Chimney Pots

Tuesday, 10th September 2002, West Yorkshire

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Sitting in my mum's garden this afternoon with nothing better to draw I sketch one of the chimney pots. I feel that chimney pots add character to a house and that somehow modern houses, which of course don't need them, look as if they're lacking something. The house was built for a family of woollen mill owners, the Baines, in 1869, and I guess that the crowned design (left, centre) , hidden by the more modern looking louvred one, might date from that time.

Doric chimney pot

Over the high garden wall is a row of terraced cottages that I believe were originally built for the servants who worked in the house and its gardens. Most of the chimney pots there have been replaced, some of them by stumpy little modern designs which might be practical but offer little in the way of architectural interest, but there's one in Doric, or Egyptian style (right), that must be very old.

My brother-in-law who is a builder had been salvaging any Victorian chimney pots that he was asked to replace and he'd put them together, with some potted herbs, outside the back door. One evening his wife looked out and a man was loading them into the back of a van. When she asked what he was doing he nonchalantly closed the van doors and drove away with the collection.

Richard Bell,
wildlife illustrator
E-mail; 'richard@willowisland.co.uk'