AND ANOTHER THING
It's not necessarily a sign of progress when chimneys disappear
PAUL JOHNSON
0 ne institution which will not survive the new millennium is the chimney. I call it an institution rather than an architectural detail because chimneys are as old as hous- es, almost as old as fire itself. And the word has endless associations.
Indeed, it is a good, satisfying word, hav- ing what Charles Lamb called a fine smack of Englishry about it; it took our national genius to turn the colourless French term cheminge into such a nutty, nougaty word as chimney, so much more resonant than all the other terms for tubes designed to allow smoke to escape. When I was in the army, young subalterns relieved the boredom of life on a troopship by getting the nautical terms wrong and so annoying the naval officers. We got a lot of pleasure from call- ing the captain 'the man on the roof' and the funnels chimneys.
Chimneys, both industrial and domestic, have been disappearing fast for some time, As a boy living in the Potteries, I found it possible to go to a place overlooking Burslem and survey a panorama of over a thousand works chimneys and broad-bel- lied pot-banks, each belching smoke in prodigious quantities — an amazing sight, unthinkable now in our environment-con- scious age, and arousing much disgust even then, though to me it had a romantic, unholy beauty. That figure did not even include the myriads of house chimneys, at a time when everyone burned coal fires, the poor making do with 'slack', which emitted smoke and virtually nothing else. The last time I was in Stoke-on-Trent, a year or two back, I found the only bottle-shaped pot- bank left was an industrial museum and the smoke had vanished.
Most houses built today do not have chimneys as such, and fireplaces, if they exist at all, are for show and to accommo- date hideous electric fake blazes. In Ameri- ca, estate agents already stress the survival of fireplaces as evidence of period glamour and list the number within the property as a selling feature. I well remember the fuss Cecil King made in the early 1960s when, as almighty chairman of IPC, then the world's largest publishing company, he dis- covered that his office in its brand-new building on Holborn Circus did not contain facilities for a proper coal fire, to which he was accustomed. So one was put in, and a special chimney had to be installed at the then enormous cost of £50,000. This was cited as evidence of growing megalomania: `That man insisted on having a chimney all to himself.'
Painters love chimneys because they break the dull lines of the rooftop, produc- ing irregular vertical punctuations in the horizontal. They are lovely splashes of colour too: orange, scarlet, crimson, gam- boge, terra-cotta. The varieties of chimney- pots, in addition to the shapes of the chim- neys themselves, are enormous. From the back of my house in Bayswater, I counted 78 chimney-pots this morning in dozens of different shapes. So chimneys give a spicy visual flavour even to the most monotonous townscape. If chimneys did not exist, artists would have to invent them. In fact they do invent them. The other day, reconstructing a giant watercolour painting of the Salute church in Venice from my sketches, I found that, on the left, I had landed myself with a boring flat line of the Dogana roof, next to the church. So to break it up I stuck in sev- eral of the marvellous old Venetian chim- neys which terminate in broad-mouthed funnels and are still the most characteristic building detail of that matchless city.
One of many reasons Carpaccio is my favourite painter is that he obviously loved and needed these Venetian chimneys. In his glorious masterpiece now in the Accademia, 'Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross at the Rialto', he has contrived to include no fewer than 38 specimens, ren- dered with close attention to their rich typology. Some are brilliantly decorated, especially two handsome monsters on the right of the painting, sprouting from what is now the fish-market. Venetian chimneys had a way of making their incongruous `Sony, I'm staying in tonight to watch the family.' appearance in all Carpaccio's works, whether he was dealing with the Old Testa- ment or the life of Christ or the fathers of the Church or even mythology. I imagine that if he woke up in the morning out of sorts or depressed or with a hangover, and gloomily contemplated an unfinished can- vas, he would get himself to rights by say- ing, 'Oh well, I'll put in a chimney or two!' The funnel chimneys of Venice are an outstanding example of the vernacular modes which make the art of chimney con- , struction so interesting. Countless builders and house-owners over the ages have had cranky theories about which shapes of chimney and pot stop fires smoking hence the variety. Regional chimney designs respond to prevailing winds and weather patterns. My favourite chimney- stacks of all are the funny, squat, round ones of the Lake District farmhouses on the high fells. They are now very rare and usually to be found only in National Trust properties. Wordsworth loved them: to him they were poetry in rough stone.
Not that Wordsworth liked all chimneys — far from it. Early in the 19th century, Charles Tennant of Glasgow built the Saint Rollox soda works, then the biggest chemi- cal factory in the world, spread over 100 acres. By pouring sulphuric acid on salt, it produced gigantic clouds of hydrochloric acid gas, one of the first recorded instances of large-scale industrial pollution. The resulting uproar from local landowners and householders led Tennant to try to disperse the poisonous smoke high in the atmo- sphere by building a chimney 455 feet high. It was higher than a cathedral, visible for 50 miles, and aroused even more objections. Wordsworth united with Sir Walter Scott to denounce it as 'intolerable'.
Personally I like very tall chimneys. One solitary specimen, rearing its head high above an industrial flatness, and with a wisp of smoke at its mouth to show it is alive and breathing, can add magic to a dull land- scape. As L.S. Lowry used to say to my father, in answer to a clean-air argument, `Where would I be without a chimney or two?' He loved them even more than Carpaccio did.
If these familiar symbols of warmth, work, greed, waste and human activity do disappear for good, they will leave painful holes in our visual experience. Perhaps we should adopt the old Albanian form of greeting: 'Good health to your chimney!'
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