Reaching for the sky Ian Jack dreams of chimneys
Posted: 22 Apr 2012, 09:47
Reaching for the sky
Ian Jack dreams of chimneys
Ian Jack
Saturday May 20, 2006
Guardian
The words "dream" and "imagination" are often confused, but one of the interesting things about dreams, the proper dreams induced by sleep, is how unimaginative they are. Strange and disturbing events occur in them, but their cast of characters and their settings are usually drawn from life. Monsters never appear in my dreams, but my mother often does; while the imagination can create pasts and futures, James Ivory on the one hand and George Lucas on the other, dreams tend to be furnished by the materials to hand. And so, in the history of dreams, each generation must dream differently according to its surroundings when awake: dreams featuring crinolines in the 19th century being replaced by dreams about mini-skirts 100 years later, and so on. Given that our minds are now infused by all kinds of artificial imagery from the past and supposed future, this may be changing. It may be that people can now fall asleep and easily dream of themselves as Roman gladiators, but so far it hasn't happened to me. Perhaps I'm too prosaic a dreamer.
It was passing the Horlicks factory at Slough last week on the Oxford train that caused me to recall the earliest dream I can remember. The Horlicks factory is an old brick building with a chimney. My childhood dream placed me on top of a similar chimney, running dizzyingly around the rim several hundred feet up with someone in pursuit. Peas - the dried kind that you soaked - also came into it. I was five or six years old and feverish - measles perhaps - and I remember that when I came to in bed I heard the late afternoon sound of children playing in the street; oddly distanced noises, as though they belonged to the faraway land of the healthy and well.
The dream's location made perfect sense. From the corner of our street you could see the twin chimneys of the Bolton Textile Company and further off the single one of Cross's spinning mill, where my father worked. Later, in Scotland, I passed tall chimneys every day on the bus to school, those of the paper mill, the brickworks, and the linen factory of Erskine Beveridge, where my father also worked. Tall chimneys made of brick or stone were a key part of many British landscapes and of our mental furniture. In textile towns such as Oldham, Halifax and Dundee they rose in priapic forests. Today they are rare enough to have preservation orders slapped on them.
Their purpose is interesting. The primary reason for their great height wasn't to remove noxious fumes from industrial processes and spew them high and relatively harmlessly above people's heads. They were high because steam power needed "natural draught". As James Douet explains in a monograph for the Victorian Society, "Air inside the enclosed shaft of the chimney becomes rarefied by being heated, thereby creating a pressure differential between it and the cooler air outside the furnace ... The effect of the differential is to draw fresh air through the furnace, and boost the combustion of the fire." The principle was first described in Germany in the 17th century. By the late 18th its practical application could be seen everywhere in Britain from Cornish copper mines to the coal pits of central Scotland. Improved steam engines needed more steam, which meant hotter fires, which needed stronger draughts; the higher the chimney and the more light air inside it, the stronger the draught.
Technical tables were published for builders to consult: a boiler raising 10 steam horse-power would need a chimney of 60 ft; for 250 horse-power, 180 ft. As chimneys grew taller, they needed deeper foundations and became free-standing, apart from the workshops. They tapered. They changed in cross-section from square to octangle and to round. Sills appeared at their tops to prevent smoke drifting down their sides. Their numbers and increasing heights became, as Douet writes, a barometer of Britain's economic growth and the most potent symbols of its industrialisation. By the 19th century, architects were employed to give them Italianate and Gothic tops (two at the Tower Works in Leeds were modelled on Giotto's Florentine campanile and the Lamberti tower in Verona).
Size mattered, and not only for technical reasons. In 1842, the Glasgow alkali firm of Tennant and Co built a 436 ft chimney, which for a time was the world's tallest. Not to be outdone, its Glasgow rival, Townsends of Port Dundas, built one reaching 468 ft and opened it to the public for a fortnight, proclaiming that it was the fourth tallest building in the word (the three taller were probably the Gothic cathedral spires of Cologne, Ulm and Beauvais).
At sea, the marine chimney also grew taller and more numerous to meet the demand for greater steam pressure. The public saw four-funnelled liners (a fashion begun by the Germans in the 1890s) as especially powerful and speedy, so that even when there was no engineering need for so much funnelling, shipping lines added dummies, a fourth to the Titanic and a third to the Queen Mary. According to the maritime historian John Maxtone-Graham, the dummies "existed primarily to reassure steerage passengers who tended naively to choose ships by the numbers of funnels they sported".
The last great brick chimney to be built in Britain was that designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott for the Bankside power station: 325 ft high, finished in 1960, and now the crowning glory of the Tate Modern. Long before, and other than in power stations, most of the non-environmental reasons for tall chimneys had gone. Diesel and electric engines had replaced steam as a source of factory power, and where steam boilers still existed furnace draughts were fan-assisted.
I doubt they appear in the dreams of five-year-olds. Today when I spot one of the few left I think of them sentimentally and sinisterly: of the heat shimmering from their tops at Bolton Textile on a sunny day, and of their role as the first great instruments of global warming, changing much more than they knew in the dream-territory high above.
