Tag: Home

History may not repeat itself, but it might rhyme

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Reading Barbara Penner’s fascinating book ‘Bathroom’ (2013) about how the modern, predominantly Western, bathroom has evolved, the parallels with the energy transition felt noticeable. Very different technologies involved but both water and energy consumption are so firmly entrenched in our lives, expectations and daily practices. The history of bathrooms shows how differently we can behave and therefore suggests we shouldn’t assume we’ve reached an unimprovable, or unchanging situation with the current entrenched position of bathrooms in our lives. How they came to be so offers reflections for the energy transition.

Penner traces the development and refinement of different technologies, showing a mix of reasons and circumstance that dictated which became more widely adopted and which fell by the wayside. How, despite new bathroom related technologies becoming available, there were issues with deployment. They were usually only available to the rich, and even then often only taken up by those who were prepared to deal with the issues getting technologies put in to their home, particularly when the wider infrastructure like sewage pipes wasn’t there to support it. Many poorer areas struggled to get the new products because companies weren’t interested, with a more widespread approach only happening when the public sector got involved. Where efforts were targeted at those who were less well-off, it was often driven by a sense of morality and desire to improve health but also behaviour. Henry Roberts, a Victorian architect, designed flats for poor families which were radical in their inclusion of a room specifically designated as a bathroom. The aim of Roberts was to provide the occupants with the ‘moral training of a well-ordered family’, looking to introduce and enforce an appropriate distance between the bodies of the various occupants and also between the bodies and their waste.

The patchy, ad hoc nature of the change and take-up of bathrooms was interesting to read about. In a world where fitted, matching suites are the norm, hearing about people starting to get some elements of what we would now consider to be fundamental parts of the bathroom, the toilet, sink and bath or shower, but not all of them showed how much has changed. Striking too, how those decisions would be driven by considerations around space, cost and availability, with factors such as health, morality and norms also playing a big part. Even where people did get some aspects of the bathroom put into their home, they would often continue with older technologies in parallel.

In the world of energy transitions, the take-up of new technologies is patchy too – globally but also within countries and across geographies, property types and personal circumstances. Even in the same home, people can have a few different technologies. Perhaps getting some insulation or a heat pump to serve an extension, whilst still having the boiler as the main heating source for instance. Although less explicitly moralistic than some of the efforts in relation to water and bathrooms, there is still a sense that it’s the ‘right thing to do’ to try and support those who are less well-off to get energy measures installed. That said, it’s also true that lots of the early adopters for energy measures are those who are well-off and prepared to navigate the complexity of installation.

Penner is also really strong on showing how the development of the bathroom allowed for our homes and bodies to become much more private spaces whilst also making bathrooms, and by extension homes, much more connected to the public sphere and regulated. Previously, all the functions we would use a bathroom for were done in more communal spaces. People would go to the toilet together, or in more public or shared spaces. Bathing, or cleaning yourself if not actually taking a bath, would be done in spaces with other uses, such as the kitchen, scullery or bedroom. As well as sharing spaces, people would often share the washing water itself.

To allow for the infrastructure which could underpin the kind of toilets we now consider to be standard, regulation and government action happened. The Public Health Act 1848 had clauses regarding domestic sanitary arrangements, marking the first moment when government entered the private bathroom in a meaningful way. The Act required that any new built or rebuilt house needed a sufficient WC or privy and an ashpit with doors and covering. Homeowners were required to notify the local board of health in writing prior to constructing privy/cesspool and surveyors were given the power to shut down any judged to be nuisance or injurious to health. Eventually The Great Stink of 1858 led to the closing of private cesspools and stopped people putting their waste into the Thames, facilitated by the building of a co-ordinated waste system to manage and treat the waste. This led to the adoption of that approach nationally and internationally too.

