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COUNCIL HOUSE KITCHEN RANGE


rover1949

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I was brought up in a post-war council house.  The kitchen had a cast iron oven range that was heated by the fire in the living room, so there was no fire in the kitchen itself.  Heat was controlled by a number of levers and dampers. Does anyone know what these were called or, even better, have  a picture of one?  (I don't mean the Yorkshire range with the fire in the kitchen).

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We had the same fire in our house on the manor estate. It was a Yorkshire range exactly like the one in the photo, the only difference was the oven hinges and where the oven door handle was, ours were just steel coloured but my mother may have done that by blackleading.

 

 

285F5BD5-6DA1-4A30-A51F-F550A565FB06.jpeg

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Thanks Tozzin, - ours wasn't like that, there was no fire in the range, just an oven and hobs.

The fire was in the living room on the other side.

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Ours was a sort of poor man's Aga.  We tried to get it going a few times, got a lot of smoke and fumes but very little usable heat.

There must have been thousands of these fitted.

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I was  largely brought up in a 1930s  Council semi on low Shiregreen The living room had a fire with a back boiler ( no oven). The fire could be regulated ( well, sort of) by a nob which opened or closed off the air and there was a device to keep the fire (just) on overnight. The kitchen had no heating at all except we had a smelly paraffin heater. and in a cold winter the gas oven was left on with the door left open. Our earlier house on the Brushes estate,  built in the 1920s, had exactly the same range as the one illustrated.

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22 minutes ago, lysandernovo said:

I was  largely brought up in a 1930s  Council semi on low Shiregreen The living room had a fire with a back boiler ( no oven). The fire could be regulated ( well, sort of) by a nob which opened or closed off the air and there was a device to keep the fire (just) on overnight. The kitchen had no heating at all except we had a smelly paraffin heater. and in a cold winter the gas oven was left on with the door left open. Our earlier house on the Brushes estate,  built in the 1920s, had exactly the same range as the one illustrated.

The cast iron range in our living room on the Old Greenhill estate was just like the one lysandernovo describes, no oven, it did have a bracket that you could put your kettle/pan on and then swivel it over the fire, also remember the damper! you could change the position of the damper either to slow down the draw of the fire or to let the fire pass under the back boiler to heat the hot water.

The cast iron range was removed from most of the Sheffield Corporation houses in the late 50s and replaced with a tiled fire place exactly like this one I came across in Southwell Work House.

Fire Place.jpg

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22 minutes ago, southside said:

The cast iron range in our living room on the Old Greenhill estate was just like the one lysandernovo describes, no oven, it did have a bracket that you could put your kettle/pan on and then swivel it over the fire, also remember the damper! you could change the position of the damper either to slow down the draw of the fire or to let the fire pass under the back boiler to heat the hot water.

The cast iron range was removed from most of the Sheffield Corporation houses in the late 50s and replaced with a tiled fire place exactly like this one I came across in Southwell Work House.

Fire Place.jpg

That’s the exact one my mother had put in when the council ripped out her beloved cast iron range.

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That's what ours looked like in the living room with a back boiler boiler behind.

The kitchen range was on the other side.

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