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.

It's not the monthly python poor Yorkshireman competition. Many of the posters who say they were so cold ,constantly, admit that actually they were subjected to abuse. Most of us who if we heard about it today, eg a child being subjected to such, we'd be telling the poster to ring the school, ring SS, wouldn't we?

We had a coal fire in the living room but nothing else in the 70s. Might as well not have had anything as we couldn't afford coal. So yes I would say we did grow up without heating.

Fireplaces were boarded up because it was the prime place to install a gas-fire but also because they were considered to be ugly and old fashioned. And the open chimneys created an unpleasant cold draught when the fire wasn;t lit

Somewhat irrelevantly to this discussion in the early 80's there were homes in Liverpool without electricity!
as well as outdoor privies and no central heating

We shouldn't have to go back to the days of no heating and freezing homes. But I am tired of reading of things that seem pretty sensible to me presented as if they are unbelievable hardship.
Having to wear a jumper indoors is good sense as is layering up your bed to make it warmer. It really isn't deprivation to switch off the heating while you are asleep.
I think we have become very wasteful with energy and this could be a useful reset, to be honest.
I have certainly had my eyes opened about how people live during this energy crisis.

Because your parents couldn't afford the coal though, not because you didn't have a source of heating.

There's also the cost and time/disruption/permission.

I can buy an electric heater for about £25 from a shop in the nearest town. I can plug it in as soon as I get home and I will feel instant warmth if I stand in front of it. Within an hour it will have made a small room warm, you can move that one heater round the house with you to take the chill off the room you are using. You don't need permission from your landlord, you don't need to involve utility companies or the council. It doesn't require annual corgi gas safety certificates.

I live in a house with no gas, there is a gas main on the street. Our nextdoor neighbour looked into getting gas central heating. The cost almost 20 years ago to get a gas connection to the house, not including purchase of the boiler, fitting the boiler, fitting the plumbing or the radiators, was £10k. The road needed to be dug up, the council, and centrica needed to be involved and grant permission and inspect the work. The front garden had to be dug up. Major internal work would be required. It would take months and cost a vast amount.

The two situations are incomparable.

Electric heating is an option for all but those in serious poverty, but those people wouldn't be able to afford to turn on a gas fire if they had one either.

That was quite unusual, but I do remember there was a boxing match on in the 60s, can’t remember who was fighting, that you could only watch if you had pay TV. Think it may have been the same for other sporting fixtures.

"Having to wear a jumper indoors is good sense as is layering up your bed to make it warmer."

People who feel the cold are already wearing jumpers though! No cold person is going around in a T-shirt!

"It really isn't deprivation to switch off the heating while you are asleep"

Who has the heating running at night while they're asleep?
Some people have it on a thermostat setting, but nobody just leaves it on constant do they?

"I think we have become very wasteful with energy and this could be a useful reset, to be honest."

I think that's a cruel thing to say as some of us feel the cold more than others. Those of us that do are not being 'wasteful'.

The point I think that OP is that, pretty much from the dawn of time, humans have recognised that it's necessary to have some way of heating their dwellings and built their homes accordingly, with a fireplace or a range or a gas fire or SOMETHING.

I have heard the argument that OP describes (I'm not talking about on this thread) where people say that heating homes is a new thing and just put on another jumper. This is just not true and will lead to people thinking that they are somehow 'soft' for struggling to cope without heating.

Of course, that doesn't mean that having a heat source in your home means you can afford to use it, or that many people didn't grow up in houses where the heat source was dangerous or didn't work or had been removed for some reason. We have full central heating in our house but couldn't afford to use it at all for a couple of years and it was miserable. It's ridiculous (and derails the thread) to suggest that posters are lying about growing up without usable heating or misremembering.

@Katypp I have never had the heating on overnight, and as it's not really something that was discussed until recently, I didn't realise that many people do! I can't bear it, I wake up hot and stuffed up.

We had 2 fireplaces downstairs but only used the living room one as Mum hated being too hot ! And also cleaning them out. This was in the 70s

In the 80s we then had gas fires fitted in both downstairs rooms.

In the 90s the council offered for 3 radiators and a boiler to be fitted Mum & Dad had a choice of which rooms they wanted them in and they chose the bedrooms as they had no heating and they used to get frost on the windows in the winter and puddles on the windowsills.

