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A lot of large old houses in london have had steel fire escapes built onto them some time in the 20th century (because basically in Victorian times they weren't so bothered if you lived or died, particularly if you were one of the poor people living at the top). Many people never use them and let them go to pot - why would you want to spend money on something that you hope you're never going to use.
I'll tell you, because the way they constructed most of them was to bed steel girders directly into the brickwork. Water gets at these girders over time and they rust, and rust expands nine to one - so for every 1 mm of steel you get 9mm of rust - and it's expands away in the brickwork and eventually something has to give and you get these huge and dangerous structural cracks. More water gets into these cracks damaging the brickwork and rusting the girder still further.
I don't know if you can see from these photos but this is what greeted us at the back of our house. The whole corner of the wall on the other side of the cracks had bellied out and the whole lot could have just fallen away at any moment; as well as this rust on the more exposed girders holding up the floor plates was rife and in places there was barely 1 mm of good steel supporting us.
It was useless as a fire escape, and even worse it was tearing down the house! I thought it would cost me millions, but in fact I think it was only £1200, and that included replacing all the rusted steelwork and rebuilding the brickwork. The guy who did it, Ian Cullingford of Fire Escape Ltd (see directory when it's up, v v good), said it was in relatively good condition and that most jobs they did involved steelwork that had already collapsed taking great chunks of buildings with it.
So, don't say I didn't warn you.
Ours looks great now and has a vine growing up it and everything. Rest of the house is crap, but.. |
