthouses to be equipped with an incandescent light bulb: 'in order to obviate a watch being kept during fog both in the engine room and the lantern, electric light has been introduced in place of the petroleum-vapour lamps and the apparatus in the lantern made automatic'. The electric current was generated by dynamos directly coupled to another set of semi-diesel engines. The lamp used was an Osram gas-filled bulb, specially designed for Trinity House by the General Electric Company. The automated equipment included a turntable lamp changer: in the event of a lamp failure, a reserve bulb was brought into position and lit, and if the reserve bulb then failed, it was replaced by a self-lighting acetylene lamp; the system remained in use until the mid-1990s. In the engine house, the Gardners were replaced by a pair of Ruston & Hornsby diesels in 1963.
Automation
Pendeen Lighthouse was automated in 1995 with the keepers leaving the station on 3 May. While a new electric lamp and automatic lamp changer were provided at this time, the original optic was retained and it remains in use. As part of the preparation for automation the fog siren was decommissioned and replaced with an electric fog signal, sounding once every 20 seconds;.