A criticism of action on climate by those who would consider themselves to be right-wing is that it’s really just cover for more intervention by the State. It was clear reading the book how development of products by the market helped make deployment possible. Without that range of options available, the problem solving to try and improve measures and the mix and match potential that marked the start of the development of the bathroom, it’s hard to see either why more infrastructure might be needed or how it could develop. That said, and I’ve not done further reading so perhaps other accounts might take a different view, it’s hard to see how the development of the infrastructure could have developed in an holistic way without the intervention of government. The private sector focus on generating a desire in those who could pay, and would put up with the challenges of getting measures installed and adapting their homes and way of life, didn’t seem able to provide a comprehensive offer to everyone. Private sector effort and enterprise could generate a want and partially fulfil it.

That sense of the attitudinal changes shifting over time, which fed into and out of the technology changes, was such a strong part of the story for me. As someone who has been brought up with certain norms around cleanliness, so much of what was normal for so many seems unthinkable now. It was a reminder of the fact that even though things can feel quite fixed in terms of behaviours and norms, they are constantly changing, as are how we use spaces, or even if we have designated spaces at all for certain activities. With the advent of new technologies it became easier for people to decry public defecation, once normal and necessary but less so when technology provided other options and design allowed for privacy.

I came to the book to get an understanding of how a part of the home has changed. One of the things that became quickly obvious but I hadn’t consciously engaged with when starting my PhD, was that different parts of the home are subject to change in different ways and over varied timescales. It was therefore really useful to get a sense of how changes to bathing and toilet habits have affected what we now think of as the bathroom, as well as other parts of the home. What was reassuring was how much of it felt relevant for the changes in how homes are designed and used now from an energy and broader environmental perspective. Despite the different technical challenges, I finished the book with a deeper sense of how fundamental social and cultural changes are to if and how positive change unfolds.

‘While it often feels as if change is unthinkable – that people’s beliefs and behaviours are as deeply entrenched and immovable as infrastructure – this history has shown time and time again that our ideas about and our methods of dealing with water and waste are much less uniform, inevitable and fixed than we usually realize. Bathrooms, like sewers, are relatively recent inventions and they constantly evolve and adapt in the face of shifting social, medical, economic, political and environmental factors.’

Barbara Penner, ‘Bathroom’

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.

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’.

Seeing is believing?

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With all of the discussion about clean energy transitions, it can feel very abstract for most people. Massive power plants, huge wind turbines.

Talk about the energy transition seems like it would feel more tangible and real to people if they are actually part of it. Every day you’d be likely to see your panels, or those of your neighbours. The talk of a transition would feel like something you were a part of. It would feel true and real and you’d be able to see how your life was better as a result.

Public acceptance of solar across the board seems to be high. The recent ‘Britain talks climate and nature’ report by Climate Outreach found only 11% of people don’t like seeing solar on roofs. That’s a huge level of public acceptance of a measure which can make quite a difference to the aesthetics of a home or street. People are also much more likely to get solar if their neighbours have got it, creating a potentially virtuous circle in terms of acceptance and take-up.

Solar installs are much quicker than lots of other measures, and less disruptive too. In terms of integrating solar into day to day life, there aren’t really any adjustments needed once it has been installed. Unlike with heat pumps which require space to be found for them and then they are using that space on an ongoing basis.

Immediately people get a benefit in terms of the energy being generated but there’s no lifestyle changes needed to be able to use it. There are lifestyle changes you might be incentivised to make as a result of having them – switching some activities to during the day, like using the dishwasher or washing machine – but if you don’t you are the one who might lose out.

With other energy efficiency or low carbon measures, there might be adjustments which are needed to make sure it works properly. There are also potential risks from an energy and climate perspective of the rebound effect. For those who have been under-heating their home that can actively be a good thing in terms of moving to a level of comfort which is better for health and wellbeing.

Directly providing measures which improve homes could also go some way to addressing the phenomenon Chen et al, (2025) identified, where the messaging on affordability doesn’t resonate with those on low incomes. This is something that people within the environmental sector can focus on around the benefits of some measures or the approach to decarbonisation more generally. So it’s humbling but helpful to get some insights into why that message can actually alienate many of the people it’s specifically trying to help. That messaging makes people feel nervous thinking about the costs because they don’t feel they can afford it. This is exacerbated by the fact they don’t think they will benefit from any transition so the costs are for them but not the benefits.

