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?

God yes, the ice inside the windows! The net curtains used to be frozen to the glass!

Many parts of our village have no mains gas so even though our house was built in the 80s it was built with an open fire and we still use it on cold nights as it warms up the house, as do many of our neighbours, because it is cheaper than oil which is the main source of central heating for remote villages.

Have you seen footage of National Gallery and Nelson's column and all those other similar buildings in cities from before c1980? They were all coated in black filth from coal and wood burning in domestic and non domestic buildings. I grew up thinking that black was their natural colour. Thankfully they've been cleared. The sooty residue was damaging the stone as well.

Not to mention leaded petrol in cars until recently.

There’s an early episode of The Crown all about London smog and the Clean Air Act, it’s with a watch even if you’re not fussed about the Royal Family.

Every room in my fairly small Victorian terraced house has a fireplace- we have seven! (The bedroom ones are really small and pretty). I can’t begin to imagine how dirty and smelly it must have been. And there is no coal cellar so I wonder how they stored the coal, I guess they just had a coal bunker in the tiny front garden.

And of course the streets outside would have been very dirty with horse poo. Amazing to think about it. I’d love to go back in time for a day to when my street was first built.

My village has no mains gas and while probably most of us now have oil or lpg there are still plenty with solid fuel heating and those with oil or lpg usually have a stove or open fire too as it is expensive to heat your home when not on the mains.

From autumn through to spring when it gets to mid afternoon you can smell when everybody is lighting their fires. So yes, in a built up area it would have been very significant pollution.

We didn't have central heating until I was a teenager.
It was always freezing going to bed and getting up in the morning. I hated winter. We had a coal fire in the living room and kitchen.

We had a real coal fire in our living room in the 70s, then in the mid eighties we got a real flame gas fire which was ultra-realistic (lit with a match and went “woompf”) but my parents always said it was too expensive to run apart from special occasions. We had central heating anyway. Our front room fireplace in our house now does work but smokeless fuel only and I can never be bothered with the cleaning, so it’s just decorative. In contrast to when I was a child, it’s now the done thing to snuggle up under a throw or two on the sofa to keep you cosy. My parents would only have allowed that if they were old or ill!