I’ve just done a thought exercise where I was trying to imagine what I’d do on day one if I were put in charge of all of the things in government and it fried my brain. It created a real tension between my understanding of what changes are needed to generate change – systemic and cultural shifts which lead to cascading and tangible changes, with my sense of what politicians are looking for – tangible things that sound good even if they don’t really deliver anything meaningful. Beyond hurting my head, it was a good reminder of why change can be hard for politicians to enact.
Even just pretending to play the part of a politican made me feel I had to silence all of those parts of my brain that think how politics tends to operate isn’t helping, and I started to grab around for something that felt like a ‘good answer’. Trying to think about how I could turn something systemic, which also recognised the limits of government responsibility, into something that was shiny and press release worthy. I think that a big issue in the retrofit sector particularly is the extent to which it looks to government to create and fund the conditions for scale, and that in itself undermines the conditions for scale. That means more government isn’t going to help, and indeed can undermine the cultural and attitudinal changes needed, albeit there are things government can do to help unblock action which will help with those shifts. Yet the short-term press release driven nature of politics is too rarely a good fit for the deeper, harder engagement with the substantive issues or ambitions. Yet in that thought experiment I could feel the pressure towards that endorphin hit of one shiny thing because that felt like what I was ‘supposed’ to come up with – that it wasn’t a serious answer if I didn’t.
In the end I just pretended the world was different and politicians can give those kind of answers. I figured that’s a luxury of not being in that position and if I can’t use that luxury in a no-stakes thought exercise, how can I be surprised that people in those actual positions don’t do that? It felt both like a cop-out given I can imagine the push-back someone in that situation would get, and also like the thing that’s actually needed.
But it was a great reminder of how institutional isomorphism and social norms can help edit out those calls to think differently. It was also useful to reflect on that temptation to try and fix things and assume control of it, rather than saying there are limits to what government can do in terms of shaping attitudes and action.
Scents can be so evocative, so it perhaps shouldn’t have been a surprise that the visceral smell of oil and gas lamps that greeted me as I entered The Judge’s Lodging in Presteigne gave such a connection to the past. History can often feel abstract, with tales of rich and powerful people living lives that seem very different to ours. From the focus on those in the ruling classes or aristocracy to different habits and practices, it can feel hard to have that sense of connection. Smelling the oil and gas lamps. feeling the effects of inhaling their fumes on myself, and observing it in the surroundings bridged that distance.
I have read about oil and gas lighting and the fact that it could create some soot but I didn’t really get an impression from reading about it quite how it manifested in practice. As soon as I saw and smelt the lamps, it was easy to connect them to the tracks of dirt and grime on the wall and up on the ceiling. Connecting the dots between the general description and how it worked in practice felt very satisfying – and I wondered if that was represented in period films. From there I found it easy to imagine how I might be annoyed if I lived then. Having decorated and made the place look lovely and then to see it getting messed up and dirty would really annoy me, in much the same way the first mark I notice on a newly painted wall does now. Of course it’s not a direct transplant from now to then and perhaps I would be more sanguine about it because that’s just the expected price that would be paid.
But then it also made me think, it isn’t as though there aren’t modern equivalents to those impacts. I look at that technology and it seems obvious that it’s not an ideal option. That’s because I’m comparing it to technologies that don’t have that same impact direct or visible impact in the home. In the home, the negative effects of gas heating can manifest in invisible impacts such as carbon monoxide poisoning, or there can be damp, condensation and mould from a mixture of how we use the home and the insulation levels. Yet those same technologies we now use also have impacts that are far worse at an aggregated level that doesn’t manifest directly in the home in the same clear cause and effect kind of way.
There was also a clear above and below stairs divide that I could both see and smell which felt starker than I had felt when I visited Uppark House last month. As the picture below shows, there was a transition from the nice wallpaper above stairs to the more damp and condensation filled part below stairs:
Where the Servants quarters in Uppark that we got to see felt quite light and airy, at The Judge’s Lodgings they were much darker, felt more damp and with low ceilings it was easy to imagine how much more stifling the cooking smells would have been there. There were also signs of damp around the place, which didn’t seem so surprising given the low ceilings, cooking and washing activities which would have been done there and the fact it would have been kept empty for large parts of the year when the court wasn’t in session.
