Category: Field notes

The power of one

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For all of the talk of relational approaches to increasing the take-up of energy or environmental measures, I was struck when hearing a friend’s recent account of home renovations about the limits to that approach.

Talking about my PhD can often lead to reflections from people about their own homes and experiences. One friend talked about how their plumber had done some research and come to the conclusion that heat pumps didn’t work unless the home is really well insulated. On that basis my friends ended up going ahead and getting their ailing boiler replaced with a new one, with lots of attendant disruption to have a more efficient system put in. They also had a builder who didn’t understand building physics and hadn’t raised any concerns when my friends wanted some air bricks covered up as part of works to replaster and repaint walls.

Had my friends got a plumber who had investigated and come to a different view, which is quite possible given the increasing number of use cases that are coming online of heat pumps performing well in inefficient buildings, they might have been persuaded to have a heat pump. Similarly, had they got a builder who had a better understanding of building physics, when there was a discussion about covering over air vents the builder should have raised the ventilation point. The builder might have explained the premise of the ventilation strategy the home was built with and suggested some alternative options if they did still decide to cover them over. They could also have suggested mitigations in rooms where previous owners had already covered over or removed air vents. Instead my friends randomly found out about the ventilation approach because the algorithm served up some information.

That reliance on others who are seeming experts and placing trust in their views is very in keeping with a relational approach. This holds that we make decisions on the basis of how the home will be for those we care about but also that trades-people can have a big impact on the choices people make. However these examples from my friends also seems to suggest it really depends who you get and there’s an element of luck in that currently. In the absence of requirements or an environment where information about how homes work is a foundational part of being a trades-person, for a relational approach to energy to work for good performance outcomes a higher basic level of knowledge is needed.

It was another reminder of how far away we are from that baseline situation now and how normal it is that builders don’t consistently have, or need to have, a holistic level of knowledge. There were lots of ways in which the builder seemed to have done a good job but those were in aspects that were more visible to my friends than the potential impact of closing up the ventilation would be, at least in the short term. If it is incumbent upon non-experts to be in a position to challenge experts that seems to be a situation which is unlikely to drive good behaviours, isn’t realistic or fair on those who are getting the work done and leads to a situation that looks much like the one we have now.

This suggests the relational approach can be important in helping people make decisions and there’s something valuable in focusing on that as a route to reach people. However, without improving the underpinning levels of knowledge it feels like there’s a real risk that approach will end up perpetuating the idea the building trade can’t be trusted and does poor work – this time more explicitly in relation to energy or environmental measures. In a sector which has issues around the quality of work done through government and energy obligation funded schemes, widening the range of tenures mistakes get made in doesn’t feel ideal. Finding a way to have improvements in generating demand – for instance through the relational approach – going hand in hand with work to improve the quality of the supply chain feels like a way to try and sustainably address issues in the round.

Futures building

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For whatever reason, when I went to Futurebuild last week I found myself reflecting on the differences between this visit and my first one in 2007 – to EcoBuild as it was then known. Of course memory is notoriously fallible, so my sense of what was different and what felt the same is perhaps also a reflection of my current perceptions projecting onto the past. I was only there for one day, I had a mix of wandering around, going to talks, and talking to a few people so what follows is therefore a very unscientific impression of the things I saw and heard, an attempt to think about what’s changed and what remains the same.

Thinking about the differences between me then and now, I remembered how, the first time I went, I was there for all 3 days – running around like a child in a candy store, if by candy we mean heat interface units and insulation materials. The event was something I had been looking forward to for weeks, checking and re-checking the event listings to luxuriate in the anticipation. By early on the second day I had a good sense of where the freebies were and I would strategically do a walk-by here to get a snack, there to pick up a canvas bag and I half-remember getting a good stash of bottles of maple syrup.

I didn’t have a very clear agenda or priorities, I was just really interested in learning and open to finding out more about everything. Part of that was where I was in my role and career, trying to develop the sustainability agenda at the organisation I was working in – I had identified the gap and been given a little bit of space to develop proposals but without any kind of direction. I love that type opportunity but it felt like I wasn’t sure what it would look like or how I’d be able to contribute. It all felt quite new, hard to place much of the information in the broader context given I was learning as I went. I do remember that feeling of being very relieved to be away from the office and have some autonomy in my days though, and a sense of sadness as I wandered around as the exhibition closed down around me.

By contrast, last week I was able to make space to go for most but not all of one day. I had a brief look at what was on across the days and didn’t feel like any of the sessions were obviously super linked to my PhD – which made me a bit sad but also served as a reminder that hopefully my research will be useful for people. I ended up going on the day I did because it fitted in with other things that were going on work-wise and because an out of town friend of mine was due to be on a panel that day so I would be able to catch up with him. I still felt open to the variety of the event, much like the me who first went, but probably not like all the previous versions of me that had been, or hadn’t even been able to make time to go – which made me feel very happy and fortunate to be in the position I’m in now.

I caught up with someone I know well and we managed to find our way together into a proper, messy and beautiful conversation, which felt even more rare and magical given the contrast with the shiny sales stands surrounding us. I had some conversations with others I know, some people I met at the event and some quick waves to others I didn’t get a chance to say hi to properly. I wasn’t exactly sad to be away from my (home) office but I didn’t feel relieved either. With lots of interesting things that I’m working on, it felt good to enjoy the event within the wider context I’m working in.

