Wednesday 6 July 2011

Chimney stacks and rooftops

This morning I tried looking at some houses in Bristol as if I was a foreigner. I thought that someone in the world would find these ordinary houses exotic and interesting, and I wanted to see them in the same way.

I was in a fairly run down area of Bristol, and the houses were cheap and built by the council. The basic shape was always the same, and all the metal gates at the ends of paths and driveways were the same design.

The roofs on the houses were flat, so in that respect this was not an ordinary British street. But I noticed that the chimney stacks looked too tall. They were almost the same height as if they had sloping roofs. Perhaps they were supposed to have roofs, but at the last minute, someone decided they shouldn’t. And no one told the man who was building the chimneys.

There’s probably some health and safety reason for a smoke outlet to be a particular distance from a window, but I imagine the builders scratching their heads when they got the architect’s plans and seeing such tall chimney stacks.

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