EnergypricesLife in a cold climate
B
ritainisadamp,coldplaceandalways
has been. Two thousand years ago Stra
bo, a Greek geographer, cast his eye over
the island and didn’t like what he saw. It
rains, he wrote. And even when it doesn’t,
it is so cloudy that “the sun is to be seen for
only three or four hours round about mid
day”. Some have managed to be charmed by
its climate; many more have not. It is,
wrote Jonathan Swift, “bloody cold”.
Although the climate hasn’t improved,
coping methods have. At the start of the
1970s only around a third of British houses
had central heating, and the temperature
of the average hallway was around 14°C. By
2010 almost all had heating and the average
temperature was closer to 21°C. Where
once British house plants were coolloving
cyclamen, today those wilt in the warmth
while succulents and cacti flourish. We are
“the most heated generation in history”,
says Alexandra Harris, a writer and fellow
at Birmingham University.
Now, however, the thermostat is likely
to be turned down a notch. War in Ukraine,
on top of earlier gassupply problems, is
likely to lead to a further 50% jump in the
cost of heating. The fortuitous arrival of
spring may blunt the immediate impact,
but high fuel prices are probably here to
stay. How will residents of a chilly country
used to living in hothouses cope?
Most historians focus on derringdo
rather than radiators and knitwear. Yet the
burning desire for heat has transformed
the landscape of northern Europe, as well
as the clothes on its citizens’ backs and the
airtheybreathe.It hasalteredthearchitec
ture of houses and to this day tilts geopoli
tics to meet its insatiable needs.
The rise of the Roman Empire is now re
membered for chiselled Roman roads and
chiselled Roman legionaries. But it should
also be remembered for toastier toes and
wood consumption on an unprecedented
scale. It has been estimated that to keep a
single, small, Roman bathhouse burning
would have used about 23 acres of coppiced
woodland a year. The sound of Roman sol
diers in your land was followed by the
sound of Roman tools attacking your trees:
I came, I saw, I sawed.
Yet even Roman bathhouses didn’t
make Roman Britain bearable. Soldiers’ let
ters expounded on the “foul” British
weather. “I have sent you...socks,” reads
one reply. By the 1600s Britain had felled so
much woodland that its wood supply be
gan to fail. “God knows where materials
can be had,” despaired Samuel Pepys,
hunting for wood for ships. Prices soared;
soon the average Briton was spending a
tenth of his income on wood. Pepys took to
staying in bed till 11 o’clock, warming up.
Even as the cost of lighting has tumbled
over the centuries, the cost of heating has
remained high. William Nordhaus, a Nobel
prizewinning economist, pointed out in
1998 that an hour’s work would buy about
350,000 times as much illumination as it
would have in early Babylonia, in around
2,000 bc. Yet much like people in Pepys’s
England, Britons still spend up to a tenth of
their income on energy, chiefly heating.Partly this is human idiocy: studies show
that when houses are better insulated,
people remove jumpers and turn up the
thermostat rather than spending less on
fuel. Partly it is the iron laws of thermody
namics: making things hotter is hard.
In the 19th century, centralheating sys
tems using pressurised water became fash
ionable. Clothes became lighter. Cotton re
placed wool; vests were jettisoned; hats
and capes discarded. Moralists panicked.
“If laces are unfastened, ties loosened, and
buttons banished”, fretted an article in Tai-
lor and Cuttermagazine in 1931, society it
self might “also fall to pieces”. It didn’t—
but family life unravelled a little. Today,
people worry that separate screens sepa
rate families, but families were divided
earlier by central heating. Once, everyone
had gathered around the focus of the fire
(the word “focus” is Latin for “fireplace”).
As houses got cosier, family members mi
grated on the warm air currents to their
own rooms and individualism increased.
Not everyone was pleased. In the 20th
century, a marked froideur towards warmth
could be detected among English writers.
Partly this was snobbery. Succumbing to
the cold was, like saying “serviette”, a low
erclass habit. Public schools were kept in
stitutionally icy; aristocrats scraped ice
from the inside of their windows. It is no
table that one of the earliest centralheat
ing systems installed in England, in 1832
for the governor of the Bank of England,
was used to heat his greenhouse and his
grapes, rather than himself. One of the
poshest things you can do still, the Guard-
ian, a leftwing newspaper, recently ad
vised, is to “have a freezing bathroom”.
Partly, too, this was a fear that tinned,
tepid air would lead to tinned, tepid
minds. While the army of the upright heat
ed themselves warmly and “business
women...in Camden town” took warm
baths, sniffed John Betjeman in “Business
Girls”, published in 1954, puritans plunged
into cold showers, eschewed central heat
ing and exercised outside in the altogether.
Poets and artists did the same—though
they were usually poorer and drunker. Bloody colder
Low temperatures, it was argued, had
sharpened the quills and minds of English
authors for centuries. “The Oxford Dictio
nary of Quotations” offers a mere 11 sayings
for “hot” and 12 for “warm”, but a flurry of
48 for “cold”. Dickens delighted in it; Hardy
hymned it; Shakespeare would surely not
have compared his love to a summer’s day
had he had central heating: he would have
been lovely and temperate already. “Pre
serve me, above all, from central heating,”
wrote W.H. Auden, frostily. It seems un
likely that today’s Britons willconcur. The
recent rise in heating bills islikelyto be
just the start of a long cold spell.nThe British climate is unpleasantly chilly. Coping with that is getting harderThe Economist March 19th 2022 Britain 25