· Ian Jack is the editor of Granta
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
Ian Jack dreams of chimneys
Ian Jack
Saturday May 20, 2006
Guardian
The words "dream" and "imagination" are often confused, but one of the interesting things about dreams, the proper dreams induced by sleep, is how unimaginative they are. Strange and disturbing events occur in them, but their cast of characters and their settings are usually drawn from life. Monsters never appear in my dreams, but my mother often does; while the imagination can create pasts and futures, James Ivory on the one hand and George Lucas on the other, dreams tend to be furnished by the materials to hand. And so, in the history of dreams, each generation must dream differently according to its surroundings when awake: dreams featuring crinolines in the 19th century being replaced by dreams about mini-skirts 100 years later, and so on. Given that our minds are now infused by all kinds of artificial imagery from the past and supposed future, this may be changing. It may be that people can now fall asleep and easily dream of themselves as Roman gladiators, but so far it hasn't happened to me. Perhaps I'm too prosaic a dreamer.
It was passing the Horlicks factory at Slough last week on the Oxford train that caused me to recall the earliest dream I can remember. The Horlicks factory is an old brick building with a chimney. My childhood dream placed me on top of a similar chimney, running dizzyingly around the rim several hundred feet up with someone in pursuit. Peas - the dried kind that you soaked - also came into it. I was five or six years old and feverish - measles perhaps - and I remember that when I came to in bed I heard the late afternoon sound of children playing in the street; oddly distanced noises, as though they belonged to the faraway land of the healthy and well.
The dream's location made perfect sense. From the corner of our street you could see the twin chimneys of the Bolton Textile Company and further off the single one of Cross's spinning mill, where my father worked. Later, in Scotland, I passed tall chimneys every day on the bus to school, those of the paper mill, the brickworks, and the linen factory of Erskine Beveridge, where my father also worked. Tall chimneys made of brick or stone were a key part of many British landscapes and of our mental furniture. In textile towns such as Oldham, Halifax and Dundee they rose in priapic forests. Today they are rare enough to have preservation orders slapped on them.
Their purpose is interesting. The primary reason for their great height wasn't to remove noxious fumes from industrial processes and spew them high and relatively harmlessly above people's heads. They were high because steam power needed "natural draught". As James Douet explains in a monograph for the Victorian Society, "Air inside the enclosed shaft of the chimney becomes rarefied by being heated, thereby creating a pressure differential between it and the cooler air outside the furnace ... The effect of the differential is to draw fresh air through the furnace, and boost the combustion of the fire." The principle was first described in Germany in the 17th century. By the late 18th its practical application could be seen everywhere in Britain from Cornish copper mines to the coal pits of central Scotland. Improved steam engines needed more steam, which meant hotter fires, which needed stronger draughts; the higher the chimney and the more light air inside it, the stronger the draught.
Technical tables were published for builders to consult: a boiler raising 10 steam horse-power would need a chimney of 60 ft; for 250 horse-power, 180 ft. As chimneys grew taller, they needed deeper foundations and became free-standing, apart from the workshops. They tapered. They changed in cross-section from square to octangle and to round. Sills appeared at their tops to prevent smoke drifting down their sides. Their numbers and increasing heights became, as Douet writes, a barometer of Britain's economic growth and the most potent symbols of its industrialisation. By the 19th century, architects were employed to give them Italianate and Gothic tops (two at the Tower Works in Leeds were modelled on Giotto's Florentine campanile and the Lamberti tower in Verona).
Size mattered, and not only for technical reasons. In 1842, the Glasgow alkali firm of Tennant and Co built a 436 ft chimney, which for a time was the world's tallest. Not to be outdone, its Glasgow rival, Townsends of Port Dundas, built one reaching 468 ft and opened it to the public for a fortnight, proclaiming that it was the fourth tallest building in the word (the three taller were probably the Gothic cathedral spires of Cologne, Ulm and Beauvais).
At sea, the marine chimney also grew taller and more numerous to meet the demand for greater steam pressure. The public saw four-funnelled liners (a fashion begun by the Germans in the 1890s) as especially powerful and speedy, so that even when there was no engineering need for so much funnelling, shipping lines added dummies, a fourth to the Titanic and a third to the Queen Mary. According to the maritime historian John Maxtone-Graham, the dummies "existed primarily to reassure steerage passengers who tended naively to choose ships by the numbers of funnels they sported".
The last great brick chimney to be built in Britain was that designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott for the Bankside power station: 325 ft high, finished in 1960, and now the crowning glory of the Tate Modern. Long before, and other than in power stations, most of the non-environmental reasons for tall chimneys had gone. Diesel and electric engines had replaced steam as a source of factory power, and where steam boilers still existed furnace draughts were fan-assisted.
I doubt they appear in the dreams of five-year-olds. Today when I spot one of the few left I think of them sentimentally and sinisterly: of the heat shimmering from their tops at Bolton Textile on a sunny day, and of their role as the first great instruments of global warming, changing much more than they knew in the dream-territory high above.
· Ian Jack is the editor of Granta
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007