The servants were the first to have the gas and oil lighting – it was tested out on them before the Judge’s had it. A precursor to the fact many schemes to try and increase deployment of insulation or renewable technologies have focused on the social housing sector where people have had less choice about whether they can accept things or not.
For whoever slept in the alcove off the space where they worked and ate, that sense of being unable to escape their work – both physically and also with the smells of the place, would have felt even more marked.
Although the Judge staying here would have experienced this place as a more relaxing space than the servants were likely to, for both the people living above and below stairs this was a working home, not just one for relaxation. However, even there, the comparison between the dark alcove for sleeping and living spaces below stairs, and those of the spaces above stairs showed, while there was a similarity in theory the practice would still have felt quite different.
A very different kind of home to others I’ve visited but it was great to see, and even better to briefly smell, the place and through it, get a clearer understanding of what it would have been like to live with those technologies.
A friend tightly hugs her knees to her chest as she tells me she’s not felt this anxious about environmental issues and the state of things for a couple of decades
It rains and people share photos of it with their friends and family. Look at this they say. Mad scenes.
My partner tells me that when he was in the office and it briefly rained, or really heavily drizzled, people went to the window to look at it in wonder – just as they would do for snow
At the same time – and there are so few times it rains of course it’s likely to be the same time – I stand outside feeling each drop of rain as it touches my skin. It feels so refreshing and also as though it’s making my skin burn. I hadn’t felt so hot, it’s been cooler the past few days – by which I mean in the late twenties – that I thought my body wasn’t so hot now. The contrast between the heat of my body and the cool of the rain tells me that’s not the case
I walk alongside the playing field on the way to the gym – a place I visit most days, sometimes twice a day – and I see the dry earth now has a crack in it. I try but can’t remember if it’s always been there, or if it just recently happened. How could I not have noticed?
We’ve not really talked a lot about his reasons why, but I have a friend who doesn’t believe in climate change. I think he says it’s because he’s not convinced by the science. I think it’s because he likes to be a contrarian, he feels he can look dispassionately at the science or other evidence and honestly who wouldn’t rather it was all made up and everything was fine? In an earlier heatwave – over a May Bank Holiday I think – he comes over to mine for lunch. When asked how I am in the standard just arriving kind of way, I languidly say I’m very hot. He quickly replies that it is hot but it’s totally normal for this time of year and this kind of thing happens all the time. In a later heatwave we’re exchanging stories about things we’re currently really obsessed by – I talk about the World Cup. He tells me about a theory he’s discovered that he’s very excited by. It’s by someone he connected with during the pandemic – they both agreed that it was basically not anything to be worried about and there was no need to take the kinds of actions that were being taken. Essentially the theory is that every c.5,000 years the Earth’s poles flip – that there’s a bit of a wobble in the rotation of Earth and eventually this wobble builds up and everything floods. And it’s getting ready to flip soon by this reckoning. This theory apparently explains why there are more earthquakes and volcanoes happening – it’s a sign of more wobbling. That isn’t the technical term but I can’t find it – when I tried searching for the theory after my friend and I met and I could remember the actual word I still struggled to find anything online. This theory also explains some aspects of climate change too. I wondered if the attraction of the theory for my friend was that it offers a way to continue to disbelieve the science of climate change while still acknowledging that things are changing – this isn’t normal. I don’t know how I could ask him that, what good it would do
Struggling one day to work, irritated and frustrated with myself at not being able to concentrate or get things done. The next day it’s down from the peak of the heat and all of a sudden work feels much easier. All of a sudden? Even as I try to recognise the need to adjust work or play, I can still bump up against my expectations of how it should be
I look online for news about when it’s likely to rain next. For some reason the algorithm shows me a story from February this year. I read it, astonished and half-remembering the news and reality of ‘biblical floods’ with some places experiencing rain every day for forty days. The jokes we made about at least we’re not going to be needing hosepipe bans this year
Influencing decisions is difficult at the best of times because so many factors are part of how and why people make decisions. When people don’t even realise they are making a decision it seems that much harder to influence them.