Being able to tangibly show people it’s for them can change that. With some things, like insulation, the measures themselves just aren’t visible to people unless they’ve been badly installed and then it becomes apparent through the mould, damp and other structural issues. Otherwise the impacts of the insulation can easily become invisible. People tend to take the savings from the energy efficiency and use it to fund an increased level of comfort – which can be the intention in fuel poverty schemes – or the savings get lost as prices rise anyway. So people feel frustrated because they were expecting a reduction in costs and instead see an increase.

In the medium term increasing the deployment of solar will also make it easier to shift costs from electricity to gas because people are less reliant on gas. Making that change is something that needs to happen to support the electrification of energy. Given most people are currently reliant on gas for their heating and hot water, there is an understandable concern about the impact of that shift on people’s health and incomes. Reducing the cost to people of electricity through the provision of free solar can then create the space to fairly and progressively make changes to costs.

Finding a way to give people a more tangible sense of ownership of the move to a decarbonised future feels utterly fundamental to getting people on board. Solar could be one way to do that, to allow people to see themselves as part of, and benefiting from that change.

Picking your poison

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In the discussion between fabric first and fabric fifth it can often feel as though people are trying to get to the ‘right answer’ rather than looking at where the inefficiencies are, how big they are and trying to decide which is more feasible.

In choosing fabric fifth it means that there will be a need to generate more energy and increase grid resilience. All of this costs and means building more national infrastructure. It’s not the more efficient approach in lots of ways, as it means putting more energy generation in than might be optimally required. Asking people to decarbonise their heat supply is a much simpler message and one which can have the biggest impact on their individual carbon footprint. There can still be a place for other measures too, particularly if people want to fund them themselves, but if it’s hard to persuade people to take up any environmental measures, focusing on the most impactful could bring efficiencies that way. In addition to generating carbon savings more quickly, it could also help to reduce costs in trying to recruit people by using a simpler message, and cutting the costs of assessing homes as the standalone heat pump installation can be simpler than internal or external wall insulation.

With fabric first, there should be less energy needing to be generated. In practice this isn’t straightforward, with lots of evidence suggesting there’s a performance gap arising from quality issues in the install process and then a rebound effect, with many households taking improved energy efficiency as comfort savings. This can lead to an increase in energy consumption – and for those households who are under-heating their homes, with the knock-on impacts on the health of the people and the building itself affected, this can be a good thing on wellbeing grounds.

To get to those carbon savings also means trying to persuade people to take up the deeper levels of insulation it requires. This can be more invasive, with most of the ‘easy’ to treat measures done – such as loft or cavity wall insulation. There are still some remaining but these are more likely to be complicated works such as non-standard cavity walls, or perhaps they are lofts where the amount of things being stored makes it too difficult for the occupants to contemplate the work. The longer it takes to persuade people, the more carbon gets emitted along the way.

I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of the shape of the decarbonisation curve, what that means in terms of the quantum of carbon which gets emitted and crucially what that means in terms of how the shift feels to live through. Reaching net zero by any date by plateauing in a steady state way and then plummeting to zero, or a more gradual downward trajectory both get to the same point. Imagining the shape of those two separate trajectories, and therefore the space underneath them as a proxy for the carbon emissions, shows the amount of carbon generated is much bigger in the first scenario than the second. The first scenario increases the likelihood of feedback loops, which mean the impacts could be more significant. Thinking about the transitions and how they would feel to live through, goes to some quite different places. Even during the Covid-19 pandemic, what felt like a total transformation in how we lived globally led to a c.4-5% drop in carbon emissions in 2020. It’s hard to imagine a precipitous drop which is good for humanity. Whereas the more gradual drop suggests a more managed approach which seems likely to be much easier to live through.

If we lived in a world where everything was aligned to the fabric first approach – funding, regulation, owner and occupants willingness and interest and the supply chain capacity and capability – it could still be the best option. Effective and efficient. If that isn’t where we are, which it isn’t, then the question becomes one of trade-offs. To make decisions means choosing the trade-offs rather than acting as though they aren’t there and continuing to push specific approaches.