It also felt different in that this time I saw mention of places and projects I’ve been involved with in different ways over time, which made it feel like more of a space that I’m part of than I felt the first time around. I really enjoyed attending a workshop where one of my brilliant PhD supervisors gave another engaging and inspiring talk about the lessons we can and should learn from the move from town gas to natural gas. I didn’t feel like a total outsider this time around, I could see things I had helped design and shape, and I have more ideas about ways in which I can be helpful.

What felt different this time was that it felt like there was more of a human angle to the sessions. Less technology-centric with more of a recognition of the need for individuals working in this area and the people in buildings that are on the receiving end of retrofits to be considered and consulted. Relatedly, there were also more discussion about the impacts when those things aren’t happening, particularly in terms of residents, and how that affects delivery. There was more non-technical content than I remember from the first time around – both in terms of the subject matter of the talks and also in some of the different organisations that had stands. Of course that could be a case of confirmation bias, given the focus of my PhD but I didn’t feel like I was surrounded by technology stands this time.

There were still plenty of grumbles about government and what they can or should be doing differently or better, but there was also a sense from some that there is a lot happening. That government has provided (some?) people and organisations with a great opportunity through the range of activities they have set in motion and it’s now incumbent upon people to try and make it work. That sense of positivity and trying to make the most of the current context felt refreshing – in any context it can be hard for people to recognise the good times as it is happening. For a sector that can still seem scarred by the Green Deal which ended in 2015, that ability to focus on the here and now felt really wonderful.

One of the biggest shifts I noticed was around a focus on monitoring performance, with lots of services available. Giving people more access to data about actual performance to enable people to have more visibility of what’s actually happening in practice. This offers more scope to try and drive better quality installations and address the performance gap.

Turning then to what felt the same, for all of the differences in myself and the sector, there was much which felt worryingly the same. The big ticket thing for me was people talking about wanting to get to scale. That underlying drumbeat of desire which is beautiful, necessary and also reflective of how far away it still is. Talking about delivery of ‘large-scale schemes’ that in practice are small-scale, given how far away they are from the scale that’s actually needed. Of promising pilots which really could be the next big thing, that unlock the change that’s needed but right now no-one knows and so it’s a case of trying and seeing.

It did still seem like there is a focus on government to provide the funding and framework in which activity can happen at scale. It still feels like there’s an underlying assumption that this is a necessary precondition. While there is a recognition of the need to explore different funding models, and move away from the subsidy junkie approach, walking around I saw a lot of companies that didn’t have very clearly defined propositions, or ones that were clearly additive rather than extractive. The propositions had broadened and changed beyond technologies or installers but still, I left with an impression that some of the companies plying their trade there weren’t necessarily designed for or enabling a more transformative approach.

Despite the conversations about scale and funding, it still seemed like much of the focus was on the social housing sector. Given the relative sizes of the other sectors, with social housing the smallest , the fact I couldn’t find any sessions the day I went which were focused on other tenures, and only a couple on other days didn’t feel very reassuring. There was lots of talk about the cost and how expensive it is and how there’s a need to draw in funding from a variety of different sources, yet there weren’t many sessions which engaged with this. It also meant that discussions around how people think about their homes and what they want from them didn’t feel very centred in many of the discussions. That fundamental driver of my PhD felt like it got a little bit of space but I definitely didn’t see sessions I could easily imagine my research fitting into this year.

What struck me the most was how limited the reckoning with the findings of the recent National Audit Office report felt. For an industry long beset by concerns about the performance gap, a report which was so stark in the findings, and which reinforced views and concerns in the sector, it was odd not have more of an explicit focus on improving quality. There was some implicit recognition of it in the increased number of organisations offering monitoring services and in some of the projects being developed. Implicitly there too in sessions encouraging a sharing of learning, and it was great to see those sessions with people from across the UK. That felt really valuable but wasn’t a space installers and manufacturers were in. That could be unfair though, a trade event might not be the place people feel comfortable having those discussions. Without that explicit focus on improving the actual quality of works at a systems level, it is hard to see how we can get anywhere near the scale we are all still trying to unlock.

That left me feeling like it is easier to feel and see the changes in me. From just starting out, trying to inch myself into an area I wanted to be working in, to feeling now like I have some perspectives that can be helpful. I can bring insights that are grounded in practical delivery and informed by my own research and learning. Feeling how different the day to day and the context is now compared to when I first went.

As someone who wants to be helpful, I’ve found it difficult writing this piece when thinking in terms of where the sector is at more generally. I’m interested in what it is I’m creating when I invent or remember that past and compare it to now. I’ve been reflecting for a while on a sentence I read by Bill McKibben – when he was asked how people can make a difference as individuals, his reply was people should ‘be less of an individual’. He was talking about how people should think about themselves in the context of systems as systems change can leverage more impact than individual actions alone.

Thinking about where to place an emphasis and in recognising my role as part of a system, and wanting to effect change, I thought about just focusing on the many good things I took away from the event. I have definitely felt happy seeing reflections from people who were there, either at the time or afterwards talking about a sense of hope. Recognising that there is a wider range of voices and perspectives. That I’m not alone, or even a totally marginal voice, in thinking about the need to engage with what people want and feel and to think more holistically about homes and improvements to them. That people are focused on what can be done and trying to work things out in a purposive way, rather than session and discussions filled with people talking about how impossible and hard it all is.

