The Englishman's House: A Practical Guide for Selecting and Building a House

by C. J. Richardson

The proposal was, that under the footways along the side of every street and lane, flues should be constructed of sufficient capacity to carry off all the smoke and other atmospheric impurities, these flues all converging, upon a general plan, to tall shafts or chimneys at some distance from the town, and supplied with furnaces. These, when the fires were once ignited, would give a fire produced by the combustion of the inflammable gases accompanying the smoke, and which would burn spontaneously in a similar manner to the combustion of foul air from old shafts connected with coal mines. The combustion might be assisted by jets of coal gas, in a fire of coke.

In very large towns it would be necessary, Mr. Flockton added, to divide the whole into districts, and to erect towers in the centre of each, to which all the flues should converge. He published a plate, showing two large dwelling-houses, with a street between, the common sewer in the middle of the carriage way, and the smoke flues on each side under the footpaths, also showing the connexion between the sewer and flue. The alteration proposed to houses already erected consisted in converting ascending into descending flues; turning the smoke from the chimney-top into the latter, and from thence into the street flue. This operation would have necessitated the pulling down and rebuilding of the flue walls. The street smoke flues, in order to carry off the smoke from a few thousand chimneys, would require to have been made of a size even larger than the sewer itself. Provision must have been made for clearing out the soot, for the smoke would have been cooled and the soot would accumulate in large quantities in them.

The same scheme, with similar constructions, was proposed by a foreign gentleman, who took out a patent for it in 1850 (No. 13,061). His plan was a very grand one; he did not propose alterations in existing buildings, but pulled them down and gave designs for a new city.

A more practical plan was proposed about 1851 by Mr. Devey, a surveyor of Furnival’s Inn. A model of his invention was in the Great Exhibition of 1851, and it is described and an engraving given of it in the illustrated volumes published by the Royal Exhibition Commissioners at the close of the Exhibition. The model is now in the Museum at South Kensington. Mr. Devey’s plan was to make only one descending flue to each building, to which the flues at the top could be either connected or not, at pleasure; the descending flue was carried to the sewer in the middle of the street, and the action of this was to be assisted by the heat of the kitchen fire. He says, “The smoke would be drawn down by the current produced by exhaustion in the sewer, the action being assisted by the kitchen fire.” Mr. Devey did not propose to have furnace shafts, but depended entirely upon the sewer acting as an exhaust.

In this scheme the objections were, that one descending flue was not sufficient to carry off the smoke from several chimneys, and the sewer certainly would not act as an exhaust without its being connected with upright furnaces. Our sewers generally have ventilating openings which permit their odours to ascend into our streets. Soot would no doubt neutralize these odours—this, a paper in a late Quarterly Review (April, 1866) admits. First, speaking of the sewer gases, the reviewer says: “These offensive gases have often engendered formidable diseases, and have, in several instances of late, been clearly shown to have caused the outbreak both of typhoid fever and cholera.” Of this the author has had proof during the outbreak of cholera in London in 1849. He was superintending the construction of a mass of buildings in one of the worst dwelling districts in London. This builder, who had just finished the erection of Harrington House, a description of which is given in this volume, died the first night of the outbreak in the greatest agony; he was a strong robust man; from one to three deaths took place in every house in the locality; a black flag was put up in the streets, and the foul fiend reigned for a while supreme. A large mass of the worst buildings have been cleared away, and model lodging-houses erected, but a considerable portion of the rotten old structures remain, the sewers are untouched, and the visitation of the cholera forgotten.

The Quarterly Review says there is no reason why ordinary sewers should not be made to serve the double purpose of carrying off smoke and sewage at the same time, provided they were connected here and there with high shafts rendered powerfully expansive by furnaces; and adds, “sewage would be improved for agricultural purposes by admixture with soot, which is an excellent manure, and the noxious qualities of the sewer gases would be destroyed.” Whether soot would increase the value of sewage or decrease it, is a question for chemists to decide; a generally increasing opinion is, that our method of using sewage by liquefaction and sending it away, is a mistake, and renders it quite worthless, and that the system of dry earth-closets is more conformable to Nature’s laws.