One way decisions can become invisible is through institutional isomorphism, where isomorphic means the same or a similar shape, structure or relational properties. In this scenario organisations of a similar type, and the people working within them, adopt the same kind of approaches to each other. DiMaggio and Powell, 1983 identified that this might be because people are forced to adopt an approach by coercive means through law or mandates from Head Office; it can also arise because people copy successful peers or where professional standards shape ways of working across a sector.
In the coercive scenario people might feel like they are consciously making decisions – where their own sense of what the ‘right’ thing to do bangs up against what they are being told to do. Equally though, where there’s a mandate it can feel like there isn’t any decision to make in practice, that’s just how things are or have to be. For the other scenarios, it might be less clear that a decision is getting made though, that sense of professionalism unintentionally or unconsciously leading people to repeat approaches or ways of working. Hard to know where they come from and harder to unpick.
Another way it can be hard to see that a decision is getting made is where there is path dependence – when the weight of historical precedents make a choice seem inevitable, or a different choice unknowable or impossible. QWERTY keyboards are seen to be the archetype of path dependence leading to lock-in, the example comes from W. Brian Arthur’s 1994 piece. For many people, if they need to get a keyboard they would just find when searching that they are being offered a QWERTY keyboard and most of us wouldn’t think to look for another one. Yet there are other options out there but a series of circumstances have led to QWERTY domination. It’s not impossible to unpick but the number of steps needed to do so feels prohibitively high and most people aren’t motivated to look for other options when the current one seems to work well.
And with all of the talk of behaviour change in relation to climate related actions, those examples show how much can be missed when trying to jump to change territory. There’s often an assumption that the behaviour, decision or rationale is clear to people and so it’s just a case of helping people realign their behaviour into another ‘better’ pathway. If that isn’t the case though, it’s hard to unpick something people don’t realise is tangled up.
These theories that make visible the invisible decisions can help us have some empathy when trying to understand where others might be starting from. Recognising that for many people, choices now considered to be environmentally unfriendly – such as getting a new boiler – don’t feel like decisions is a helpful way to ground yourself in the reality of people you’re trying to persuade. Starting from that point might then provide a better basis on which to sell or persuade.
Stately homes can often focus on just telling the story of the stately part, rather than also showing and exploring the work that keeps the stately afloat. As such I was looking forward to visiting Uppark House in West Sussex on my latest study date, because it’s a large country house which also has an accessible and well preserved servants quarters – allowing me to visit different homes within one space.
Uppark is a 17th century house which has been extended and renovated over time, much of the interior is broadly unchanged since the time of Sir Matthew and Lady Sarah Fetherstonhaugh who bought the house in 1747. They spent over £16,000 – equivalent to around £1.8 million now – transforming the house. That money seems to have come from extraction and subjugation. Matthew was one of the largest shareholders in the East India Company, invested in the Grand Ohio Company which got land from indigenous people of North America and there is also the suggestion of a link to slavery – Up Park Pen in Jamaica, a plantation worked by enslaved people and once owned by the Pink family of the local village of South Harting. That would always have been true but I wonder if that’s a part of the story which would have been part of the telling even just a few years ago.
We started our visit in the entrance hall which was a later addition to the house, entering through a corridor with a low ceiling. This made the view of the double height hall feel that bit grander as we stood up straight to enter and take in the view after having bowed our way into the space.
One of the things that is really interesting in exploring what people think and feel about their homes, and how that has changed over time, is looking at how people have used the spaces differently and what impact that has had. At Uppark a drawing is provided which shows how the floorplan has evolved, with spaces changing in their usage, and many spaces becoming more defined. The progression at Uppark shows the place becoming bigger, with more distinct spaces for the servants and over time the kinds of spaces servants would be working in, such as the kitchen, getting more removed from the rest of the house. The ground floor moves from being a much more mixed usage to one that is much more public facing space – a bedroom and dressing room disappear and become more drawing rooms. Dining moves from something that happens wherever people happen to be, to something that happens in a defined space.
