Plumbers in Elsecar, Barnsley

Heating a conservation village of solid stone walls

Elsecar sits around six miles south of Barnsley in the valley of Knoll Beck, roughly two miles below Hoyland, with its own station on the Sheffield to Barnsley line and the heritage centre occupying the former New Yard workshops. It was built from the 1790s as a planned estate village under the Earls Fitzwilliam, and most of that planned village survives: Old Row, Station Row, Distillery Row of 1836, Reform Row of 1837, the terraces of Fitzwilliam Street and Cobcar Terrace.

For heating work the construction is the whole story. The traditional fabric here is local sandstone walls with stone slate roofs, and as a general rule buildings before 1850 are coursed rubble while later ones are coursed dressed stone. These are solid walls with no cavity, built with an outer and inner stone skin and rubble infill, and the local sandstone is soft and weathers readily. That means high heat loss, radiators that often need to be sized properly rather than matched to what was there, and pipe and flue routes that have to be worked out in advance instead of chased through whatever is nearest. Chimney stacks are sandstone or brick and are not something to make holes in casually.

The 1911 garden village at the Strafford Avenue, Lifford Place and Cobcar Lane end is different again: brick-built houses with rendered upper storeys, deep red tiled roofs, tall brick chimneystacks and, unusually for the date, internal bathrooms. There are around thirty listed buildings in the conservation area, with terraces such as Old Row and Reform Row each listed as a single item covering several dwellings, so what one owner does affects a protected group. Much original cast iron rainwater goods has already been replaced in plastic, and the historic rear outbuildings are expected to be retained. We plan work here accordingly, and we will tell you where we think consent is needed before anything is fixed to the building. Every gas job is carried out by a Gas Safe registered engineer.