The point I think that OP is that, pretty much from the dawn of time, humans have recognised that it's necessary to have some way of heating their dwellings and built their homes accordingly, with a fireplace or a range or a gas fire or SOMETHING.

Yes, but, pretty much from the dawn of time, there have been many humans who do not or cannot heat the place in which they live. And those people have been much more likely to become ill and die than those who could manage to access heating.

It is an important thing to recognise. It's not that 'everyone in the past had heating of some form, of course'. It's 'many people did not have heating - literally, nothing- AND THEY OFTEN DIED.'

I live in a house with no gas central heating. I don't claim to have no heating.

Cheap plug in electric heaters are heating.

They are not the same as gas central heating, you may have to get used to lower temperatures due to the cost, it may be unpleasant but it isn't "no heating".

I agree that there used to be alternative forms of heating that are not now in place, but it was still a lot colder. My mum told me that if she wanted to drink from the glass of water by her bed in the morning she had to break the ice first.

I grew up in a house with no central heating, no fireplace. We kept warm with a heater in the lounge. 1970’s
Sometimes an electric fan heater, sometimes a paraffin heater (loved the smell of that) eventually a calor gas heater.
Ice in the inside of windows, water pipes bursting as they froze etc were commonplace.
At 19 I moved into a flat that only had a coal fire and I couldn’t afford coal. I grew up very used to being cold. By then it was 1980’s. I bought my first home, no central heating, but it did have a gas fire installed into the fireplace in the lounge and the same in the dining room.
My first experience of central heating in my own homework was in the 1990’s.

I see the OPs point. Any house with an electric plug socket has a heating source. Whether you can afford to run an electric heater is a seperate issue, but the option is there.

I grew up in a deprived area and many of my friends had NO heating and NO fire. There wasn’t even a chimney for a fire. YABU and seem quite sheltered to how it has always been for many from deprived backgrounds.

@Gwenhwyfar it has literally never occurred to me to heat my house overnight, but it looks like it it's expected in some families and some have even started doing so on the FB group I was talking about, usually framing it as refusing to let my children freeze. As I said, I have had my eyes opened wide in this crisis.
I am not being cruel but I do think a reset is necessary. People do feel the cold differently, but it's not difficult to be objective and say that for most people, an outside temperature of 15 degrees is not freezing and should not need hat, gloves, heated throws, dressing gowns. What did these people do last year?

DPs moved into a then brand new maisonette in 1968
We had 1 electric fire in the living room
1 Wall heater in the kitchen and that was it.
We did, though, at one point (probably the late 70s or early 80s) invest in a Paraffin heater as well.

Regardless of what happened in the past lots of people won’t be putting the heating on this year which is terrible

That was quite unusual, but I do remember there was a boxing match on in the 60s, can’t remember who was fighting, that you could only watch if you had pay TV. Think it may have been the same for other sporting fixtures.

I can only see that working if the houses had cable TV, and very few places in the UK had that in the 1960s. Rediffusion was the cable company I remember.

@Bemyclementine i agree. It has never occurred to me to do so, but it seems to have become a thing in the last few years. I am not saying it's commonplace but it's definitely more widespread than it was. The amount of people fretting because their children might freeze with no overnight heating is frankly bizarre.

My house (1980s built on a big housing estate) does not have a fire place, radiators, warm air heating, ceiling heating, underfloor heating or any other form of central heating.

Yes I agree with you. The point I was making (probably not very well!) is that, while heating hasn't always been available, it's always been necessary in order to remain healthy and comfortable in cold weather and that recognising this fact isn't unique to the last few decades. I've heard the attitude that OP describes in real life- essentially, toughen up, no one had heating in the past. Put on a jumper.

I completely agree with the posters saying that there have always been people who couldn't heat their homes- I've been in the position myself!

This is what I used at my paternal grandparents' home until the last time I went there a few years ago. They did have an indoor bathroom, but visitors used the outside! My DF grew up without a bathroom and just the outside toilet.

Yes quite a few households have kept there outside toilet despite having an indoor bathroom upstairs. Much the same idea as the downstairs cloakroom but outside. Actually wish I had one myself!