There is a lot in the literature about how different spaces have changed over time, such as the bathroom as Barbara Penner’s book ‘Bathroom’ so clearly and graphically describes. Halls are another space that have changed a lot – as the floorplans above show, the hall was the main room, with a subsidiary hall. Gradually the use of the space changed and the hall became smaller. In Uppark the hall is still a big space but in many homes the hall has disappeared or become so small that it can’t function as the liminal, transitional space people want – leading them to adjust the layout to recreate that space. These changes in the design and layout of the building have impacts on how people live, which link back to further changes or amendments to the layout of the space. The fabric of the building and the way people live interacting with each other.
There were lots of elements within the house that showed those changes in technology and ways of living changing the space. From a chamber pot which was added to the Servery by the Dining Room when it became necessary for people to have more access to toilets, to water filtration, a bell ringing system that allowed the servants to easily see which room was ringing the bell and electricity.
All these changes were further indications of how technologies can get layered onto, or into buildings and rooms. That we change and adjust homes to suit our expectations and needs. Spaces, particularly ones that are decorated in what feels like a very old-fashioned way, were once the height of modernity. These changing but seemingly static spaces also reflect and can fit to new ways of being and living.
As someone who loves coloured glass, my eye was caught by these blue bottled beauties. One of the volunteer guides invited me to guess what this – hanging up in the hall is:
Lamps?
Water bottles?
Medicine?
Eventually he put me out of my poor-guesswork misery and told me they are a kind of fire retardant. The bottles would have contained a substance which would put out fires – the bottle would be broken over the fire in a hearth or elsewhere, glass and all. Apparently effective in putting out a fire but not ideal if they had to be used in bed.
There was a big fire at Uppark in 1989 and it needed a good deal more than a couple of bottles of fire retardant to put out. Volunteers told us about there had been a massive effort to remove things from the burning building, such that much of the furniture and artwork was saved. Uppark became a huge restoration project – all the ash and rubble was gridded and collected, then sifted to find fragments of the building which could be reincorporated into the restored space.
There is a display which talks about the work that was done to restore Uppark after the fire. I really loved the display of keys which was a good way to represent the variety of trades involved in the restoration work. The range of skills and the amount of care which has gone in to the house showed how complicated it can be to look after homes.
Hundreds of pieces of artwork were saved from the fire and are back on show. Rather than going to IKEA or similar, as was the custom of the time, much of the artwork was collected on a Grand Tour. There are lots of portraits of the family but I was particularly drawn to a fantastical painting by Lady Sarah which had a monkey in, alongside some creatures that might be more familiar visitors to the South Downs. A reminder of how, even at home, we can intentionally create connections to the outside world. And that in doing so we’re also communicating something to others about how we see ourselves in the world. This at a time when those extractive trades which funded the Fetherstonhaugh’s weren’t seen to be as problematic as they are now.
After having gone through the above stairs rooms I was happy to be able to also see the servants areas. I was surprised by the fact the servants quarters didn’t look totally awful and cramped and had some natural light coming in – which reflects my expectations of how servants tend to be treated. It seems very normal for servants to be treated poorly, so having more than a tiny crumb of space and some daylight seems luxurious. I was reminded of the servant Crosby in ‘The Years’ by Virginia Woolf. When the people who owned the place looked around the servants quarters as they get ready to sell up and leave they realise how cramped and dark it is, to which Crosby replies it was her home. Below is a picture of the Housekeeper’s room
Before getting too carried away with the idea of this as a more meritocratic place, it’s worth bearing in mind that H.G. Wells visited Uppark House as a child because his mother was the Housekeeper there. He had visited many times as a child and convalesced there. It is said that the house and the social hierarchy of the place helped to shape his socialist, liberal and meritocratic views.
And even as the servants areas seemed less cramped than I had imagined they might be, there were still many signs of the work and effort that the servants had to put in. The well-worn stone steps in the servants quarters that have been eroded over time by tread after tread of servants tells a tale of the work they’ve done.
