Victorian fireplace questions

Good evening, I found this forum a few days ago. Is it a good one for those renovating Victorian properties? I own a semi built in 1894 that has more original features than many others from that time. I have all the deeds from 1893 when the local corporation sold the land and a previous owner called the house Westholme hence my username. I have some questions about the fireplaces.

Q1. Where is my missing fireplace?

The house is a two-up two-down plus two-up two-down with three chimney stacks and seven pots. However only six fireplaces are visible, of which just one has been replaced. I think I have found the missing fireplace but I would welcome confirmation and please see photos below.

Chimney breast with missing fireplace?

Concrete hearth for missing fireplace?

Concrete hearth for existing fireplace

The chimney stack has three pots on my side and there is another fireplace downstairs.

It does look like that is a hearth below the pink wall in the second photograph. I guess the central flue must pass between the two first floor fireplaces. Do the vertical lines on the pink wall in the photo offer any clues to the exact position?

I admire your first 5 posts in the test forum. There is normally a delay in the first 5 posts appearing for new members and they very often go away. We could suggest the same approach to all new members.

Thanks for the reply. I read that the first five posts are moderated so I created that number of tests.

As can be seen I hope, the plaster on the pink wall is uneven and raised slightly where the outside of the fireplace surround would have been. Both concrete hearths extend 12" from the chimney breast and inside the stud wall is a recess about 5" deep with boards at the bottom extending outwards for the same 12" distance.

I agree that the central flue would have to be for the downstairs fire. My Building Construction book by McKay says that flues are usually 9" or one brick square and allowing half a brick width or 4½" between them that means the two upstairs flues would be 18" apart. From the middle of the 4" by 2" stud to the opening of the existing fireplace is 9" and opening to chimney breast corner is also 9".

The fireplace downstairs is at right angles to those above and the width of the chimney breast parallel to the party wall is less than 3' compared to over 5' upstairs, a difference of 2½'. The other two chimney breasts in the house are widest on the ground floor, narrow both sides on the first floor, then narrow on one side in the attic and above.

I'm very tempted to remove some plaster to confirm there was a fireplace. I need to remove the broken concrete hearth and replace it with floorboards anyway to create a new corridor and doorway right next to the chimney breast.

Q2. What should I do with a redundant fireplace?

Apart from satisfying my curiosity, could I gain anything by opening up a fireplace that would never see a fire again? Would a 14" wide opening make a worthwhile storage space?

The fireplace still in situ would be hidden when the new bedroom door is open and might stop the door from opening fully. (Current door is very low near external wall where roof and ceiling slopes.) It seems a shame to remove an original cast iron surround. Has anyone converted a small fireplace into a cupboard?

Westholme said:

Apart from satisfying my curiosity, could I gain anything by opening up a fireplace that would never see a fire again? Would a 14" wide opening make a worthwhile storage space?

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That seems quite small to be useful as a storage space, I suppose it would fit a few books, some shoes or a pot plant. To me it's more a matter of aesthetics, I think they look nicer as a fireplace, even if all the bits inside serve no purpose, but it really depends on your style of decorating and the look you're after.

I've decided to keep the existing fireplace with the 'Fern' cast iron surround. I might try to open up the other fireplace and install a new lintel higher up but the flue starts narrowing at some unknown height. I don't know how the chimney breast on this floor is supported because as mentioned before it is wider than on the ground floor.

I have a disused fireplace in a bedroom which was bricked up in a similar manner. I put a pepper pot cowl on the chimney pot after jackdaw season and then opened the fireplace to remove years of nests and hopefully reduce damp issues. Jackdaws have plenty of other chimneys to live in around here.

I bricked mine up again. I thought about a fireplace but it seemed like a lot of effort for something that would just be decorative, and I have a lot of other old building preservation super hero stuff to do. I didn't mind the blank wall before and I recall not liking the bedroom fireplace in a previous house which sucked all of the heat out of the room.

Thanks for the replies so far. Next question:

Q3. What is this fireplace?