It feels too easy to criticise and point out what’s wrong rather than focusing on the positives. Recognising that it’s easy to be a critic and thinking back to this quote from Theodore Roosevelt where he said ‘the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena…who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly’. That while it’s easier to criticise others than to build things yourself, it is much more rewarding to be the one who is building things.

Yet that niggling sense of worry I have keeps coming in, that while there is a greater diversity of views there is much that feels unchanged. That part of myself which feels worried we’re still trying to build on foundations that feel unstable. Reading and hearing comments about the National Audit Office report and wider longstanding issues with performance and quality being passed off as a few bad apples or not really engaged with enough or sufficiently substantively to have confidence the many examples of good practice are becoming entrenched as industry norms. Too little engagement with what people actually think and feel about their homes and a limited focus on tenures beyond social housing – hearing more voices calling for approaches that align with what my research is exploring but still struggling to see a context in which the aims of my research are accepted and embedded.

That in a time of political instability, with both the political and physical climates deteriorating, there is still a large reliance across much of the sector on government interventions as the element that is going to unlock change and action. Yet even amidst the instability and the latest UK political psycho-drama affecting progress, Ed Miliband and DESNZ are putting in a pretty solid shift to try and address the challenges of the moment in a sustainable, transformative way. Much in the detail that could be better in what they are doing but the sense of ambition feels evident. There’s a real risk that if we don’t find a way to shore up the foundations we won’t be able to make the most of the current opportunities.

So perhaps it’s unsurprising I don’t feel I can pick a side in the positive or critical perspective on the event and where the sector is at. That uncertain, nuanced view could be a fair reflection of how things are, and what story the conference was offering. Partially and imperfectly – in the arenas and stands, in private conversations and workshop sessions – people were telling stories of patchy, slow progress. Difficult reckonings, signs of hope, tentative progress and patterns of behaviour being recognised and grappled with, alongside the same mistakes over and over and over, of things still unresolved and unexplored. I left the event feeling energised by that sense of being part of a sector still willing to dare greatly, yet uncertain if or how those unresolved tensions beneath it are really being addressed widely enough.

A time capsule

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My latest study visit took me to Sambourne House, the family home of Linley Sambourne, the artist and Chief Cartoonist for Punch magazine that has been preserved almost untouched. The space has become a show home but still feels very lived in. It gives an insight into Victorian life and particularly for that of a family with an artistic disposition. The house shows how homes can absorb the influences and advances of the time, and yet still allow people to express their own tastes.

The house reflects the ‘House Beautiful’ aesthetic of the time – this saw a reaction to mass produced products, favouring the handmade and recognising the value of furniture and furnishings as artworks. The style tends to include lots of natural motifs and more muted colours – which can be seen throughout the house in the colours and designs, including William Morris wallpapers.

However, the house also reflects how people can take aspects of the current styles and adjust them to their own tastes. Another aspect of this style is a restrained, pared back approach and that is most definitely not the case in the Sambourne’s house. As the picture of the living room below shows, it is a space that is very full of things indeed.

As the picture above also shows, there are lots of elements of the interior which are connected to the exterior. Chinoiserie and pictures from and of the wider world – from their travels and also to reflect their connections to and placing themselves in relation to the world. Rugs and vases from around the world too – showing how homes are not just individual spaces but are connected to other places and people and that people intentionally seek out those connections. Influences and designs, a way of showing off both your taste and sense of self, allowing you to be somewhat out in the world even when at home, and signalling to others that you are cosmopolitan and connected.

There was a strong sense of comfort about the place, with lots of places for people to sit, rich and warm fabrics and materials covering all of the surfaces, and fireplaces in the rooms and even in the hall. I was very intrigued to find a curtain over the doorway in one of the rooms – part of it was on a pole that comes out so you can open the door without getting the curtain tangled up with the door. I had never seen that technology before but it makes such sense.

Another sign of the modernity of the house was that it has a downstairs cloakroom toilet as well as a separate bathroom with a toilet. This increased prevalence of toilets was something that was starting to come forward in Victorian times, following The Great Exhibition of 1851 at Crystal Palace. There the expression ‘to spend a penny’ came into being, as people could spend a penny to trial the first paid public toilets. This helped increased expectations about the availability of toilets, and the privacy of having a separate space for them.

The downstairs cloakroom is so modern that the sink is a technology innovation – to empty it you would have to tilt it to let the water run out of. These sinks allowed people to have access to running water and enabled them to wash their hands without needing to have the pipework plumbed in. This made it much more accessible for people to have installed, it also got around the issue which arose where plumbing systems initially were quite smelly – rendering them less attractive for people from that perspective. I wasn’t able to get in to the room to have a look but typically these sinks would empty into a bucket which would be cleared away – by the servants.

While the rest of the house is very highly decorated, the cloakroom has the white tiling that Barbara Penner talks about in her book which have come from a medical context – where the white tiles are designed to show how clean the place is, or make it easy to tell if and where it isn’t.

After Linley and his wife Marion died the house was left to their son Roy, who kept the house largely unchanged. When he died in 1946 the house was left to his sister Maud. Maud already had a large London residence, and so the house became a time capsule, mostly unoccupied and unchanged. Maud’s daughter Anne became fascinated by the place, leading to her setting up the Victorian Society and the continued preservation of the house.

