This new awakening of interest in a real fire in the hearth has resulted in the recent trend by speculative house builders to shut out the open fire to be reversed as more and more people again demand the attraction of a fire in the living-room. The type of fire preferred is also interesting: the traditional grate can be associated with the ideals of a closely-knit family life familiar from nineteenth-century genre painting and with this nostalgic notion in mind there is a great demand for the
The Breakfast Table, after Webster. There are many fine details in this genre painting, not least the bee-skip and honey-pot in the foreground. What attracts most is the way the family group around the table relates to the fireplace. Grandfather with the smallest child on his knee, father cutting bread, two daughters sipping - could it be? - bread and milk, one of whom is feeding her pet dog, whilst the unwilling schoolboy goes cross-eyed over his enforced Latin conjugation. scrubbed up and spruce Victorian cast-iron grate, now polished as it never was in the days of our Queen Victoria, to a shiny steel colour set into a stripped and waxed pine surround. This delightful memento of the Victorian interior, it is interesting to note, has had the taste of our day imposed just as strongly on the artefact by stripping it back to its natural material. The Victorian middle-class householder would probably have preferred the chimney-piece painted to imitate a richer wood or marble, and the steel finished in the then ubiquitous black lead polish. Not only Victorian surrounds but the elegant marble chimney-pieces of the eighteenth century find a ready sale, and so, curiously, to a greater degree the smaller-scaled French chimney-pieces of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Workshops in various parts of London and other cities are set up to carefully restore and clean these now precious artefacts and set them up in new homes where they can be enjoyed very much as sculptural objects in their own right, not just to frame the open fire.
Not that the fireplace really ever died out, for although many people have lived in a house without a fire they may at least not have chosen to do without the symbolism of one, for countless substitutes for the real thing have been thought up. The elegant marble chimney-piece can still be set against a wall and an electric-powered imitation log fire can be switched on (with nodding apologies to Sir John Betjeman). In desperation the whole composition can even be painted on a wall en trompe l'oeil, but all these tricks simply serve to point up the evident need for a real focus, the Latin word for hearth.
The real thing can itself now be achieved with remarkable facility. No room without a fireplace in a private house (flats can be little more difficult) need be without a real fire for longer than it takes to install a prefabricated flue, double¬walled and well insulated, threaded through the house to emerge at roof level.
Nine hundred years ago something of an invention - parallel to that of the discovery of the wheel in its way - was made when the chimney was designed to carry away the smoke from a fire. An example of this can be seen at a Norman house in Christchurch, Hampshire, where the circular stone chimney still points its funnel to the skies as a remarkable prototype of later designs. By carefully arranging the relationship between the fire at the foot to the height of the flue, it was gradually found that a degree of control in the rate of combustion and heat output could be obtained. The science of controlling the fire on the hearth had made a substantial advance. Through the succeeding centuries refinements have been made by almost every generation so that today, the fireplace can, to para¬phrase Le Corbusier, be described as a machine for burning fuel, a far cry indeed from the beaten earth floor of the early dwelling where the smoke found its way out of a louvre or unglazed window.