Is this fireplace a type of range? The photo was taken from a point almost directly below that of the first photo I posted, in what is now the dining room but might have been the original kitchen. A door off to the left leads through a half-brick wall to what is now the kitchen.

Assuming there were two fireplaces upstairs, there can only be one flue for downstairs. Is it possible there was another fireplace behind this one that shared the same flue? I have a book on Model Building Byelaws (the precursors to modern Building Regs) which says:

A flue which communicates with a room intended for human habitation shall not communicate with any other room : Provided that a flue may communicate with a single fireplace which is common to a living room and a kitchen or scullery.

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I am not sure what this means. If this fireplace was the only one downstairs how was it used for cooking?

Ignoring the wallpaper if possible, the fireplace is quite imposing and the top of the shelf is nearly five feet above the floor (58" to be exact). It is cast iron (or ferrous anyway) between the jambs and below a horizontal join that can just be seen below the diagonal scratch mark under the "keystone" and the outer part is wooden probably. The tiles are not very impressive and are they likely to be original?

On the right is the party wall and there would have been a mirror-image fireplace next door, sadly long since removed. I wonder whether these two fireplaces would have been identical apart from the shelf? The left jamb is 3" wider than the right one which could be embedded by 3" in the wall.

I have looked at hundreds of old fireplaces online, at www.oldfireplaces.co.uk in particular, but none matches this one.

Typically there would be a fireplace in each downstairs room. Probably upstairs too but not necessarily
and
That is not a range but is a polite fireplace
and
I used to own a house about the same age as yours and the range had its own flue and chimney at the back of the house

Thanks for identifying the type of fireplace. A web search for "polite fireplace" produces almost nothing relevant.

The semi's either side of me both have a chimney breast flush with the rear wall but they are only one-up one-down at the back. On one side the pots are in one row of four, on the other the pots are two by two. In effect my house is the latter plus an extra room up and down beyond the rear stack but with only one extra pot for which the fireplace still exists upstairs.

In other words, I have eight rooms and seven flues, not six and six as next door, so the polite fireplace downstairs must have been used for cooking. There was never another chimney that has been removed because an original WC downstairs and window upstairs make that impossible.

I think polite was more a desription than an official name. Your fireplace is a cast iron insert. To me it looks neoclassical style because if the swags, probably Edwardian as there was a bit of a revivalist movement then and the insert is definitely not Georgian or anything earlier. The tiles may be original, but look like they could be a little later, maybe 20s or 30s, but then again the insert could also be from that period. I don't think the surround and insert fit together, the surround is too tall, and the insert would usually have been set at floor level as far as I know, and not on a raised hearth. I'm going to stick my neck out and say I don't think it was original to the 1894 construction, but it is nice and worth of being kept if you like it!!!

Jolly interesting.

The mismatch of fire surround and insert, the probably later tiles - could even be 50s - and the high fire surround, do all suggest that this fireplace may well have been the home of porridge bangers and mash. After all, they had to cook somewhere.

Only by opening up the fireplace to ascertain the size of the fire opening/arch could you confirm or otherwise this supposition, but the mismatch of components is itself of interest because it hints at the evolution of the domestic facilities.

Ivor

Yes I hadn't thought of that! It could well be that the surround is original and there was a small range in there, and the insert added later!

I have reached the same conclusion. The surround looks too well installed to be a later addition. The left corner of the shelf is rounded and the end is perfectly flush with the chimney breast return. The cast iron insert (inside the yellow lines in the photo below and 38" high by 30¼" wide) might have come from the sitting room which has a replacement fireplace. The tiles do not look right and are not fitted very well. The house had changed hands in 1894, 1927, 1934, 1947 and 1964 before I bought it in 2013.

Since the above photo was taken, I have removed the horrible laminate floor and beading, as described here.