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, often just a backdrop or fleeting glimpse. Something that tells us about someone but isn’t often the main focus.

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 or parts of 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.

Bedding down

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Beds have come to seem so normal but for most people in time and space, the kinds of mattresses we think of as standard in the UK just aren’t. Sleeping on bare earth – or at least, earth covered with grass and herbs to provide some kind of matting for people to walk around and sleep on. Hammocks and boxes, benches and coffin-like beds. Mattresses made of linen, feathers or straw, beds have been through lots of iterations.

My bed, I’m so happy and lucky to say, is very much not like sleeping on bare earth. It is so comfortable and either explicitly or implicitly I register that each time I get in. A daily joy and privilege. It’s quite firm but not too firm. There’s some give in it but it doesn’t feel squashed or like I’m suffocating or being swallowed up by the bed.

Yet I wonder what it would feel like for people who are used to sleeping on rolled up plant materials if they were to magically be able to try out my bed. Whether they would lie down on it and be blown away by the comfort levels, see their own situation differently. Wish for something else. Or whether it would just feel too uncomfortable. Too much. Or perhaps too little. Missing that connection with the ground. Feeling a bit unmoored from their life and homesick for something that felt more natural, rather than being on some complicated set-up.

Shove suggests that so much of what we experience as comfort is set by wider expectations. With the availability of technologies which allow us to control the temperature in rooms and buildings more easily there was a need for designers to have an understanding of what temperature range they should be aiming for. This has led to the development of a norm around temperatures in buildings which then creates a feedback loop, or ratchet as Shove describes it, which leads to increases in usage more widely. Somewhat terrifyingly, Walker, Simcock and Day found the temperatures people prefer in their bedrooms are generally lower than the 18 degrees recommended by the energy sector. This guidance can help to reset expectations and could lead to further increases in energy consumption.

So perhaps those mythical time travellers who get to test my bed might not like it if they just gave it a one-time try. Their expectations would still be with their own beds and perhaps mine wouldn’t feel right for them.

A really big shift, perhaps bigger than the actual bed technology, is the one from sleeping being a more communal activity to sleep as something private. There is a wider move to more privacy at home, and beds are just part of that. Until around the Victorian times in the UK, sleep was a much more shared experience. It used to be common for all the members of a household to bed down together. Halls were multi-purpose rooms where people would eat, work, hang out and sleep. Servants and masters, young and old sharing beds or a room. Hard to imagine that being the norm for most people in space and time, yet there was considered to be an intimacy to sharing that space. For many members of the nobility, inviting people into their bedchamber was considered to be offering or getting a huge privilege. A much more communal existence than most people have now.

This shift by the Victorians was driven partly by increased concerns around the moral implications of people sharing beds, and partly because of hygiene considerations. There became more awareness of how infectious diseases could be spread, and therefore more of a drive for people to have their own space to try and reduce that risk.

That seems impossible for most of us to imagine. A tangible way in which people from previous generations lived lives that are very different to our own.

Of course, there are now hundreds of thousands of people around the country, one of the richest in the world, for whom imagining that is easy because it is their reality today too. Families or groups of individuals sharing one room. That room becoming like the Hall of old – with one room also becoming the living, working and eating space. Sometimes the room they have to use for cooking too. Living rooms in rental places increasingly getting used as living rooms, either by the people renting having to make that decision to be able to afford the space, or landlords making that decision for people.

As with other changing expectations, the gap between expectation and reality means what once might have made a home feel communal and normal, now feels like a lack of care or respect. This creates a sense of emotional discomfort which can be just as unpleasant to live with, and in, as physical discomfort can be. Much has changed with beds and how we sleep but until we have more of a shared agreement, and actions to match, we’ll continue to have people living amongst us who have beds and sleeping arrangements that seem like time travel to most of us.

In plain sight

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Always really humbling and hopefully helpful to see things hiding in plain sight that have been taken for granted that don’t quite work.

