To explain to people that UK homes have never 'not had heating'

[KweenieBeanz]

People keep responding to those worrying about energy costs, don't worry, homes never used to have heating, people survived, just don't put your heating on!
Home did not have central heating. Instead, they had fires and heated individual homes. People did not live in homes with no heating in the UK.

In the UK during the winter if a home is never heated even by late November /December temperatures inside will have gradually dropped to a temperature that's too low.
See the info here: www.cse.org.uk/advice/advice-and-support/heat-and-health#:~:text=Below%2013%C2%B0%20%2D%20If%20your,recommended%20night%20time%20bedroom%20temperature.

There is a huge difference if you even use your heating for just 1hr a day, topping up the temperature to stop it dropping so rapidly.

People need to stop acting as though those struggling just need to toughen up, 'wear more layers' and cope with the heating off this winter as a solution to energy costs, as it's simply not feasible, and it would be better for people to take action now to let their energy provider know they are in fuel poverty and need to access help.

In the 60s lots of fireplaces had been blocked up. Major de-construction to remove chimneys but many were blocked up, panelled over and a modern 2 bar electric fire, or gas fire, put on the front of them. ( probably caused damp higher up the chimney flue)
I lived in 2 Victorian houses in Manchester as a child. One room heated by an electric or gas fire, no heating in the bedrooms except when a younger sibling was born at home, remember seeing a coal fire lit in my parents bedroom.
C1970 central heating installed. The boiler, which I think was oil fired, was bigger than the fridge and very loud.
Living room tended to be get hot ( and Smokey from 2 parents smoking) then the hallway, bathroom and bedrooms were freezing cold.
I don’t remember any homes being unseated, they were just heated room by room by gas, electric or paraffin heaters ( you could tell those by the smell, though I quite liked it)

She has said she's not old, and on the thread she's started this TAAT about, nobody has claimed to be without any form of heating.

Well there’s certainly a few on this thread who’ve claimed to have had no heating at all.

I think that more to the point, who wants to go back to a time when people were freezing? I think that we have perhaps become wasteful during the good times and fortunately, developing technology has allowed us to be more efficient. People don't need be grateful that they don't have to heat water for a tin bath or that kids don't get shoved up chimneys or down a mine anymore. We should be more efficient and less wasteful but we don't have to be endlessly grateful or make false equivalences.

Where are posters recommending this

It wasn't posters recommending it, it was the OP saying that she had seen or heard this being recommended, out in the world, as a solution.

Agree, it is evident from many recent threads on here that gas central heating has become so ubiquitous that people consider this "heating" to the exclusion of anything else.

Such as the many posters on the "is your heating on yet?" thread who said their heating was off but they had lit the log burner or used the aga or had an oil filled radiator on.

Many homes wouldn't have had "heating" as we know it now in the past (some don't now) and people say "we managed without heating" to mean they didn't have touch of a button thermostatically controlled heating but they don't account for the fact that there would generally have been some heat source such as a coal or wood fire, a stove, a paraffin heater, a gas fire, an electric fire, etc. That doesn't mean the house was warm, but it wasn't the same as having no heat source whatsoever all winter.

Many people will remember ice on the windows and frozen water in the toilet, but this doesn't mean that they had no heating. It was quite common, even when fires/stoves were used, it is not evidence that people managed without fires as some suggest.

Yes there will be exceptions, and there still are, people living in extreme poverty, people living with broken heating or with slum landlords but they would be the exception.

The fire places were bricked up. Just having fire places in the wall is not a source of heat.

But is that representative of everyone? For example non of my older family (grew up in a developing country went without fires). In the U.K. in the 60s electricity use soared partly because of growth of electrical heaters.

Patronising much?

OP, you are right that most houses , even long ago, would have had some form of heating- even the Vikings and Anglo saxons and Romans heated their homes- FFS! even cavemen lit fires!

Of course though, if you propose that something was rare on MN you will get countless posters that try to prove you wrong. Central heating was not an exception in the 1980s, no matter what posters on here try to claim, and even those without central heating had a gas or electric or open fire. I grew up in terraced house in Yorkshire, and most of my friends lived in similar or in council flats or houses- they all had heating of some kind in the 1970s. My parents grew up in the 1940s and 50s in the same area- they didn't have central heating and talk about ice on the inside of the bedroom windows, but they did have some heating in the form of coal fireplaces and a stove to cook on. These were poor, working class, nor†hern families.

It's not reasonable to assume that people could afford to run whatever heating was available whichever era you pick.

