Last updated
05 February 2012
Quest for the Good Life 
Discovering our Victorian fireplace
Living in a Victorian house you would expect to have Victorian chimneys throughout. We all know though how fires fell out of fashion throughout the 1970’s and subsequently were removed, boarded up and made to disappear from view.
Prior to this, the fireplace would have been a key important feature of the house. Each room had a fireplace and the chimneys all found their way up to the roof via offset bends and various stacks. Despite all attempts to remove the visual effect of old fireplaces, you simply could not take away the chimneys they were part of the structure of the building.
At our house, we had the classic chimney breast, quite wide in the kitchen, boarded up, papered over and emulsioned. A false mantel piece has been placed over this to “pretend” there was a fire there.
This picture shows the raw state of the old chimney breast. On the left hand side is the chimney which you can see has been plastered, filled in and generally altered many times in its history. On the right there’s evidence that there had been another flue here with perhaps a bread oven or something similar.
Once you start to knock off the old plaster, evidence of the previous fireplace begins
to reveal itself. In this picture you can see the arch of bricks that forms the
lintel support for the stack. Beneath this the fireplace has been in-
Then we see, amongst the mess, the real fireplace structure. I’m sure the Victorians never built this with the intention of showing bricks. They were very much concerned with covering it over, and the brickwork is a bit rough. We like brick though so this becomes part of the new fireplace. With a lot of scratching, picking and pointing up the brick structure becomes as good as it can be. The roughness of the bricks and the old lime mortar doesn’t bother us apart from knowing we would have to seal it up to prevent paint from peeling. For this an alkali primer/sealer was used (international paints). Two coats meant the surface was sealed. Then the emulsion will hopefully stay on longer.
So with the brickwork prepared, the old hearth levelled, extended and surfaced with slates, the job is pretty much complete. The cost to open the fireplace was not massive, but the time involved was considerable. You also had a lot of rubble, soot (chimneys need sweeping before lining) and old cement to get rid of. Well worth the effort.