Fireplaces....little pipes?

[AGreatUsername]

In our soon-to-be house are many fireplaces. 7 in fact. All Edwardian which I presume were originally open fires. Now most of them have a little brass pipe coming out of the floor next to them (these don’t go anywhere, they just stick up) which I am assuming is a gas feed. How would an open fire have been converted to gas? Can these be easily removed? In a handful of the fireplaces there are also strange boxes sitting in the liner which seem to be some kind of ignition box? I’m lost as to what to do. The pipes interfere with the flooring plan I want, and if we want any of them fires to work it’d be on a wood burner/open fire basis.

Any ideas?

The gas fire would have stood in front of the fireplace.

Gas pipes. A decent gas engineer will be able to remove them for you, isolating them from the main pipe. We’re having ours replaced, but no point keeping yours if you aren’t having gas fires anyway.

Oh! In front of the fire? Never thought of that! They’re beautiful original fireplaces, must’ve looked horrible. Thank you for the information that’s really helpful.

Ours go in the side, through the skirting and into the plaster over the brick. I’d love to knock out the fireplaces and have a real fire or wood burner, but for now we’re just getting the old lead ones taken out and new ones put in.
Even if they’re not gas pipes they won’t be integral to the structure of the fire (some kind of ventilation, maybe?) and should be easily removable.

Our house (Victorian) had a couple of fireplaces with gas burners fitted in the fireplaces and fake coals on top. They looked real when on but we capped them off as they weren’t very safe (had to light them by switching on gas and throwing a match in). I wonder if they did something similar in your house?

@cottipus it’s possible with the little boxes in there. I have tried googling but to no avail. They had an on and off switch and one that said ignition so maybe like you said, a kind of unsafe cobbled together gas fire not compromising the look of a period fireplace. They’re all capped off now anyway by the looks of it so we’ll just remove the gas pipes and restore the nice looking fireplaces apart from a log burner in the living room. The kitchen has an original bread oven/open fire thing with blue enamel all over it too, such a nice piece of history but it’s going to have to go as we are removing that wall!