The subject was taken up in 1857 by Mr. Peter Spence, of Manchester, a large alum manufacturer.[G] This gentleman states that the “blacks,” the horror of the Londoner, are guiltless of any deleterious effect to human health, as carbon is one of the most anti-putrescent of bodies, and while floating in the atmosphere over everything, arrest and destroy noxious and miasmatic vapours. Perfect freedom from smoke would, if accomplished, only increase the evil arising from the purely gaseous results of combustion. He proposed a system of atmospheric or gaseous sewage, and the complete removal of all their gases to a safe distance from our towns. He would combine this gaseous sewage in such a form with town drainage as would bring all the liquid sewage into contact with the gases from our furnaces and house fires, the liquid sewage being kept from all surface drainage. The same liquid and fœtid mass of sewage he would concentrate in an innoxious form, to be converted, in a convenient place, where it might with perfect safety be manufactured into manure more valuable than the richest guano.

For effecting this all the gases from our coal combustion would have to be conveyed along the same tunnel with the sewage to centralizing conduits converging to a point, where an immense chimney, 600 ft. high, should be erected, to discharge these gases into the atmosphere, the ascensive power being obtained either from the retained heat of the gases, which would probably be found quite sufficient, or if not, artificial heat could then be applied to effect the object. The chimney should be of the internal diameter of 100 ft. at the top, and 140 ft. external diameter at the bottom. This would take the smoke from 500 chimneys and every particle of foul emanation from the sewer, and every leak or opening to the upward air from these sewers would not then emit foul gases, but draw in fresh air with a pressure or suction of three and a half pounds per foot, and with a velocity of 40 feet per second. This gentleman says: “It is idle to talk of trapping, and thus confining gases evolved under ground; exit they must and will have, and when you imagine you have secured them in one place, you will find them pouring out in another.” He makes this plain by an illustration. He took an old-fashioned detached house; after entering into possession he found frequently very disagreeable smells, especially after rain, a change of wind, or a fall of the barometer; it may be remarked here that it was not necessary to take an old-fashioned house to find out this; in more modern built houses in London, after a fall in the barometer or rain, such a thing is repeatedly occurring. Mr. Spence, to cure the evil in his old mansion, exhausted all the remedies which the philosophy of London schemes acknowledges; he trapped all the exits from the sewer with the most approved patent girds; all slopstone pipes were cut and water-luted. But this was of no use, the smell came through the very walls and floors, and one bedroom on the first floor, which showed no connexion with the sewer, was quite uninhabitable. He adopted a plan which succeeded: a branch from the main sewer was brought right under the kitchen grate, from that a pipe of cast iron, four inches in diameter, was carried up through the brickwork, and the open top projected into the chimney a yard and a half behind the kitchen fire, above the fire. When this fire was again lighted, in a few hours the house was perfectly sweet, and the distant bedroom, uninhabitable before, has been slept in ever since. When this nuisance occurs in a London house the only remedy is to open the doors and windows to get rid of it, as we are not allowed to meddle with the sewers. Disagreeable effluvia in dwellings often occur, and baffle every endeavour to trace from where they proceed; in every case it is from choked-up drains or the sewer, and the decomposition of animal and vegetable matter therein retained.

As for Mr. Spence’s scheme, its grandeur almost stops its execution. It is well known that in all large manufactories, and in gas works, a tall chimney serves to draw out the smoke from the numerous fires, and it forms a smoke-outlet for them all. In most of these places the fuel is used up so completely that it is only the gases of combustion that are drawn away. Mr. Spence’s scheme has been successfully tried in its application to private residences, and also on a large scale to the new Assize Courts in Manchester. It was adopted by one of the architects in the competitive designs for the New Law Courts in London.

If these tall shafts and furnaces were applied in London, it may be questioned whether the smoke in cooling would not deposit the soot in the sewer, and this must be removed, if not run off by water. The flues connecting the house fires with the sewer would be partly horizontal, and these would certainly fill with soot, and no machines we have at present in use could clean out these flues from above. The operation must be performed from within the sewer, and then these flues being unsupplied with drain-eyes at their entrance to the sewer, would form so many open channels for the passage of the sewer gases into the houses. This would be the case in a very great degree where there were no fires in the stoves and their register doors were open. It would require an immense consumption of fuel in the high stalks to cause a current to prevent it, and the furnaces must be close together to lessen the cooling effects of cold currents of air from flues not in use.