 the 18th Century he was appalled by the inefficiency of the open fires that he found, prompting him to write as follows:-
“The enormous waste of fuel in London may be estimated by the vast, dark cloud which continually hangs over this great metropolis and frequently overshadows the whole country, far and wide. For this dense cloud is certainly composed almost entirely of unconsumed coal, —. I never view from a distance as I come into town this black cloud which hangs over London without wishing to be able to compute the enormous number of cauldrons of coal of which it is composed. For, could this be ascertained, I am persuaded, so striking a fact would awaken the curiosity and excite the astonishment of all ranks of the inhabitants and perhaps turn their minds to an object of economy to which they have hitherto paid little attention”
As a result, he developed by 1796 a ‘modern’ and efficient fireplace and grate which came to be known colloquially as a ‘Rumford’. Essentially he achieved this by reducing the size of the fireplace, introducing angled rather than square sides to reflect more heat back into the room and restricting the size of the flue immediately above the fireback to increase the speed of the airflow and thus improve the efficiency or ‘draw’ of the flue. One of the advantages of Rumford’s design was that his new, improved fireplace could be built inside the large and inefficient fireplace openings that already existed in the majority of London houses of the late 18th Century.
Fireplaces continued in use well into the 20th Century and it was not really until the 1960’s that open fires were largely replaced by central heating in the majority of houses. At this time many fireplaces were bricked up or removed and modern houses and flats began to be built without fireplaces and flues at all.
In more recent times there has been something of a renaissance in open fires and most new houses are now built with at least one working fireplace. When we carry out Building Surveys and Homebuyer Reports these days we are often asked by the purchaser to look at the practicalities of opening up sealed fireplaces and re-using flues that may have been redundant for many years.
The strange thing is that we never really seem to have lost our fascination with fire and it is amazing how many modern houses and flats that I survey where the focal point of the living room is a dummy fireplace.
We think that’s enough of the history for the time being and we’ll turn our attention to some of the practicalities.
The majority of the fireplaces and chimney breasts that we come across will be in houses dating from the late Georgian period up to the 1950’s. (As we’ve said above, many of the houses built from the 1960’s onwards were built without working fireplaces.) The fireplaces, chimney breasts and flues in these properties are generally of traditional brick construction. The actual fire surrounds are in a variety of materials. Cast iron fire surrounds were common in the Victorian and Edwardian era and these can range from quite simple to extremely ornate designs. These tended to be superseded by the tiled fire surround in the 1920’s and 1930’s and tiled surrounds continued to be popular until the demise of open fires in the 1960’s.
In theory chimney breasts are quite simple brick constructions. If a property has only one fireplace this is also the case in practice. In the simplest case the fireplace in the living room is connected to the chimney stack at roof level by a single brick flue. Each fireplace has to have an individual flue, however, and in a multi-storey property this starts to get complicated. A further complication is that in a terraced house the chimney breasts are usually on the party wall and this means that the fireplaces in one house will normally back onto the fireplaces in the adjoining house.
If we take as an example a five-storey, Georgian, terraced house with the chimney breasts on the party wall, we could potentially have ten flues running through the same chimney breast! You only have to look up at the roofs of 