The curious world of the chimney

Huddled around our chimenea the other night with a crew of fellow garden geeks, we got talking about chimneys. A few beers later we’d come up with a frankly glittering array of chimney-related stories. Here are some of the team’s favourites.

Alone, Naked, Afraid and on fire

Hard-headed, highly experienced survivors come a cropper with chimneys, as we’ve seen on TV’s Alone. As do the folks on the US naked survival show Naked And Afraid. Alone contestants have been forced to tap out of their Arctic endurance test because the chimney in their shelter set fire to the roof, or collapsed and smoked them out into the frigid black night. Poof, there’s your half a million dollars prize money gone, all because you bollocksed up your chimney design. On Naked and Afraid, as you might or might not like to imagine, the risks to one’s bare personage are so much greater.

Thankfully we don’t have a picture of it, so here’s one of our favourite metal chimineas instead 😉

Lethal chimney-fails lead to tragedy

A chimney looks like a simple enough thing to engineer but get the smallest thing wrong and it’s disastrous. In 2009 the Korba chimney in India collapsed mid-build on top of more than 100 workers who were taking shelter from a thunderstorm. In another tragedy so awful it’s hard to talk about, a man died after being stuck upside down at the top of a 290ft chimney. The body of a teenager was found the week before Christmas, trapped inside the chimney in an empty house. The body of a missing man was found in a chimney over a month after mysterious screams were heard from the building. The list goes on.

Here’s another of our cool chimeneas to cheer you up.

Retro chimney tales from the ’70s

Every time mum hoovered, the cat would disappear up the chimney and stay there, perched on a little brick ledge about six feet up, until the noise ended. She was a white cat but she’d jump down black with coal dust. We had the sweep round once a year. He’s block the fireplaces with sheets and close the doors, but the house would still be sooty weeks later. Just like, when you have a party, you keep finding peanuts for months afterwards, even when there were no peanuts present at the event.

Before the law made it a smoke-free zone the streets of Middlesbrough were thick with smoke, not just from the industrial-size chimneys at the steel works, chemical works and ICI but on every house, each pouring out trails of dense brown smoke from coal and wood. When the wind blew in the wrong direction the air stank. We’d feel sick in the playground from the thick yellowy, plasticky smell that stuck to our clothes.

You know what’s coming, don’t you – here’s another stunning chimenea, this time in cast iron.

Sending your kids up the chimney

Tiny Victorian children, usually five or six years old but sometimes as young as three, were sent up chimneys by their chimneysweep employers, paid a pittance to clear stubborn sooty blockages by squeezing into small spaces. They didn’t go to school, couldn’t read or write and worked in lethally dangerous conditions. While the modern world is often mental-crazy, at least we don’t have to force our kids into hard labour.

Treasures lost and found up chimneys

Granny Molly hid her jewellery box up the chimney, on the same sort of little shelf the cat sat on at our house. When she got very old she’d forget she’d put it up there, call the police, then remember again and be horribly embarrassed. But she isn’t the only one to shove valuables up there in the dark, hidden in the muck.

A woman renovating a 400 year old cottage in Wales found a gold necklace in the cracked plaster lining her inglenook fireplace, put there to protect the place from demons. In 2016 a world map dating back to the 1600s was found stuffed up an Aberdeen chimney, leading to one of the most challenging restorations the National Library of Scotland had every tackled. It took 150 hours of work to bring the Dutch engraver Gerald Valck’s map back to its original glory. The moral of the story – if you have a chimney, it isn’t a bad idea to have a butchers up it.

There are so many stories to tell about the chimney, on the face of it a completely ordinary object nobody spends much time thinking about, about as exciting as watching paint dry. We might tell you some more. In the meantime enjoy exploring our beautiful collection of Mexican clay chimeneas, metal chimeneas and more.