Last week I encountered an unusual exhibit in the Ashmolean Museum’s ‘Exploring the Past’ gallery. For staring out from inside one of the glass cases was a little clay head cheekily sticking his tongue out at me. His label says that he once sat atop a merchant’s house in the High Street of 14th century Oxford. The hollowed-out creation with holes for eyes, nose and ears used as vents for the smoke that rose up through the rafters from the central hearth below. An early chimney pot. Amusingly crafted to send smoke billowing from its various orifices. How very charming.
And it sparked the inspiration to set off around the city with my camera on a chimney pot pilgrimage. A chimney crawl if you like. Choosing one of those cold but clear May days we have had recently, to gaze upwards to check how fine a fare of fancy flues remain today. Chimneys have after all some competition when it comes to our city skyline. What with its spires and towers, grotesques and gargoyles, crenelations and crocketed pinnacles all vying for attention. But I’d like to think they hold their own.
For once you concentrate, your eyes honed, your neck strained heavenwards, a sea of sprouting stalks comes into focus. On the colleges some are massive and many feet tall, built for early kitchens and great halls. Architectural flights of fancy, an advertisement of status, a chance to engage in inter-collegiate rivalry. Elaborate edifices of decorative stone. Later when the numbers of students increased, each requiring their room to be heated, vast towers of brick were erected bristling with cylindrical clay toppers.
And then there are the terraces of houses fanning out from the centre. The roofs crowned in uniform clumps of many potted stacks. I can see them now as I write from my attic study. Sentinels of the skyline. Rows upon rows of neat cylindrical soldiers standing to attention.
Except that these lines of infantry rarely see action these days. Indeed, it’s illegal to have an open fire around our way. Capped and cowled, shorn of their purpose, there is a melancholic look to what have become useful only as perches for pigeons.
But for me they will always be redolent of hearth and home. A romantic reminder of domesticity. Of flaming log fires, of family gatherings, the comforting smell of burning wood. Of Mary Poppins and Father Christmas.
And though modern houses may have no need for them, for me a house without a chimney doesn’t look quite right. So gaze aloft and celebrate the tall and the small, the ornate and the plain, the single stalks and the clusters, the sheer exuberance of wonderful chimney stacks that we still see around our city. Long may they live on.
Balliol College
Trinity College
Museum Lodge
Love these – view from the other direction.
The majestic multi coloured brick stacks of Keble College.
Brasenose Lane. In the 19th century a growing population of students meant an extra layer of attic rooms was added to many college quadrangles. Each room needed a fireplace and consequently a chimney – here they sprout up from the rooftops at regular intervals.
Hertford College.
The three kings of Holywell Street.
Holywell Street
Through the walls of Rose Lane.
Magdalen College
The Oxford Union
University College
St John Street – Oxford’s first residential housing development built in the 1830’s.
More kings from the Cowley Road. The 19th century was the heyday of the chimney pot, with thousands of different designs on offer.
Magdalen College
St Paul’s Day Nursery
Contrasted against the Blavatnik School of Government behind which has no chimney that I can see.
The cheeky chimney pot from 14th century Oxford’s High Street now in the Ashmolean Museum.
Many chimney pots however end up like this one on my allotment – used for forcing rhubarb. This was happening as early as 1912 when A.C. Marshall wrote in Every Woman’s Encyclopaedia, “Ordinary chimney-pots costing Is. 3d. a piece may be used for forcing early rhubarb, and are as effective as rhubarb pots costing 3s.”
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