Burning for warmth

About the talk

Between 1960 and 1980 the way Britain heated its homes changed almost completely. Open coal fires gave way to gas central heating, electricity fought hard for a share of the market, and the Clean Air Acts reshaped what people were allowed to burn. It was one of the fastest domestic energy transitions this country has been through.

Kathy Davies and Rebecca Wright argue that health sat close to the centre of that story. Coal, gas and electricity were all competing for the same living rooms, and each had reasons to make claims about what its fuel did to the air people breathed, to damp and condensation, and to the comfort and wellbeing of the household. Health was not simply a public good that the transition happened to deliver. It was also a commercial argument, made by industries with a great deal at stake.

The paper draws on their work for Carbon Bodies, a Wellcome funded project examining how warmth and health have been connected in Britain since 1918, and it looks at the interplay between domestic heating, indoor and outdoor air quality, energy transition, and the commercial interests shaping all three.

If you work on retrofit, fuel poverty, indoor air quality or the path to net zero, the parallels are hard to miss. We are again asking households to change how they heat their homes, again making health arguments for doing so, and again doing it in a market where different technologies have very different interests in how those arguments land.

Themes

The speakers

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Dr Kathy Davies

Research Fellow, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Northumbria University

Kathy is a historian of energy and environment, working across oral history, transdisciplinary collaboration, exhibitions and public programming, and policy engagement. She leads a strand of the Wellcome funded Carbon Bodies project, looking at how energy, heat, space, the body and the state were tied together in twentieth century Britain. Her wider research covers the social, cultural and political histories of domestic energy, air quality and environmental change in everyday life.

She was Archives By-Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge in Lent 2025, and the British Library's first Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow in Environment and Sustainability in 2025. From 2023 to 2025 she led History Lab Plus, the national network for early career historians at the Institute of Historical Research.

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Dr Rebecca Wright

Associate Professor in History, Northumbria University

Rebecca is Principal Investigator of the Wellcome Trust funded project Carbon Bodies: Warmth and Fuelling Health in Britain, 1918 to 2022. She joined Northumbria in 2018.

Before that she was a Research Fellow in Future Health at the Centre for Global Health Histories, University of York, a Research Fellow in Mass Observation Studies at the University of Sussex in 2017, and a Research Fellow on the AHRC collaborative project Material Cultures of Energy at Birkbeck College from 2014 to 2016. She completed her PhD at Birkbeck in 2015.