And yes, plenty of people went without heating if they had to choose between food and coal. And cooking was the only heat

Read up on life in what we now call slums, and for the rural (insecurely housed) poor

Then check your privilege - and realise that some people indeed had no heating. In the sense that there was nothing they could actually use

I don't have a fire place, I do have central heating but it is not designed to have a fire. It's only 20 years old though.

I had a tiny studio flat in London 30 years ago, that only had a plug in heater, it wasn't built with a fireplace or any form of heating.

One gas fire running for a couple of hours in the evening does not heat bedrooms.

YABU, because you are suggesting selective memory, rather than realising that no not everyone had adequate heating

I could not agree more.

It is and always has been fucking miserable to be cold through to your bones and unable to get warm.

I'm really really worried about my mum this year. I've bought her a fleece blanket and I bought her some electric heaters a few years back but she simply can't afford to run them and I can't pay her bills this winter. She sleeps on the sofa because upstairs is damp and mouldy. She's so frail. And there are people living like that up and down the country.

And here we (not we we. Thread we) are arguing about the difference between the physical facilities present in a home that would allow that home to be heated and the financial ability to afford to use those heating options.

i can’t but then again I can’t advise how to run a central heating system without money either. I was commenting on people who said they had no heating meaning source of heating, rather than insufficient money to pay to run the source of heating that they did, in fact, have.

Child of the 70s here. Manchester victorian terraced house. NO HEATING, I repeat NO HEATING op. I also remember scratching the windowpane with a fingernail to peep outside. It was absolutely bitter at bed time. I lived without heating at all last winter to save money and it was relatively easy due to global warming - there was no snow. I shall do the same this year purely out of necessity.

but why does a bedroom need heating?
unless you are a teenager sitting in your room
or you are ill and stuck in bed

No central heating until 1970 when phimax, a smokeless fuel, was very poor quality. Home had 9 fireplaces. Thé sitting room fire was lit at 4pm, the dining room fire just for Sunday lunch.
DF used to order half a ton of smokeless fuel every month.
Still had ice on the inside of my bedroom window.

We had no heating in 2013 when we bought our house. The previous owners had had the backboiler fire removed and the gas cut off. There was no other source of heating. We used the kitchen for everything, we squished a sofa in there and basically lived in there until we could afford to put heating in.

in the 1950s there were an average of 60,000 excess deaths in winter, now there are improved heating & health services we’re nowhere near that

Linky

but yes the idea that people in the past were just somehow much tougher isn’t true, they didn’t live as long & died of the cold and cold related diseases in far greater numbers

Life expectancy in the Uk since 1950

even the Vikings and Anglo saxons and Romans heated their homes- FFS! even cavemen lit fires!

This! i think the Romans had some form of central heating or underfloor heating.

We had electricity, we did not have heating. Its no different to saying if your road had a gas supply you had gas central heating.

I think the point is that these modernish houses that were supposedly built with no heating, and had neither, had electricity. So they weren't BUILT with 'no heating' as such. However, whether they were heated is a separate question, because in some individual cases people couldn't afford to use their electricity to provide heating at all (although they'd still get a tiny bit of warmth from the electric or gas oven, or the immersion heater even if lagged properly, unless they were so poor they weren't cooking or heating water either which would be rarer).

they did - the hypocaust

Hypocaust

15 years ago I worked a home carer. A lady I visited in her 80s lived in the house she was born in and had her bed in her living room downstairs in front of a traditional/original log fire place. The bathroom was downstairs, added on in later years. The stairs went up from a gap in the living room covered by a sliding door. Occasionally I would have to go upstairs to her wardrobe and it was bitter cold up there. I wondered how a family would have managed in winter's as there was no space for extra beds downstairs.

Weirdly until the age of 8 I lived in a house with a gas fire downstairs but no radiators in the 80s/early 90s. I remember we had traditional bed blankets and don't ever remembering being cold apart from getting dressed in front of the fire on a morning.

Not if you take the OP (and others') assertions that having electricity (and I doubt Hannah Hauxwell's ghost is a MNer) means you have a heating source.

The posters who have said they have no heating have electricity.

So according to the OP and the people who agree with her, they have a heating SOURCE.

The thick is out in force among the same people who don't realise that you need to pay for the thing to plug in and then pay for the electricity consumed. As well as their poor reading comprehension obvs.

No I wasnt unless people were home all day and could afford the coal to keep it going. It would be lit when the first adult got home from work

@Theeyeballsinthesky that's it, remember from school history lessons. They were a clever bunch!