The definition of fuel poverty has changed a lot over time. Broadly speaking it’s about finding different ways to express the fact that people don’t have enough money to be able to heat their homes to a suitable temperature. There’s a separate debate about the term, and it’s not one that many people would recognise for themselves but still, those are not really for today.

There are all kinds of subtleties to that though. People’s circumstances can change for various reasons, all of which affect their ability to pay. From changes in their income – which is the main reason people move into or out of fuel poverty, to changes in the household – increases or decreases, or someone becomes unwell. There are plenty of other reasons besides but they give a sense of the fact this isn’t an absolute number that can be used as the benchmark to assess a household’s situation.

Yet when we look at fuel poverty, we look at the energy costs. This includes costs to heat the home and typically heating is the largest part of the cost. It’s not the only part of the cost. Even just looking at gas costs doesn’t allow you to separate out the heating costs, as people also use gas for hot water and potentially for cooking too.

Somewhere along the way those different aspects – assessing fuel poverty on the basis of ability to heat the home, and looking at energy costs in the round, got joined together.

Perhaps it wouldn’t matter. As many, including Druckman and Jackson suggest, energy costs for heating are more variable than electricity costs. Heating costs are more dependent upon the energy efficiency of the home and the need for different levels of comfort. So perhaps it’s a pragmatic proxy that avoids making life even more complicated.

Nonetheless, that sense of being shown by Walker, Simcock & Day how those two different considerations have been joined together in a way which isn’t articulated clearly was astonishing.

A reminder of how often there can be shared blind spots. Unspoken understandings and misunderstandings which then block opportunities or set parameters unnecessarily.

Things fall apart

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It’s easy not to pay attention to the different parts of our home when they are working well. Not the things that we were already wanting to change but those taken for granted parts of home. Switching on a light or a plug socket. Flushing the toilet. The buttons, dials and levers do as we instruct them. The magic happens. Home as a machine for life.

When it works it works and we don’t tend to give thanks each time we use something. The intricacies of the technology are, for most of us, something unfathomable. An accumulation of knowledge, trial and error, insights and experimentation moulded into tools which make our lives easier. Untold hours, unexpected inspiration and dedication of people who’ve come before us turned into an easier way to make tea or clean your clothes.

Modern life has then done a pretty good job of making the technology invisible. When the Victorians put in the sewer they were so proud of the technology and what it meant, they made sewage pipes visible so people could see the marvel. They built Crossness Pumping Station – a veritable cathedral with jokes in the ironwork. Now though, underneath and through the home the wires, cables and pipes are usually hidden away. Interior design magazines often edit out wires and cables to make the place look tidier, a crisper look, more aspirational.

Putnam describes those hidden sewers, cables and utility mains as forms of material life support. Home then becomes, in their view, not just a place which holds memories, or a space for socialising but a support service.

A sign of how modern, or post-modern, homes have become that these technologies are just part of how we live now. Putnam sees this shift as the second of two successive transformations of contemporary living from the traditional 19th Century models. The first shift they identify was the emergence of the modern home between c.1920-1950 when the domestic space was designed around the technical core of those underpinning material supports. They describe the second shift in the 1960s when the technical, and they suggest the economic and political, structures of modernity became part of the background for modern home life. With this shift, where basic aspects of how we are fortunate enough to live become taken for granted, ‘home becomes the supreme domain for personalization and, by consequence, of endless negotiations’.

Moving up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs when we no longer need to think about the basics of shelter and care for ourselves. Those supports are woven into the fabric of our homes and the expectations of our lucky days.

Then when something doesn’t work, well, it’s then that we notice them. We feel the knock-on impacts of that on our behaviour. Things get glitchy. We have to run errands to try and get something to fix it ourselves, or to try and deal with the impacts of the thing being broken. Searching for different approaches to fix things, or just to understand what the issue is. The hope when we try a new thing. Looking for signs that it is working. Tossing aside the new when it hasn’t worked. More and more time and money getting spent trying to fix something.

Things feeling a bit more fragile and off – that this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. We bump back down to the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. The home shifts from the background, supportive and magical, into the foreground of problems, mess and frustration. We notice when things don’t work, we feel our luck when dealing with the loss.