I was interested by Roy Sambourne – choosing to live in the house and preserve it largely unchanged from when his parents had lived there. It seemed like an odd choice, to consciously choose to preserve somewhere, particularly somewhere that wasn’t a ‘stately’ home or one belonging to particularly famous people. I wondered how much it was a conscious choice or if it was something that reflected more a lack of decisions and action to make changes

As I found out more about Roy it came to make a bit more sense. From what I’ve been able to gather, he never really found his way in life. His mother Marion Sambourne wrote that “she was worried that her son had inherited none of the ambition and capacity for sustained hard work which had made his father so successful”. Roy’s biographer Shirley Nicholson writes in her book ‘An Edwardian Bachelor’ that “All Roy ever wanted to do was have a good time with the minimum amount of effort. This may not be an unusual attitude among the young, but Roy was never to grow out of it; Life carried him along, while he made no effort to shape its course”. When I read that, it became easier to see how he might choose to live in the house and not make any particular changes to it – beyond apparently getting the woodwork in his bedroom changed from red to white – while still leaving a space that didn’t feel very minimalist, as the picture of his room below shows.

A time capsule that developed from a comfortable family home into a place that shows how people lived then. It felt quite different to the more restrained designs that can typify the modern Victorian aesthetic. For a place that hasn’t been lived in since the late 1940s it nonetheless felt like a real home, and one that people obviously tried to make comfortable and reflective of their tastes. An old fashioned feeling space now but one that was clearly quite modern in lots of ways then.

The hard sell

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I was at Elemental London earlier this week. A trade show and conference about the built environment. Plenty of flanges and pumps and gadget goodness to try and make sense of.

At one of the sessions I did go to, someone giving a presentation said that it’s hard to sell heating systems because people only want to talk about them if something goes wrong. A gentle, knowing laugh went around the space.

It feels like there’s plenty of truth in that. Heating systems aren’t the most exciting thing to talk about, there’s lots of technical details which don’t mean much to most people. The language and technical details can be off-putting to most.

So why try and sell a heating system? Why not talk about the things that do interest people instead? Warmth and comfort and relaxation. As Fouquet discusses, people think about energy services – not exactly marketing ready language but that phrasing more readily engages with what people are actually looking for. The outputs and opportunities that flow from the energy, rather than actively being interested in the energy source itself.

We can either keep being frustrated with people or we can go to where they are and really engage with what interests them. There was some sense of an attempt to do that in sessions around the conference, with discussions around co-creation and protecting what’s important to people. More of that is needed to turn fledgling ideas and approaches into things that can more consistently appeal to people.

A scone-fuelled mission

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It’s fun to have a mission.

I’ve been to the Tate Britain many times before but this was the first time I had a mission – I was looking for artworks that had representations of home in them.

Often I wander around museums and don’t really feel like I’m engaging with them. I did a short ethnography course a million years ago and the activity I undertook was watching others interacting with an artwork. Sitting there for an afternoon I felt quite exposed because, although I’d picked a quite well known and large piece of art to watch the watchers, most people passed it by very quickly indeed. My sitting there for so long felt very out of place compared to how long others were interacting with the artwork.

As someone who’s never learned ‘how to’ interpret art, I don’t feel like I come to it with a very wide vocabulary to understand what I’m seeing. That’s partly why I’m so interested in including reviewing different cultural materials in my PhD – it’s a way for me to learn some skills and approaches to understanding and interrogating artwork.

I love going to museums and galleries and enjoy exploring, so being able to get more ways to understand pieces of art and find ways to interact with them in a more meaningful way feels like such an enriching thing to be able to do. The fact that it’s in the service of something that feels useful in terms of answering the questions of my wider PhD then means I can allow myself to enjoy it without the more puritanical streak in me freaking out.

I also got to have some delicious tea and a lovely scone with an absolutely stonking amount of clotted cream and jam to refresh me part-way through the endeavour. If anyone had told me this is what working on the weekend could be like I think past me would find it as hard as current me to fathom this could be the case.

In that context then, I really enjoyed having that sense of purpose – being able to make my way around the exhibition with a hook to see what I could find. I also passed on my mission to the posse I was with which added to the fun, for me at least – I didn’t do a feedback poll to see how the others felt about it.

I had expected to be able to find more things along the way than I did though. Lots of pieces either didn’t seem to relate to the home or didn’t show people in that context.

Here are a few of the ones I did find along the way.

Walter Sickert, Ennui, 1914

A fascinating piece, with such a story within it of the relationship between the two people. Virginia Woolf wrote an essay about Sickert, and particularly this piece, as a response. Albeit Woolf was writing in response to another version of the painting done by Sickert and held at the Ashmolean Museum – that one has much more vibrant colours and decor but the people within it are unchanged. Stuck and bored whatever their surroundings.

That sense of a story in the paintings comes through much more strongly in those pieces where there are multiple people in. From a Dr looking after a sick child, to men distraught – sometimes supported by their wife as in Hick’s work, at other times, as in Egg’s the prostrate woman is apparently the cause. Of course that also makes it harder to see the interiors though…

Woolf makes another appearance in the home of one couple in Gupta’s series showing homosexual couples at home. The photos were taken at a time in the 1980s when homosexuality was being portrayed as deviant whilst these photos present them as ordinary rather than other.

Luke Fildes, The Doctor, 1891
George Elgar Hicks, Woman’s mission: Companion of manhood, 1863
Augustus Leopold Egg, Past and Present No. 1, 1858
Sunil Gupta, Lovers: Ten years on, 1984-6

All of the paintings have a story to tell but from this collection of paintings at least, it’s a gentler story in those with just one person in. Peace, quiet and reflection in the scenes but, apart from McEvoy’s painting the interiors themselves are vibrant and busy – full of colour and objects.

