We present an analysis of 20 galaxy clusters observed with the Chandra X-ray satellite, focussing on the temperature structure of the intracluster medium and the cooling time of the gas. Our sample is drawn from a flux-limited catalogue but excludes the Fornax, Coma and Centaurus clusters, owing to their large angular size compared to the Chandra field-of-view. We describe a quantitative measure of the impact of central cooling, and find that the sample comprises 9 clusters possessing cool cores and 11 without. The properties of these two types differ markedly, but there is a high degree of uniformity amongst the cool core clusters, which obey a nearly universal radial scaling in temperature of the form T propto r^~0.4, within the core. This uniformity persists in the gas cooling time, which varies more strongly with radius in cool core clusters (t_cool propto r^~1.3), reaching t_cool <1Gyr in all cases, although surprisingly low central cooling times (<5Gyr) are found in many of the non-cool core systems. The scatter between the cooling time profiles of all the clusters is found to be remarkably small, implying a universal form for the cooling time of gas at a given physical radius in virialized systems, in agreement with recent previous work. Our results favour cluster merging as the primary factor in preventing the formation of cool cores.
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