There were other elements which showed it wasn’t all plain sailing for the servants working there too. Because of smells arising from the kitchen, a new kitchen was built away from the house and connected by an underground tunnel. The servants then had to transport food from the kitchen through the tunnel – on kinds of hostess trollies which had warm coals on to try and keep the food warm. Walking through the tunnel it was easy to imagine what a faff it would have been to transport the food down the stairs, along the tunnel with the slightly uneven surface and then back up the stairs
The ladder was in the middle of the original kitchen so that someone could go up it and hold up a lantern so that it would illuminate the stained glass that was over where the food was kept. A servant would have to stand on the ladder holding up a lantern for some amount of time, just for the effect it created.
Very different lives lived at Uppark and rare to be able to see something of how they all lived. What stuck with me was how the people who owned the place lived lives which were made possible by the labour they sought to make as invisible as possible. Even as the owners have moved out, at least from some of the spaces, it is those who work and have skills that have made and remade the place over time. It is that largely unseen labour which is really what has made the place it is, far more than the decorating efforts of a few rich people.
Don’t worry, this isn’t about watching England play at the World Cup. It’s about feeling the tension between different ways of working and noticing those issues can also translate into how people make decisions in day to day life. What has been emerging is that my own process is showing me that change and creativity don’t always emerge from maximum efficiency.
As someone who is self-funding their PhD beyond having a scholarship to pay their tuition fees, I’m definitely motivated to try and get my PhD completed more quickly. But I’m not ‘just’ here to get a PhD – I want to produce work that is useful and will make a difference.
In some respects then, that context creates the conditions to try and move more quickly and to let go of aspects that feel less clearly defined or on the critical path to delivery. Going for efficiency in the tasks and trying to find ways to do them as effectively as possible.
Yet I’ve had an ongoing tension between the sense that my ambitions and interests are broader than the subject of the PhD, while also needing to develop a PhD project that is discretely bounded enough that it can be completed. I didn’t realise I was doing this but I’ve been reaching towards a broader articulation of the subject and what it is I’m really trying to explore. That has led to a constant baseline level of questioning when doing things about that disconnect as it manifests in a particular area.
The background hum was getting louder and impacting on my ability to be more efficient and effective. The irony of observing myself feeling like I’ve made a decision about the next task I’m going to work on or how I’ll approach something and then feeling like it isn’t quite made as I have that discussion in my head. Eventually it brought me back to some activities that had been postponed week after week, despite having felt them to be useful, where I intentionally give myself a chunk of time to just think, explore and generally thought-shower and play without having to have an end goal in mind. It’s something I’m constantly wanting to do and so creating some time where I’ve got an outlet for that seemed like it was a good idea, felt great when I was doing it and yet got moved into the next week time after time because it didn’t feel like quite the right thing to do.
In giving myself the space to just play, listen to that background hum and try to make sense of it I think I now have a clearer sense of the different layers and linkages between those things. Seeing my PhD as a way to explore ideas through a particular case study that can inform the wider work and underlying questions I’m interested in. Peeling the onion and seeing that I’m still absolutely fascinated by my PhD but also being able to place it in the context of questions that are about what it is that enables some people to make a change and yet others don’t. Exploring and trying to make sense of what kinds of factors help indicate whether something is going to catalyse action or whether it is a good idea that won’t translate.
What felt like a luxury I could live without, even as I could see the value of it, became something that has helped speed things up and brought more clarity to the things I am doing. With that clearer articulation of the different layers and what I’m really trying to explore, I was able to revisit some things like the survey I had drafted and update the questions before they went out into the world. They are still aligned to answering the PhD but also link better to the overarching questions I’m interested in.
Given a lot of what I’m exploring through the PhD is around decision making, that sense of a tension between feeling like the need for speed was helping me make a decision, and realising it was hindering me has been interesting. There can be an underlying sense of a need for speed in decisions people are trying to get agreed that relate to environmental or climate issues – whether it’s an organisational or individual level. That might relate to the urgency of addressing issues that the science and natural systems drives, or it can be artificially generated urgency relating to funding or financing offers that are time limited. John Vaillant in ‘Fire and Flood’ is good at drawing out the different timescales that people can operate at and how time can be experienced differently – what feels fast in terms of the science can feel slow in terms of how humans experience it.
