Ignorant question about chimneys, fire and winters.

[Liloandswitch]

Every house and even most flats in my area have out of use chimneys, I was wondering what it must've been like in London during the winter with all of them on the go. The smoke and smell, was it bearable?

Does anyone remember this or have any insight?

I grew up with little gas fires where the fire place used to be that eventually got pulled out when central heating took over so I dont remember anyone having a real fire.

How did people cope with it and did it used to heat up the whole house?

google the great smog of London 1952, that was an extreme event but thousands of people died

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog

air quality in cities used to be awful- not just due to domestic fuel burning, but industrial as well.

People also had fires in bedrooms

My mum and dad both grew up in London after the war.

Real fires do not heat the whole house, not unless you are using massive amounts of coal or wood.

Yes, it got very very smoky in the air.
The clean air act was brought in in the 1950s after some terrible London smogs.

I lived in a ex council house just 15 years ago that had coal fired central heating. One fire that had a backboiler to heat the water for the radiators. It was a total pain in the arse. Constantly cleaning coal dust, not able to pop the heating on for an hour to take the chill off. If we went away in winter you had to drain the system to stop it freezing. A lot of freezers stop working when the ambient temp drops by a certain level too. When you go home it would take at least a couple of days before it started to feel properly warm again. Like the whole place had to defrost. Never again!

we aren’t in London, but in 1930s built semi in south east. We have a shared chimney with the other side of the semi. It’s blocked off on our side, but they reopened theirs and put in a wood burner. when they light it, our living room and the bedroom above get really warm as the heat comes through.

so while real fires don’t heat the whole house, if you had a terrace with at least one fire lit in each house, there would be shared warmth.

Thanks for your replies.

The pollution must've been a nightmare, even before most people had cars.

The houses and flats are so close together I'm trying to imagine it. You can see the smoke if one person has a bbq let alone if all the chimneys were firing full blast all winter

We in an 1890s terrace, fireplaces in the bedrooms and living room. When we moved in 15 years ago we had the chimney swept swept and lit a fire at Christmas, thought it would be lovely.

It was roasting hot and we only lit a couple of logs, and never repeated the experience.

The coal and wood burning was compounded by the sheer number of cigarette and pipe smokers.

Even in the 80's smoking was allowed in offices, top floor of double decker buses, a few train carriages, pubs and restaurants even the underground!

I remember my mum talking about visibility of just a few feet at night during the big smog (so it took an eternity to get anywhere).

We have 6 operational chimneys in our house. Lighting a fire in one of the fireplaces makes little difference to the room temperature. Our woodburner is fab, though.

Usually only when they were ill.

We have a wood burner and while it doesn't heat the whole house, it makes a massive difference - we leave ours lit until we go to bed and the warmth is still there in the morning.

It's a pain in the arse though and I rarely ever use it if I'm home alone. It's dirty, needs looking at regularly to keep it going and it's not cheap to run. Wood and coal have shot up in price recently.

I live in a former mining area. Miners, including retired miner I think, used to get free coal so they all used it. When I moved here in the late 80s you could smell the smoke and there were some very thick fogs at times. Gradually, as the pits closed, people had gas central heating put in but there is still a small coal merchants near me so there are still some homes heated by coke (smokeless coal).

I was born in the 50's so remember coal fires and no central heating.
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Coal was delivered weekly in winter and stored in a bunker inside the house (there was a door to the outside so the coal man could deliver straight into the bunker).

Terrible faff getting it going sometimes if the wind didn't draw up the chimney right. Coal fire in lounge only, so that was the only warm room.

I don't remember it being smoky inside the house, but I do remember how black buildings were with soot.

London was especially grim, perhaps because the soot showed up against the white buildings, so a column would be white on one side and pitch black on the other. Buckingham Palace was filthy!

After a day trio to London when you blew your nose your hanky was black! God knows how Londoners made old bones!

Grew up in NI in 70s/80s, our country did not have mains gas supplies until many years later, so the coal fire was standard heating when I was a child.

You had a boiler and pump at the back of the fire which heated water and your not-very-warm radiators (if you were lucky).

In the winter everyone sat in the living room at night, and the bedrooms were Baltic.

The advantage I guess was living in a country with a plentiful supply of coal where we weren't dependent on imported energy so much, but it was a filthy and polluting fuel source.

We had that back boiler arrangement which slightly heated three radiators in a new build house in England in the 1960s.

I grew up in a house with fires in the bedrooms that were on all winter. The hot water was heated by a boiler behind the main fireplace in the livingroom and there were very few radiators in the house so the fires everywhere else were essential for heat.

Sometimes I still get the black bogeys thing if I've been travelling around Euston and getting the underground.

My grandparents had no central heating. Fire places in the parlour (never lit, except on special occasions) and livingroom (only lit after lunch, unless there was snow on the ground). There was a stove in the kitchen which my grandfather lit every morning but it was allowed to go out after breakfast. Thinking was if you were cold you should do something useful to warm yourself up (sweeping, making beds etc). No fires in bedrooms at all, but great piles of warm bedding and hot water bottles.

I love the smell of a coal fire. They lived in a mining community, so everyone had a coal fire going by evening. To walk down the street on a crisp winter's night and smell the coal fires was just lovely.

We had coal fires and no central heating when I was little (early 70s) and my main memories are of frost patterns on the inside of the bedroom window,
tons of heavy blankets on the bed (duvets weren’t a thing then) and getting dressed in the morning in front of an electric fire because the coal fire had gone out overnight.
I don’t remember what we did for hot water, might have been a back boiler behind the fire.
I don’t remember being cold or smelling smoke but we were in a village in the country. I do remember my dad chopping wood and arguments about filling the coal scuttle on rainy nights and the coal man coming every week (the dog hated him).
My parents had coal fired central heating until the 1980s.

I grew up in the eighties in a council house with coal fired central heating so it did heat the whole house but someone had to light the fire first. I remember very cold mornings!

My family had no central heating until I was 12. We had an aga in the dining room and a coal open fire which could heat up the water in the sitting room.

I remember there being a chimney fire a few times. It was freezing upstairs, except my room which had the chimney adjacent.

Remember getting coal deliveries- we had a coal bunker outside as well. Also remember my mum chopping kindling first thing in the morning. We loved the fire, but I'm glad to have central heating now.

Most people didn't. Bedrooms just weren't heated. I had ice inside my bedroom windows in the morning in winter. It was a common experience for people my age. (Born in the 1950s).

God, chimney fires! They were terrifying experiences. The roaring was like a jet engine, and all the flames and sparks came flying out of the chimney pot, I remember being badly freaked out by them as a child.

We had a chimney fire when I was a girl. All the neighbours were out like a shot and formed a chain passing water in an assortment of receptacles to someone on the first floor flat roof.

The fire brigade came and put it out before telling my mum off for not having the chimney swept.

Then all the neighbours came in and had a drink. Some in their pyjamas and dressing gowns. An impromptu party got going and I remember that night as one of the best of my childhood. I had a game of chess with an old boy who lived up the road and he said how clever I was because I beat him! 😀

We had one fire in the living room in a four bedroom house. No wonder we only had a bath once or twice a week. It was cold in winter. Ice inside the bedroom windows. I remember going to bed with wet hair (treated like a suicidal act in those days) and waking up with my hair frozen stiff and stuck to the pillow. We always had our coats on the beds too on the coldest nights.

@madroid no wonder our grannies were always warning us about wet hair! Yes, it makes sense if the bedroom was stone cold. Might even have caused hypothermia in a frail person in a British winter!