Newbie here - Strange Pipe above Brick Partition Wall!

[QueenDog]

Hi all,

New to the forum, but I have joined as I have no idea what is going on here.
I'm looking to open up a hope between my kitchen and living room, we live in a 1940's council block, the kind with the sash windows and walkway.

Obviously want to get permission from the council, and today I started opening up the wall a bit to see what it was made of.
It's only 150mm thick, but runs down the center of the plan parallel to the brick facade walls.
Looks like Cement Render to either side of a single brick leaf, (so thought it might not be structural) but when I went to look at the junction between wall and slab above us I found pipe, just above the brickwork!

Any ideas what this could be, or why there would be a pipe along here?
Also does this mean the wall is more than likely not structural? If so it would be easier to just get an engineer to say as much and knock the hole, than pay for a report and lintel etc...

Any advice would be appreciated!

 

[SimonH2]

I can't picture what wall it is you are opening up.
But looking at the picture, the "pipe" is black isn't it - and looks like it's going into a fitting ?

My guess is that it's old electrical "slip conduit". I think if you dig it out a little more, then you'll find that fitting on the right is either an elbow or tee with screw clamp fittings onto the tubes themselves. By now I'd be "quite surprised" if it's still live, but you can't assume that. Typically it'll have been rewired at least once since it was built, and most likely they'll have pulled out only some of the conduit and left the rest in-situ - some of it will actually contain new cables, that's the case in our house where they've re-used the conduits down to most of the light switches.

It may be possible to see where original fittings were - in our house they were "a bit slapdash" about filling them in and mostly left slight bulges. If so, see if you can correlate where the conduit fitting is in relation to any switches or sockets.