建議搜索: coal fired cooking range, coal fireplace roast 圖片
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Kitchen ranges: All fired up on the old range
轉載自:
Jonny Beardsall
12:01AM GMT 02 Feb 2008
One man has spent years perfecting and replicating this bastion of the Victorian kitchen, says Jonny Beardsall
In his workshop in East Halton, near Skipton, a 55-year-old Yorkshireman is putting the finishing touches to the shiny black jigsaw-like pieces of another one of his Yorkshire ranges that will soon be installed in the home of a customer who wants to turn the clock back a century.
Gordon Pickles makes cast-iron kitchen ranges. Unlike a gleaming Aga, Rayburn or Esse, you cannot hurry a Pickles. With an output of just six new ranges a year, he has a waiting list and, if you order one tomorrow, you will have it in time for Christmas… just. In two decades, he has made more than 100, which burn coal or wood. Each is a reminder of a glorious industrial past, and if you keep them lit they will warm your kitchen, cook your food, provide domestic hot water and even heat four to five radiators.
His wife, Jeanette, does his paperwork and he is yet to persuade their son, Andrew, 20, an agricultural engineer, to join him in the business, so the knowledge he has amassed should be recorded. He shakes his head - nothing is written down.
Gordon had been a haulier when he was first offered a range. It was a pile of dismantled cast iron, but pieces were missing. He didn't want it, but when he chanced on another weeks later in a kitchen in Ingleton, he was keener. Given the increasing enthusiasm for architectural salvage, he dismantled it and sensed that he had stumbled upon a new sideline.
Over several months, he advertised for others. Most had pieces missing or were broken because cast iron snaps easily. "One had some pork pies in the oven - they'd been there for years," he laughs. Most were only fit for scrap, which had been the fate of many by the 1920s when gas and electric ovens were readily available and the now-ubiquitous Aga began arriving from Sweden.
But as he had the perfect range from Ingleton, he wondered if he could reproduce an identical new one. A carpenter made wooden patterns and he took them to a foundry. The first castings, which were "sand'' castings, were not a huge success. "The metal bent like bananas because the patterns had warped," he says.
A pattern-maker was called up, new patterns were made and a spanking Pickles prototype was successfully cast and assembled in his workshop. "But it had cost me a few thousand pounds in research and development. I was worried. I'd made one, but didn't know how to fit it and hadn't a single order."
He built two chimney breasts in his barn and, unable to find any reference books or drawings, spent days testing flues and fitting boilers before he gained a feel for how ranges worked.
"When I'd got it right, I went on to sell eight Ingletons before I found another I preferred, which came from Ripon, which is what I've called the one I still make today."
In 1780, Thomas Robinson designed the first kitchen range when foundries began making good-quality cast iron.
With a central grate, it had a closed oven on one side, with a hinged door, and on the other side a tank for heating water. It was improved upon; passages for the circulation of hot air around the oven were introduced, which meant food cooked more evenly. Dampers, which control the heat, were fitted because early models burnt very hot. But since then, it hardly changed - until Gordon came along.
Laid across the floor in the barn, steel sheets are being cut and welded to form a casing and a flue, which he first inserts in a chimney-breast before fitting the range into it. "This is something I've come up with, which makes the job much smoother," he explains. "They were fiddly to fit and involved much cutting of bricks in the chimney, so I just came up with an easier way of doing it."
He has also modified the range itself. "The Victorians made hundreds of thousands but they have changed very little in 100 years," he says, before pointing to the door he has added to cut the air-flow, his labour-saving ash pan and his carpet-saving fireguard.
His ranges, which vary in width from 3ft 1in to 3ft 8in, come with or without an L-shaped steel boiler on two sides of the central grate, which is plumbed into the domestic hot-water system. "If you want, you can run it in conjunction with another heating system - gas, oil or solid fuel - which will reduce your other energy bills," he says.
So how much are they? You might pay £7,650 for a new four-door Aga and £4,650 for a secondhand one, so how does a new cast-iron kitchen range compare? At a shade under £5,000, they rise to £5,469, though secondhand ones start from £1,980. Add to this a fitting charge, a cast-iron surround, backboiler, ash pans, oven trays and a towel rail and your bill can be nearly £8,000.
As well as casting new ranges and extras like the Tidy Betty - a freestanding guard that conceals falling ash - he casts dog grates and firebacks and also restores original ranges, casting any pieces that are missing.
Taking a break in his kitchen, he runs a hand along the edge of his own range as if it were a favourite collie. Blazing away it is the focal point in the room; painted in black stove paint and rubbed with black lead polish, it has a high shine, and its brass towel rail and oven catch are gleaming.
"I still like to sit in front of it and watch the flames licking up the chimney," he says. Jeanette uses it every day: "It's brilliant for roasts, for braising and baking," she says.
The future for their business is equally comforting, but they have no plans to expand. "I could develop further on the R & D side, if I had the time," he says. "Right now, I'm happy as we are. We keep it simple, we have no stress."
- Yorkshire Range Co, Chapel Lane, Halton East, Skipton, North Yorkshire BD23 6EH (01756 710263,
info@yorkshireranges.co.uk). - -----------------------------------------------
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