Mary McEvoy, Interior: Girl reading, 1901
Harold Gilman, Edwardian interior, c.1907
Edouard Vuillard, Jeune femme dans un interieur, c.1910

More wandering and exploring, a beautiful richly coloured and empty view of the room where Shakespeare was apparently born; a side-quest visit to see the Henry Moore’s because I can still enjoy the stark, sensual beauty of them whilst working hard.

Then, as we left the building, we were met by Chris Ofili’s colourful, elegiac piece in memory of those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire. A totally different piece. The scale monumental compared to the smaller pieces I’d seen. Richly coloured and far removed from the gentle, quiet reflections. As with some of the other pieces, telling a story about when things have gone wrong, failings and harm. This time, at a societal level rather than between two people. The painting itself has a dreamlike quality about a nightmarish situation.

Chris Ofili, Requiem, 2023

Only a few pieces of art found on my visit but that small selection shows just how varied homes and home-making and un-making can be, how fundamental they are to our lives and wellbeing.

Moons and moons and moons

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Talking about other planets often becomes another way of talking about Earth, making it easier to engage with ourselves, our habits and the impacts they have. Reading ‘Orbital’ by Samantha Harvey, the poetic, beautiful book about a day in the life on the International Space Station, much of what made it so wonderful to read was being taken to somewhere else I’d never be able to, and seeing Earth afresh. It felt revelatory being shown the beauty and improbable aloneness of our Earth in the universe.

Taking a different planet seemingly as it’s focus ‘Moon’, Duncan Jones’ 2009 film, offers another way for us to see ourselves and Earth. So much of the story is about the focus of Sam Rockwell’s character Sam Bell on looking after himself as he finishes up his three year posting on the Moon, ahead of returning to Earth, his wife and family. Sam is all alone on the Moon apart from an AI helper and ‘buddy’ as he mines for helium-3. His contact with Earth is limited to intermittent recorded messages as the live communications link between the Moon and Earth is down. At the start of the film we see Sam trying to keep himself together physically and mentally. We see how much he wants to get back to Earth, to his home and family, how close it all seems and yet how far given what seems to be a declining state of health. As the film unfolds, we watch his health deteriorate.

Seeing him as he gets physically injured, and as his mental health is affected, it felt like I was seeing the madness of our pursuit for energy playing out on one person. Getting sick and going mad as an allegory of our collective madness. How this manifests in him – his health suffering, physically and mentally scarred, bruised, burned and eventually left for dead. Disconnected from those he loves, watching them from afar, intermittently, as they grow and change without him there.

Heidegger talks about how technology can alienate us from ourselves and our true sense of being. That we are all beings in this world, with relationships to each other that are fundamental as inherently social creatures. As we see in ‘Moon, Sam is able to make sense of the work he’s doing because of what it means for the possibilities for his family, and how much he values getting messages from them. Heidegger is worried that technology can lead us to see nature and other people simply as raw materials – whether in ‘Moon’ that’s the person who is doing the mining, or the materials they are mining for. Technology then, in Heidegger’s view, takes us away from our sense of self, our way of being in the world which he sees as crucial to our humanity. Although there’s much to criticise Heidegger for – professionally and personally – ‘Moon’ gives a cinematic view of what that disconnect can look like.

The distant company Sam is working for, distant both physically and emotionally, seem to be operating from this Heideggerian perspective. They give Sam meaningless platitudinal reassurance but don’t do anything to fix equipment or look after him in ways which would actually be useful for him. Sam continues to work even whilst he is unwell, out of a sense of obligation and to avoid giving any reason for his return to Earth to be delayed. He has some interests outside of his work there, making a model replica of his hometown and exercising. In the main his life and meaning has become so built around the work, and the work ending so he can return home, that he needs to keep working so he, his location and his purpose there can hold together.

Sam’s work extracting helium-3 makes visible how energy extraction can look in practice, something we can usually avoid. Seeing the mining unfolding on the Moon, a place that seems such a pristine environment, feels more shocking, throwing into further relief what we are doing on Earth. Compared to earth, where it’s estimated there is only about 100kg globally of helium-3, the amount on the Moon is relatively more abundant. Different samples have found up to 10 parts per billion(ppb) of helium-3 on the Moon, with the average about 4 ppb. These are still very low levels of the material but lots of organisations have nonetheless investigated mining there. Currently helium-3 is used in a few ways, including in cryogenics and quantum computing but it’s also considered a potential future source of energy, as the film proposes it is used. The film shows the Moon’s surface getting utterly churned up as Sam tries to find some crumbs of helium-3 to send back to Earth.

In the literature around energy transitions, one of the key discussions is whether we have seen or are seeing, energy transitions or whether it’s more a case of energy additions. The argument for energy transitions is about progress away from older energy sources and bringing online new ones. Primarily this is a discussion about a transition away from filthy fossil fuels to cleaner sources of energy – renewable sources such as solar, wind or hydroelectric, as well as ones that are cleaner by some metrics ones such as nuclear. Proponents of this view would point to how some sources such as coal, have fallen away or gone completely in many countries.