More info:

1. The skirting is cement or hard plaster, not wood, as mentioned in the other thread.

2. There are quarry tiles underneath all the laminate in the photo.

3. The raised hearth is constructed from red tiles, which I exposed after removing the visible white paint and invisible red paint. I can't tell whether the hearth tiles sit on top of whole quarry tiles or they sit on top of a concrete hearth flush with the surrounding quarry tiles which were cut to fit. The hearth projects a couple of inches from the surround

4. The bottom of the column or jamb on the left of the surround is not wood. It appears to be a light-coloured stone and presumably the other side is the same. It is not the same material as the skirting. I removed some paint from the floor to above the current level of the hearth and before it was white it was green and before that brown. I think the fire surround is mostly wood but it is sitting on two stones. Tapping produces two different sounds and although I couldn't find the join between stone and wood it is probably at the same height as the top of the hearth.

The wooden surround not touching the floor is consistent with the skirting not being wood either. This is very good news to me because I want to move the surround and cast iron insert into the adjacent sitting-room, which is probably where the insert was originally. I didn't fancy cutting the surround to make it fit in with a hearth flush with floorboards and I think that won't be necessary.

I need to know how much if any of the right-hand side of the fireplace surround is intact but embedded in the wall. Under section 2.(f) of The Party Wall Act 1996, I have the right to "cut into a party structure for any purpose" but I must serve a notice on my next door neighbour beforehand. This won't be a problem but does "cut into a party structure" include cutting or removing bricks but exclude removing plaster?

call me non-conventional but I wouldn't bother with the party wall act for such a triviality of removing a surround unless I was doing something that would be obviously structural, I would just do it..

steveb said:

Westholme said:

I need to know how much if any of the right-hand side of the fireplace surround is intact but embedded in the wall. Under section 2.(f) of The Party Wall Act 1996, I have the right to "cut into a party structure for any purpose" but I must serve a notice on my next door neighbour beforehand. This won't be a problem but does "cut into a party structure" include cutting or removing bricks but exclude removing plaster?

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call me non-conventional but I wouldn't bother with the party wall act for such a triviality of removing a surround unless I was doing something that would be obviously structural, I would just do it..

Click to expand...

Thanks, the job was very trivial. I've just got around to removing the plaster next to the surround and the shelf is embedded by ½" at most and the rest by less. Therefore, my surround must be the left-handed version and here's the pic again of how the room used to look:



The surround looks like it should be stone and I think it is stone, not wood. I can't see how it is attached to the brickwork as there are no lugs or fixings around the outside.

Could be held in by metal loops embedded in the brickwork and then stuck into big globs of plaster on the inside of the stone. This was the way with slate surounds.

Westholme said:

I have reached the same conclusion. The surround looks too well installed to be a later addition. The left corner of the shelf is rounded and the end is perfectly flush with the chimney breast return. The cast iron insert (inside the yellow lines in the photo below and 38" high by 30¼" wide) might have come from the sitting room which has a replacement fireplace. The tiles do not look right and are not fitted very well. The house had changed hands in 1894, 1927, 1934, 1947 and 1964 before I bought it in 2013.

Click to expand...

FWIW I actually think it may be original. Because I have a similar fireplace, cast iron insert with tiles, surround, and similar height. Mine is original according to the listing and the previous owners, and the room used to be the school room.

ElectronicFur said:

Westholme said:

I have reached the same conclusion. The surround looks too well installed to be a later addition. The left corner of the shelf is rounded and the end is perfectly flush with the chimney breast return. The cast iron insert (inside the yellow lines in the photo below and 38" high by 30¼" wide) might have come from the sitting room which has a replacement fireplace. The tiles do not look right and are not fitted very well. The house had changed hands in 1894, 1927, 1934, 1947 and 1964 before I bought it in 2013.

Click to expand...

FWIW I actually think it may be original. Because I have a similar fireplace, cast iron insert with tiles, surround, and similar height. Mine is original according to the listing and the previous owners, and the room used to be the school room.

Click to expand...

Does your fireplace have a raised hearth? Mine was used for cooking originally, without any doubt, as there is nowhere else it could have been done. The surround is definitely stone.

In another topic a photo was posted taken from the Cookit! website showing a Georgian fireplace (from The Georgian House Museum in Bristol) and my surround is very similar to that:

http://gallery.nen.gov.uk/asset656550_13761-cookit.html
http://gallery.nen.gov.uk/gallery13761-cookit.html