For myself, it’s been a good reminder from that some ways of working which are useful need to be protected in my days and weeks from a practical perspective. Doing a PhD gives me the space to make that happen and become embedded that will hopefully make it easier to protect that whatever comes next. It’s also been a useful reflection to take with me when looking at the circumstances that are being created for people we are trying to get decisions from.
As summer temperatures increase, at night as well as during the day, people are becoming increasingly aware of how uncomfortable their homes can be but there isn’t an easy fix. One of my PhD supervisors reflects on the fact that part of the challenge is that the same homes are both too hot in summer and too cold in winter. We’re not, for the most part, trying to address one issue in one set of homes and the other issue in the rest of the homes. Yet we’re better equipped for dealing with the cold than we are the hot.
In the event of cold weather, most homes can be improved if you were to throw lots of money at it, without doing anything to the home. You could just subsidise people’s bills, or flat out pay the whole lot. It would be massively expensive and wasteful but still, there’s an immediate lever that could be pulled if we lived in a parallel universe and felt that something needed to be done. We already have an equivalent for cold weather of the Winter Fuel Discount and the Energy Bills Support Scheme in 2022.
Most homes have central heating, so to try and warm up the homes it’s then a case of having the heating on more. Census data from 2021 suggests that only c.1.2% of homes don’t have central heating so there are a lot of homes where it is then easier to provide funding towards the cost of energy to make it more affordable. For those households that aren’t using mains electricity or gas to power their central heating there would be more steps because they have to procure extra oil or solid fuel. If they already have this fuel system, this is something that they are used to doing and would have suppliers that they are able to contact to try and source supplies.
That isn’t the case in terms of cooling a home though. Even if you subsidised everyone’s bills in the same way to try and make the home cooler, there would be more steps in between. Some of that would involve getting more immediate cooling options such as fans or cooling units. Having invested in a fan the internet told me was whisper quiet and effective, which turned out not to be so, I don’t think we can assume that it’s quick or straightforward for people to get something which will make a difference. There are things that could be done but they aren’t quick – from shades, shutters and awnings to more hard-core air conditioning units. That means there are a lot more steps, which need a lot more levers.
This also suggests that where possible, it obviously doesn’t make sense for people to be coming up with separate but related proposals. Too often adaptation and mitigation can get separated out but in many cases it should be the same approach which addresses both, or could be the same approach with some tweaks. That if there are going to be works done to a home, they should be things that will make sense for as many of those scenarios as possible. Instead – as my supervisor’s work surfaces – they can work against each other. Measures to improve the ability of the home to retain the warmth in winter can, if not properly detailed and dealt with as part of a wider approach which considers ventilation, make the home warmer or more difficult to cool in summer too.
If vulnerability is a mix of the underlying circumstances and the extent to which you can or can’t adjust, then these heatwaves reflect how much more vulnerable we are to hotter weather than cold weather. The design of our buildings increases our vulnerability as the climate warms up because, for the most part, they aren’t designed to cope with this amount of heat, this regularly – particularly with nights where the temperature doesn’t drop that much. The fact we have much less ability and focus on managing in the heat than the cold will continue to exacerbate this. A lack of quick levers we can pull to try and help (some?) people in emergencies compounds all of this.
Addressing this vulnerability therefore needs a focus on both addressing the underlying conditions alongside the levers to provide more immediate support. To date the focus has been more on trying to address the way buildings operate or how we can use them differently. Reducing the vulnerability to extreme heat will need a more systems based approach to try and make a substantive difference, focusing on one aspect is better than nothing but ultimately has limitations.
There are different aspects to vulnerability and adaptation – some relate to physical aspects and some to capability – and the current heatwave in parts of the UK are showing both elements of that, but I’m particularly interested in the social elements of it. The social and cultural elements of adaptation, as with mitigation, are challenging but unlocking those aspects could then help provide the resources needed to deal with the physical aspects.
I’m, very slowly and a bit brain foggily, writing this piece as where I live in the UK experiences a heatwave and it doesn’t currently feel like actively enjoyable weather. I haven’t sleep well last night as it was too stifling, with no breeze. The room felt suffocating, I eventually got up and went outside where it was a bit cooler. Today I’m really not feeling very awake or engaged and I’m lucky enough to be able to arrange my work activities to do things that don’t require so much brain power. I was out in the hot, hot heat as I had an event to go to but it really didn’t feel like a good idea.
