So yes, did you know that for most UK households, central heating didn’t become the norm until the late 1970s? Many of us grew up in cold bedrooms and homes where keeping warm in winter was a yearly challenge.
This morning was cold. I looked out of the window and noticed that every roof was covered in ice. Cars and the pavements were iced over as well. And, officially, winter hasn’t begun yet.
At least today, we have central heating to keep out the cold.
If you grew up in a British home before the late 1970s, you’ll know that heating the house — the whole house — was being optimistic. Heating a room, usually a single room, was a more accurate description of family life.
The idea that every room could be warmed at the turn of a thermostat belonged firmly to the future. If you were well-off, or posh, maybe you could afford it, but there was no one like that in my neighbourhood. Futuristic TV adverts and the pages of the Ideal Home magazine promised a better future, but for most of us, central heating was an exotic luxury, like a colour TV or crisps in flavours other than ready salted.
The typical UK home of the 60s and 70s was built around the living room fire. It was king. King Coal, in fact. That single fire was expected to heat the entire family and, if you were lucky, most of the downstairs. Bedrooms? Bathrooms (if you had one)? The landing? Those were places you dashed through at speed, wrapped in a dressing gown, determined to complete your journey before frostbite set in.
Condensation wasn’t a minor annoyance — it ran down single-glazed windows like a miniature waterfall, creating small black mould that everyone pretended not to notice. This was long before the days of double glazing, and insulation in houses was, well, what was insulation? In winter, ice on the inside of windows wasn’t unusual. Your bedroom felt less like a domestic space and more like a poorly insulated Arctic outpost.
An icebox.
And if you had a bathroom, they were tiled, involving a hop, skip, and a jump off the cold floor into the bath. A winter bath involved letting the hot tap run long enough to take the edge off the cold air. Even then, climbing out of warm water into the “Temperature Drop” required bravery, and a towel hopefully warmed to make a difference. At least a tin bath could be moved to the room where the heating was. But then the room would be off limits to everyone else while the person had a bath.
Bath night was a thing back then. No one had showers.
Of course, every home had its own supplemental heating methods, usually more dangerous than effective. Paraffin heaters, electric bar heaters, and hot water bottles all had their place.
If you were unfortunate enough to be renting a bedsit, chances are you had an electric bar heater with its glowing strips of fiery red that were dangerous to sit too close to. The possibility that they were a fire hazard didn’t seem to concern the landlord. Often they were high up on the wall, and everyone knew that heat rises — the tenant in the bedsit upstairs got all the heat.
It’s not that central heating didn’t exist; it just wasn’t widespread until well into the 1970s. Post-war housing, out of necessity, was built quickly and cheaply, with little thought given to detail like insulation. Older homes typically had archaic pipework or boiler systems that made upgrades complicated and expensive. Many of those older homes are still around today.
Then there was the cost.
For many families, why heat the whole house when everyone gathered in the living room anyway? Why heat the bedrooms when blankets, eiderdowns, hot water bottles, and the occasional additional jumper would do?
When central heating finally did arrive, it felt like stepping into the future. The thermostat became a mystical dial that every Dad became an expert at controlling. You could now go to bed without wearing a woolly hat. You would only see your breath outside rather than indoors. Getting up for school didn’t require three layers of clothing and a sprint to the coal fire in the living room downstairs.
It changed everything. Homes became more comfortable, and people spent more time in the whole house rather than huddled in a single room. Upstairs was no longer off-limits until bedtime. Damp patches receded. And suddenly, dressing gowns, slippers, and bed socks were optional extras rather than essential survival gear.
Yet there’s a strange nostalgia attached to those old, underheated days. Some might remember shivering mornings as character-building. The coal fire, crackling away and glowing, was undeniably cosy, even when it spat a fiery piece of coal at you, as it occasionally did. Families gathered together out of necessity, mainly to watch the television, a huge box in the corner with a small screen and only three channels.
Modern comfort is wonderful, of course, and no one actually wants to scrape ice off the inside of the window today — we aren’t living in the dark ages any more. But today’s choices can still be difficult.
With a cost of living crisis and austerity, many people are now having to choose between heating and eating in winter. The debate, ‘Do we really need the central heating on?’, is a very real one in modern Britain. So, while today we do have central heating, for many it is again becoming a costly luxury — as it was for much of the nineteen sixties and seventies.
Image by Nick Collins from Pixabay
No comments:
Post a Comment