ABSTRACT
Anna Carlsson-Hyslop (0000-0003-2702-3643)
Accounts of the adoption of central heating have focused on price, convenience, cleanliness and technological change as driving forces. By contrast, this chapter uses detailed case studies to follow the introduction of central heating, exploring the multiple time scales and different routes that made full central heating ‘normal’. By using archival sources to track debates, decisions and discourses surrounding the introduction of central heating by three councils in Stocksbridge, Stevenage and London, the alleged smoothness and – occasionally – the desirability of the transition is called into question. The decision to change to a certain type of central heating was taken for many different reasons: capital, maintenance and running costs were only part of these decisions. Similarly, government standards and technological innovation played a role, but did not necessarily determine the outcome. Instead, council records, along with tenant surveys and reports, draw attention to local contingencies in the decision-making process, revealing the role of different political, technological, financial, legal and cultural considerations and their combination in different locations and at different moments. The picture is of a complex, shifting ‘patchwork’ of steps, not of a steady or uniform transition to central heating.