Fressoz’s book ‘More and more and more’ argues that what we’ve had, and are going through, are energy additions. That whilst new technologies are coming online, we’re still using old technologies too, and this increase in the availability of energy is leading to an overall rise in consumption. The data can certainly support this view. Data from ‘Our World in Data’ shows that more traditional biomass is burnt globally now than 100s of years ago. We’re still using coal and gas. This year has seen the highest ever level of coal usage globally. As Fouquet and Pearson’s 1998 article shows, the more energy that becomes available, and the more affordable it becomes, the more likely we are to spend disposable income on energy. This encourages people to develop new or cheaper energy sources and services, making it more affordable, and normal, for people to use more energy. Then we go around the loop again and find ourselves thinking that scrabbling around the surface of the Moon for crumbs makes sense.

Shove talks about the adoption of practices and how comfort becomes something that people seek. This feedback loop between availability, use and rising expectations or changing norms can then feed off itself. We can justify the mess we make of places on Earth or, in a potential future, the Moon or other planets – apparently Jupiter has the most helium-3 of all the planets but is even more inaccessible than the Moon – because of all the uses we make of energy. The entrenched position of the habits and expectations becomes enough to explain or justify the impacts. It can also become easier to accept the impacts than address the behaviours.

I found watching ‘Moon’ to be an unsettling story in many ways, yet it was also like watching a story I’ve seen many times before. The film provided a near-future reflection of scenes that continue to be played out across the world in pursuit of resources. Although ‘Moon’ is science fiction, it reflects existing extractive patterns here on Earth, affecting those working in the industry and the Earth itself. ‘Orbital’ gives us reasons to care, inviting us to see anew how precious this planet is, while ‘Moon’ shows us the consequences of that lack of care. Together, they offer different ways of seeing ourselves, giving emotional reasons to care, and to want to reassess our actions.

Back to the future

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Visiting archives is a way to physically connect with the past, so I am keen to do so as a way to explore the stories that shape how we understand homes, communities, and change over time. As soon as I stepped into the Southwark Archives I realised that of course this is what an archives should smell like. That slightly dry, dusty but richly inviting smell. Absolutely ideal.

From that on-point smell, my visit to an archives only got better. As a first-time visitor to an archives, and going in an exploratory way to get a sense of the lay of the land, I didn’t have much of a sense of what I’d find, how it would all work.

The amazing archivist that I’d e-mailed before I arrived had, on the basis of a very broad set of parameters, collected together some information for me and it was all laid out ready when I arrived. I just delved right in, looking to see what piqued my interest, or felt like it related to my PhD.

The generosity of this work, people working to preserve parts of the past and help others make sense of it just blew me away. Watching one of the archivists respectfully and patiently respond to a million questions from a couple of people who had booked a visit. Finding and helping, making resources available and helping people who are coming to the archives with all kinds of interests and questions. The act of archiving, as they acknowledged themselves when talking about the changing norms in society, is obviously an act of choosing what is important, what should be kept, that says something about the time, place and people – even if those views reflect a worldview that most of us would now no longer agree with.

It was so incredible to actually physically hold documents going back over 100 years. Although virtual things are great and give us access to so much information easily, that sense of literally holding parts of history in my hands had me feeling quite emotional at times. The more so because most of what I looked at was the stuff of everyday life – brochures, flyers, news stories and reports. Often it’s the so-called ‘extraordinary’ moments that get recorded – moments in which most people are observers rather than participants, such as sporting events, the details of rich peoples lives. It was really lovely to see a richer reflection and recognition of people’s lives beyond that small slice of it.

Even though I felt like I was in hunter gathering mode, rather than really processing what I was seeing, there were still some themes which came through:

  • the care people put into looking after each other – the different schemes and plans to look after each other, to try and find ways to help people live healthier, better lives
  • an increasingly common mismatch between the amount of funding needed to look after, let alone improve social housing and what has been made available
  • restrictions on how people can live in homes they don’t own, regulations from an 1897 publication, much of which would still feel familiar today
  • different manifestations of the tensions between people and other creatures. Lots of news stories about rats, ants, mice, cockroaches and other insects and animals that are trying to make themselves at home

There were also some fascinating gems, including:

  • a sense of the changing expectations of homes coming through in a drawing from a 1928 publication. This proudly showed a lovely home that had a properly plumbed in bath in the kitchen. This would now be considered unacceptable but was then considered quite an upgrade
  • photo’s and stories from people giving glimpses into the different ways people navigate the world and place their home within it – from the landmarks around the place a registered blind person uses to orientate himself, to transient spaces briefly becoming homes for homeless people
  • Montagu H. Cox, the Clerk of the Council, wrote in January 1928 about ‘the housing problem’ in a way which felt both humble and yet purposeful – ‘These are striking figures (numbers of homes built), but it must not be supposed that the housing problem is already solved. Slums have not yet been wholly swept away, nor have houses yet been provided for all who need them. Moreover, the housing standards of to-day will not necessarily be those of to-morrow, and some areas not at present classed as slums are certain in course of time to come within this category. Nevertheless, much has been accomplished, the lines of future progress are more clearly discernible, and the time has been brought appreciably nearer when it may be possible to say that the solution of one of the most difficult and serious social problems of the age is at last within sight’. Much in there which would still hold true – from housing standards changing to homes and areas changing in character. That sense of a solution, written in a beautifully printed and bound book, looking positively to the future felt tonally very different to much of the public discourse we see and hear now about what’s possible.