Yet I’ve heard and read lots of people describing it as nice or good weather – even as they might otherwise be talking about how uncomfortable the heat is. This does not seem like good weather to me, and nor does it seem like they actually think it is when they talk about different elements of their experience.
Perhaps the reason adaptation struggles to get much traction is that in the UK people associate ‘bad weather’ with rain, wind and cold weather. By contrast, hot weather can often be considered to be good weather – in part because of the conception that it’s really rainy and you can never trust it to be sunny in the summer. Hence the cultural idea of having a rainy Bank Holiday BBQ or rain-lashed picnic in the car. The idea that sunny weather could be ‘bad’ doesn’t fit with that view and so then the default for many is to describe it as good, even as they might talk about the impacts negatively.
While some impacts of hot weather can be obvious – such as wildfires, train cancellations or sunburn – it can be less so than floods or heavy snowfall where the impact is more visually obvious. If there are fatalities as a result of flooding or snowfall it tends to be more immediate and clearer to see the connection, whereas with heatwaves it can be harder to tell. Often people die as a result of an underlying condition which is exacerbated by the hot weather. These deaths show up as ‘excess deaths’ which is not a mechanism that is as easily communicated or has the same clarity of cause and effect.
However, a consistent message in the literature is that people underestimate the impacts and are reluctant to take action, even where it will affect them. In relation to flooding which has historically been more common than heatwaves, people can underestimate the likelihood of being affected, as the title of Burningham et al’s 2008 piece ‘‘It’ll never happen to me’: understanding public awareness of local flood risk’ suggests. Research on attitudes to and behaviours undertaken in heatwaves from by Erens et al (2021) found that people who were the most vulnerable or potentially vulnerable to heatwaves didn’t realise they could be affected and only a quarter of potentially vulnerable people changed their behaviour. Research by the British Red Cross found relatively high levels of understanding of actions that could be taken, yet there was a significant drop-off in the number of people who actually took action.
Helping to shift that narrative and getting people to engage with the fact this isn’t good weather for many feels like a pre-condition to then take steps to adapt to it. In the absence of that understanding, it is unsurprising people wouldn’t take action. It’s something that happens to other people rather than to them, until it isn’t of course.
London School of Economics research suggests there is a low expectation among people that government is taking sufficient steps to respond. This could partly be projection by them but also seems to be outsourcing responsibility to a government that is unlikely to be getting lobbied on this by people who don’t think it’s an issue for them. All in all it’s currently quite a hot mess and likely to keep getting hotter unless we can find a way to recognise how things really are and go from there.
It sounds obvious but it can be helpful to think about the home in terms of the different parts and how they have changed, recognising elements don’t all change at the same time or in similar ways. This moves it away from thinking of it as one monolithic entity which changes in a monolithic way and it strikes me this feels like a shift from some ways in which people can talk about the home. And it made me wonder if perhaps part of why it can feel difficult to improve homes is that often the homes get conceived of as monoliths, which can feel quite daunting.
From a historical perspective, there’s been lots of investigations of how the home and parts of it have changed over time. Judith Flanders brilliant ‘The making of home’ takes the long view, while ‘The great indoors’ by Ben Highmore is looking at how homes have changed over the last 100 years or so in particular. There is also plenty of work looking at different aspects of the home, from Barbara Penners ‘Bathroom’ to chapters in Irene Cieraad’s ‘At home: an anthology of domestic space’ that variously cover how entrance halls have changed, Dutch windows or the move to open plan living.
Perhaps the focus on a ‘whole-house’ approach might be part of what drives that sense of the house as a monolithic space for many in the environmental sector. That the need is there to try and improve all of the building fabric, think holistically about the ventilation strategy and consider factors that will affect the movement and management of moisture in and around the building to avoid damaging the building or creating issues with mould and damp.
