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The WARMING & VENTILATING of VICTORIAN & EDWARDIAN CHURCHES

 

 


Christ Church, Worthing, c.1857

 

 

BRIAN ROBERTS & FRANK J FERRIS




The WARMING & VENTILATING of VICTORIAN & EDWARDIAN CHURCHES

 

 


City of London Churches [The Builder, 1870/744]

 

 

 

A CIBSE HERITAGE GROUP

ELECTRONIC PUBLICATION





The WARMING & VENTILATING of VICTORIAN & EDWARDIAN CHURCHES

 

 

 

 

 

CONTENTS

 

SECTIONS

 

1. Foreword, Acknowledgments & Introduction

 

2. The Heritage Group Website

 

3. Directory of Religious Buildings

 

4. Manufacturers & Installers

 

5. References

 

 

 

 

APPENDICES

 

A-1. Early Church Heating (The Builder 1843-83)

 

A-2. Victorian Architects

 

A-3. English Cathedrals

 

A-4. The Heating Engineers (List of Installations)

 

A-5. Master Masons & Builders

 

 





The WARMING & VENTILATING of VICTORIAN & EDWARDIAN CHURCHES

 

 

Section-1

 

FOREWORD, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 & INTRODUCTION






 




The WARMING & VENTILATING of VICTORIAN & EDWARDIAN CHURCHES

 

 

Section-1

 

INTRODUCTION

 

 

 

 

 

At the beginning of the 19th century, it was recognised there were insufficient churches to serve a population that was not only increasing in numbers but moving from the countryside into the towns. In 1803 there was “An Act to Promote the Building, Repairing or Otherwise Providing of Churches and Chapels.” This was amended in 1811, but the key legislation came in 1818 with “An Act for Promoting the Building of Additional Churches in Populous Parishes.” This allowed State finance to be available for church building, these being known as Commissioners’ Churches, or Waterloo Churches, being built with the approval of The Commissioners for Building New Churches in the years following the Battle of Waterloo (1815). All of this was consolidated in an Act of 1824.     

 

The Victorian Era lasted over sixty years. Queen Victoria came to the throne on the 20th June 1837. She died on the 22nd January 1901. The reign of Edward VII, the Edwardian era, lasted until 1911. Some extent of the work carried out by the growing heating industry may be gauged from the construction rate of new and rebuilt Anglican churches during the years 1835 to 1875 when some 3765 churches were consecrated, of which 1010 were in the peak decade of the 1860’s. In addition, numerous Catholic churches and convents were built during the same period.

 

 

 

Pioneers of Warming & Ventilating

Steam heating was an English innovation, first proposed by a Colonel William Cook in 1745. It was not immediately taken up, though James Watt used it to heat his writing room in 1784, and his partner, Matthew Boulton, to warm his living room and bath in 1789. James Hoyle of Halifax took out a patent for steam heating in 1791, while in 1793 Green took out a patent “to heat air in double tubes, through which steam or water can circulate.” Most early applications of steam heating were for factories, and later in glasshouses. The first church to have been warmed by steam may be one in Dublin, said to have been arranged by Count Rumford in 1796.  But steam heating for English churches was extremely rare.