My favourite find though was in the seemingly unlikely place of a 1939 brochure by the Borough of Bermondsey Electricity Committee. You’d be forgiven for thinking this might be an offering as dry and dusty as the air in archives but you would be wrong – richness indeed in that brochure, as in the archival air. Here’s a small sample from ‘The magic of electricity’:

‘Once upon a time, a little girl named Alice discovered a Wonderland where philosophic caterpillars smoked hookahs, and lobsters danced quadrilles, while the Mock Turtle sobbed without ceasing – a queer quarrelsome Wonderland of muddled magic. There was a lovely garden in this Wonderland, but Alice could not find the way into it until the middle of the story, when a golden key unlocked the door the led to the bright flower-beds and cool fountains.

Housewives who use the old-fashioned methods of lighting, heating, cooking and cleaning are just in Alice’s shoes. They are surrounded by a quarrelsome Wonderland of smoky fires, inadequate lighting, dirt that needs continual clearing away, and unending labour over the simplest tasks. They have not discovered the key that gives access to the lovely garden of Leisure – the golden key that is clearly marked “Electricity”.

With this little book, the Electricity Committee presents every modern Alice who lives in Bermondsey with the key.’

Key’s indeed to be found, in that brochure and the rest of the archives. An absolute privilege to be able to explore them, my first visit but hopefully not my last to that kind of ‘quarrelsome Wonderland’.

Walked the homes

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Do Ho Suh’s exhibition at the Tate is so titled because traditional Korean buildings known as a hanok can be disassembled and reassembled elsewhere, a process of ‘walking the house’.

It was wonderful to be immersed in someone expressing different aspects of the home. From the physical aspects to the emotional and temporal. Seeing them all overlaid together, as they are for people most of the time but which feels rare to see in artworks. Homes can often be featured in art but rarely as the main event, more commonly as a backdrop or fleeting glimpse. Something that tells us about someone but isn’t usually the main focus of the piece.

Public/private split

Homes are usually thought of as private spaces, or at least they have increasingly been for the last few hundred years. People lived together in much more communal set-ups. Sharing rooms, beds and homes. Things that we would now consider private, like using the toilet or having sex, were much more public activities then. It’s apparently why swear words were related to religion up until a few hundred years ago – that was a transgressive thing to talk about, whereas swear words now are more about sex and toilet things because they have become private matters, things to be ashamed or embarrassed about.

Here, Suh upends that, making the private public. He has houses within houses, parts of homes which have become public spaces as they are demolished. A childhood home rubbed down and rebuilt within the gallery. Every part of the exterior traced onto paper, lines and designs, to capture the look and feel of the place. Films showing homes exposed to the public as they are demolished, private walls becoming briefly public before they disappear.

Homes in this telling are not just becoming public because we get to see the private light switches and fire hydrants of previous homes but, in sharing his artistic response to his home, he’s also helping us move from the specific to the universal. In showing us where he’s lived in a way which invites us in, creates some intimacy, he’s also inviting people to think about their own home. Helping us bring our own homes into that gallery, comparing ours with his, reflecting back on our own, seeing how others live.

Gender and homes

Homes have traditionally become a place that’s associated with women rather than men, as many, including Bowlby, Gregory and McKie have reflected. Following the split between public and private spaces, men became more associated with public spaces and women with private spaces. Perhaps if the exhibition had been by a woman rather than a man, it might have resonated slightly differently. A sense of women working within the parameters they are typically afforded. Whereas having a man make art from it, and see it as something which is worthy of making art with and from, is another way of helping to show and shift that division.

Modernity and homes

Putnam identified two successive transformations of contemporary living from traditional 19th Century models of home. The first was the emergence of the modern home between about 1920-1950 when domestic spaces were designed around the technical core of sewers, water, gas and power cables. A time when these innovations were new for most people and somewhat astonishing, or perhaps a little terrifying too. The second shift he identifies is around the 1960s, when the technical, economic and political structures of modernity became part of the background of modern home life. At that point, as what he describes as ‘the material life supports of modernity are taken for granted’, the cables and sewers and suchlike fade into the background and the home becomes a space in which people personalise their space and negotiate with each other about how it looks.

In that context it was fun to see cables, wires and light fittings represented. Those life supports, especially things like cables, don’t tend to be shown and have disappeared into a sense of what normal homes look like. Often in lifestyle magazines cables and wires get edited out of pictures, as though the items they are powering magically work without showing the plugs. That it’s not cool or aspirational to need to connect in to power sockets.

Suh shows the different aspects of the home which would normally be hidden, peeling away layers of life. Simultaneously showing the modernity of the home which is taken for granted by those who have grown up with it, and also going back to the pre-modern home where it’s not taken for granted and is instead something to marvel at. Bringing them to the fore again allows for the magic and importance of them to be seen and recognised.

Making homes our own

When people move into a place they often try and remove traces of previous occupants to ‘make it their own’. Suh shows there are many ways to make a home our own.  He had to get permission from some of the landlords to make the art,  a way of taking ownership of the home – it’s his art when it’s out in the world, even if it wasn’t and isn’t ‘his’ home.

In one of the pieces, he layers up aspects of different homes – light switches and plugs, light fittings and door handles. It gave me a time-travelling sense of all of the people who would have used those light switches and door handles. The different hands that had used them, the lives they have supported. As we become more separate in our homes, with much less communal living, more people living by themselves, and even within homes as we have separate spaces, overlaying parts from multiple homes gave a more communal sense of home.

Memory and meaning

For some, home is a place of practices and habits, for others it’s a place that holds memory and meaning. The pieces by Suh blur those boundaries. The practice of making art, the holding on to places and details which act as anchors for both practices within the home and also memories.