In part that view of the home as a monolithic entity also seems to stem from the understandable intention to try and avoid the performance gap. Treating the home as a whole system and trying to understand what’s particular about it – from a technical perspective but also in terms of what people value about the place. Albeit in practice that isn’t what happens enough of the time – either in terms of the design or the installation of measures.
It’s obviously possible to do a whole-house retrofit that takes place over time – so even if that’s the end goal it can then be more light in terms of the interventions. For a long time I had a great love for building renovation passports as a way to help people work out how to integrate retrofit measures into their wider home improvements. There’s lots of work happening in the social housing sector that takes a more piecemeal approach to improving homes over time. Some of that is driven by applying for sources of funding as and when they come up, and some of it reflects that over time a home will move through different teams who are responsible for works to homes – from voids to repairs and maintenance or special projects for instance.
Whereas if the discussion was dis-aggregated and focused around specific aspects, might it feel slightly less daunting? Dialling down the stress of it all, reducing the temperature a bit. It might feel easier to imagine looking to engage people with the need to change out a heating system rather than trying to get people on board with thinking about the whole house in one go. For most people, that’s how they think about their homes more generally – the bathroom needs doing, something needs to be done about the cupboard under the stairs etc – so it brings it in line with other elements too. In and of itself that makes it more manageable for people when thinking about their own homes.
This shift also allows for an approach which accepts that it isn’t just going to change incrementally in terms of aspects of the building but also over time too. So that then it isn’t about trying to claim that this is the ultimate perfection that can be offered but recognising that a particular technology might be the best for now, but that is likely to change in time too.
That change of mindset can then help people think more tactically too. My PhD is all about linking in environmental improvements to wider home improvements – instead of thinking about the whole house it’s then trying to find a way in and working from there. Going with the grain of works that either need to be done because something has broken, or works that people are exploring or choosing to get done.
There are lots of practical implications which arise from making that shift, and I hope to explore those further as my PhD progresses. But the act of thinking differently about our homes, and therefore parts of our homes, feels like it could be a helpful mindset shift that makes it much easier to talk to people about changes. Taking the idea apart to help put the actual space back together a bit differently.
It feels important to try and acknowledge in the moment when something is good. Too often we can get caught up in the business of finding reasons not to be cheerful, as though in grumbling about minor issues we can ward off the really bad ones. I’m in another transition phase at the moment and in that shift it’s given me opportunity to pause and feel greatful.
It’s partly a transition time because I’ve been spending lots of time on a couple of non-PhD projects I’ve been working on, and I’m back to just focusing on my PhD. They have been related to my PhD so it’s not a total shift but still, they weren’t entirely filed under PhD work. I put in a big old shift over the weekend on one of them so it felt like I was coming back to work this week for a bit of a rest.
Even if I hadn’t been working on some other projects it would be a transitional phase at the moment in any case because ethics approval has been granted. My project is officially ethical!
Given how much I have enjoyed the ethics framing I’m not surprised to find myself feeling quite touched by that approval.
More tangibly, it means that I can now start to officially talk to people and do the more direct data collection activities. I’d already made a start on some aspects of the research alongside my literature review, collecting together and starting to review cultural materials and existing government and industry reports. I’ve also done some study dates, such as the ones to Sambourne House and Tate Britain and a couple of archive visits. So it’s not like that part of it hasn’t been happening at all, again not a total transition.
It feels very different getting to speak to people or send out surveys directly, rather than relying upon existing materials though. A classic part of the research and PhD process. It feels like it has been a long time coming but then this is a marathon not a sprint so perhaps that’s not so surprising after all.
And it’s exciting to imagine what I might find. Fun to not be able to entirely predict how something is going to unfold and where it might lead. Privileged to be able to do it at all, I mean really, what an absolute privilege to have made this space for myself, to be able to back myself to explore and try something different.
It’s good sometimes to be able to sit with that and cherish it. Not just to rush through the moments. To try and notice as it something shifts, or when something is good and feels full of possibility or even when the possibility is getting translated into something more tangible. Allowing those moments to get consciously stashed away. Not to artificially extend it but to pay some attention, give a sense of gratitude and acknowledgement and then go back to the thing itself. Which seems a fitting note to end on, as I then turn to putting together my survey to pilot…
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