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Hampton Court Palace

Repairs to Chimneys

The chimneys at Hampton Court are a forest of carved brickwork and represent one of the glories of the building. Many of them date from the original construction but a number are Victorian replacements. In 2001, Nimbus was commissioned by Historic Royal Palaces to repair and conserve two chimneys in tennis Court Lane and one in Lord Chamberlain’s court.

Initially the work was to involve simple repointing with hydraulic lime mortar, localised repairs with mortars to match the brickwork and replacement of individual bricks with new red rubbers cut and rubbed to the required size and shape.

Although this process was carried out successfully to one of the chimneys, the substantial caps of the other two were found to be unstable – partly due to poor bonding in the original construction and partly due to hard cement, flaunching leading to decay of the soft bricks. In these cases, the top 15 courses of the stacks had to be dismantled, labelled and stored. Many of the bricks were found to be beyond repair and new bricks had to be hand cut using a wire bow saw to the same profile. In order to ensure that a strong internal bonding pattern was established, the caps were constructed dry in the workshop using plywood templates. They were then transferred, course by course, to the scaffold and fixed in position using lime mortar. At the same time, new terracotta flues were inserted.

Client: Historic Royal Palaces