The pieces are a way of preserving the past but also, for him as an artist, of making the future – exhibitions and work, building a body of work and meaning. Tracing the contours of the building, with his childhood home literally rubbing every part of the outside of the building, capturing the details on fabric which then gets remade into a simulacrum of his home – but not a place you could actually live within. A memory of the memory. A memory that looks like the memory, in the same way a story that gets told and retold can become a memory of the story, rather than a memory of the memory.

As Brickell reflects, home isn’t just a place where history ends up but where history emerges from and, quoting Caluya, the home exhibits ‘a certain plastic tendency that enables its boundaries to expand and shrink’. This work does that too, delicately and painstakingly tracing the boundaries of the homes but with an intention for those very boundaries to go further out into the world.

The exhibition space itself felt like things were quite crushed together and could have done with some more space to breathe. Nonetheless, providing room for people to see homes as worthy of being considered art, and not just glamorous homes but the life support parts, created a space for thinking about homes that we can take from the gallery into the world and back home again.

Not writing

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Feeling distracted, thoughts fractured and half thought and racing away with and from me. Wanting to write and focus and also to think all of the things and explore all of the avenues and rabbit holes and luxuriate in that.

Hot weather and maybe my mind is playing along, feeding off it. It doesn’t feel like the weather for rigorous discipline and deep, thoughtful work. Any time not lounging in a comfortable chair in the shade with a long tall glass of something delicious feels like an absolute triumph. Surely I should be carried through the streets, people showering me with flowers and kudos, writing epic tales to be passed down.

Jumping from one thing to another, exacerbated by screen attention grabbing which persuades me into frittering away time after time on things the better angels of my nature know to not be what I want to actually be putting my time into.

We are creatures of the weather, only able to live and work and be in a very narrow set of temperatures. It isn’t at all surprising that in those circumstances I, we, would be less able to function. When my brain is boiling, eyes feeling like they could melt at any moment, skin red and sweaty at though the blood within is melting – can I really be surprised that work feels hard. No wonder the recent polling suggests less enthusiasm for heatwaves as they become increasingly common. Having that discomfort on a frequent basis when it’s not a break, a chance to discover new ways of being, have the ordinary be transformed – even if not into something good, at least into something unexpected.

Not sustainable to give myself days and weeks and months off whilst the weather is like this. Another reason to not write. And that’s it really. That I’m pushing myself into doing things I’m not sure about, think I can’t do or I’m not good at. So of course it all feels more discomforting. My brain is in the business of finding things to show me that it’s ok and healthy not to write. To try and do what it thinks is looking after myself when actually I want to see what happens if I just keep trying, day after day.

And this is all nonsense, nothing of any interest or use, apart from to me. Seeing the excuse in the hot hot heat. Finding the inspiration to keep working and trying and figuring things out – a reminder of why the work I want to do is needed, even as the changes I’m trying to address make it ever harder to so…

An uncomfortable silence

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I went to see ‘London Road’ at The National Theatre, a musical using verbatim language from residents of and around London Road. 79 London Road was where the serial killer Steven Wright was living when he was arrested for the murders of five women.

The play doesn’t really focus on the murderer, and those who have been killed hardly feature at all, and rarely with much compassion. In one sequence, one of the women from the road talked about how they were glad the women were killed – they had all been working on the street or the local area as sex workers – and the person living on the road found it uncomfortable and unpleasant living there. There were a number of extended silences, giving the audience time to contemplate what she’s saying, to feel the messy, difficult implications of it. The silences increased the sense of intimacy, hearing private views that she knows she ‘shouldn’t’ be feeling, or we would probably want to hear. It felt like the audience was holding it’s breath as she spoke. Letting her say what she had to say. Curious about it. Wondering if she would pull back, come to more socially acceptable views. Instead the kept restating her views, going further each time, the pauses giving more of an impression they were considered views.

An even bigger silence later on, as one of the sex workers reflected on how the murders had made them get out of that work, mostly – they still saw a few regulars. A moment that seemed to grow and grow, perpetually it felt, about to end, yet somehow continuing to expand. Like blowing a bubble, the shape of it wobbling as it grows, so fragile and ready to pop at any moment, yet somehow, for that fraction of a second which feels bigger, continuing to exist and grow. A reminder of how powerfully a silence can hold people, how rare it can be. Discomfort and waves of wondering when it will end, a tension at times that feels like it needs to end and then shifts into a wanting it to continue – it’s so big but surely we can make it ever bigger and larger. At times almost wanting to laugh because it felt so long, improbably so.

Moments of silence can be hard to experience, whether they are gentle ones like those in a safe, lovely theatre, or harder ones with other people where the stakes are high. Not knowing, filling it with our own dread panic. The voices of our insecurity, where it’s hard to be curious, there’s more risk in the response.

More and more there’s discussion about how smart phones and screen time generally are affecting our ability to sit with discomfort or boredom. Leaving us rushing to fill the silent moment with distraction and action, noise and other people doing things. Not having to wait to see what becomes of the silence because we can fast forward or scroll on through other people’s lives and thoughts.

The play was a reminder of the messiness of emotions and reactions. Not tidying things up for people but giving the people represented in the play the dignity and responsibility of their own emotions. Providing the audience the space to feel their own responses, however uncomfortable they might find them. The power of holding some space and allowing things to be as they are.