Hi, Wednesday, January 15, 2003, 9:48:13 PM, you wrote:
> Almost every Enblish/British house has a fireplace or a furnace or > both, and at the very top of the chimney, there's a tile or metal tube > coming out of the center of the chimney, and it's capped with some > sort of device (a "pot?") to keep amateur Santas (just kidding!) and > birds out...and rain from coming straight down it! More or less every house built before the 1960s has a fireplace in every room. Because of the room layouts this means that every has at least 2 chimneys and the same number of chimney pots. My house is a bog-standard Victorian terraced house with 2 very plain chimney pots (I've just been out to have a look at them). They're the kind of thing that people here simply don't notice unless they happen to be particularly spectacular. Tudor houses generally have some very fine chimney pots - Hatfield House and Hampton Court Palace spring to mind. It was the burning of coal in domestic fireplaces that led to the famous London smogs. Over 4,000 people died as a result of the Great Smog of 1952 and this led to the Clean Air Acts, which put a stop to people burning coal in their fireplaces. My earliest real memories of this country are of returning here from the bright light of Singapore to the blackened, soot-covered buildings of London in winter 1965. It was very depressing and made quite an impression on me. Most parts of London and other cities are now 'smokeless zones', so people rarely burn a fire at home. The fireplaces in this house are blocked up, so I couldn't if I wanted to, but in my last house I had a fireplace restored and it was a great pleasure on a long winter's night to have an open fire, a couple of bottles of wine or Grouse and an enormous Bob Marley cigarette... > The variety in design is absolutely delightful! Trains running in and out of Waterloo Station go on elevated tracks over the Dickensian rooftops of Borough and Bankside and you get some very impressive views of acre on acre of rooves, chimney stacks and pots. Bob > I noticed some others have tuned in on this thread, and probably some > of those are our resident Brits. I may be corrected shortly! <grin> > In various ways!
