Hello!
This is the first instalment of my research diary, I will update intermittently but I’ll aim for one every week or so. It will be made up of rough ideas, first impressions, tidbits and observations. Please don’t hold me to every half-formed opinion I present! I do hope this can be interesting to people whether you have any interest in the topic or not. If you have any thoughts, ideas or leads for my research please get in touch.
Some background:
Beneath the North Sea are a series of large gas fields. The gas, largely made up of methane, is the product of biomass that has been heated under pressure over millions of years to form hydrocarbons. The first discovery in British waters was in 1965, the West Sole gas field was found by the prospecting platform Sea Gem that then tragically sank with the death of 13 crew. In the coming years further gas reservoirs were discovered off the coasts of Norfolk and Lincolnshire.
During this period OPEC, which had formed in 1960, began to demonstrate its power over the global energy market. The British government sought to improve fuel security anticipating the energy crises that would take place in the 1970s. The funding of North Sea oil and gas exploration was central to these efforts. Further gas reservoirs were struck and then commercialised, Intrepid, Leman, Viking, Clipper. A soothing role call of shipping forecast words.
Up until this point the gas used for street lights, cookers, fires and radiators were all derived from coal and oil. This was called town gas or coal gas. Coal was heated and processed to produce a gas that contained a mixture of carbon monoxide, hydrogen, ethylene and other hydrocarbons. It was both poisonous and dirty leaving a residue of soot on walls and ceilings. Many of the cookers in the 1950s specified that their flue was positioned to minimise staining of adjacent surfaces.
The British government agreed to start purchasing gas from British Petroleum in 1966. In 1967 the Gas Council, formed in 1948 to oversee the 12 regional nationalised gas boards, began the process of converting British homes and infrastructure to make use of North Sea Gas. It was quickly recognised that the scale of the challenge of adapting to North Sea Gas would require further centralisation, this led to the formation of the still state owned British Gas corporation under the conservative government in power in 1972.
The reason for explaining all of this is that this period is a key component of my current research project. I am trying to understand how this conversion was communicated to householders, and how it shaped our current relationship with domestic energy use. In the midst of a climate crisis, a geopolitical crisis, and a cost of living crisis there is an urgent need to adapt our infrastructure and energy usage.
This means transforming technology and energy use, and there are a great many people and projects concerned with the social and technical challenges in this transition. However it will also entail a huge shift in our cultural an emotional relationship with the home, and this is what I hope to explore. By exploring this prior period of transition we might garner some lessons for how it might be achieved today.
In the archives this week:
I went to visit the Museum of the Home collection library this week to view some of the things they have relating to natural gas. I had a huge amount of help from the collections and archives manager and if you’ve not been to visit the collections library I strongly suggest you do! I barely scratched the surface but it was very exciting to begin to get stuck into the actual work of research.
I spent hours poring over adverts for gas cookers from the 1950s, all produced by different companies but approved by the relevant regional gas boards. The collection came from a private individual, it may have been the collection of an enthusiast, but I also wondered if these had come back from a trip to research a purchase. I need to find out more about this, but at the time it seems that people went to something called a ‘gas showroom’ to learn about cookers, boilers, etc… I think these must have been run by gas boards. Half educational half sales.
I will write more about these leaflets at a later date, particularly when I get to the ones which are closer to the time period I am focusing on. However they were completely enthralling, each product was imbued with its own particular character, even from the same producer there were cookers which foregrounded functionality and affordability and others which sought a more generous and nourishing sort of an identity. My mouth started watering when I read: “The New World Eighty Four is large enough to toast two full rounds of bread quickly and evenly or, for example, to grill six lamb chops and three tomatoes halved.”
One of the best finds of the visit was a leaflet which must have been sent out between 1967 and 1972 because it is from the South East Gas Board. It announces the arrival of what it calls ‘Natural High Speed’ North Sea Gas to the area and informs the householder about a forthcoming visit to convert their property for this new provision. It is beautifully designed in full colour, it incorporates photographs taken from the edge of a beach looking out to the sea, as if anticipating the arrival of something marvellous.
The leaflet promises something which is almost inconceivable today, or at least inconceivable that it might happen so simply. All you have to do is make sure you are in or you leave your key with a neighbour (!!) so that the Gas Board can come into your house and convert your supply. “WE MUST GET IN” it emphasises in all caps. It offers to make special arrangements for households with “infants” or “invalids” at home, and for some reason singles out the visually impaired: “blind people will be given special care”.
As a geographer I cannot help but be drawn to the map which shows a pipeline running from the coast of Norfolk to the South East region. The Britishness of the North Sea coast is emphasised throughout. The leaflet starts its pitch to households with a point of geopolitics and macro-economics, it is important that this is British Gas. The leaflet reads: “The gas you are using at present is manufactured mostly from imported oil. By using North Sea Gas you will be helping the country’s balance of payments”. These are the last days of a different kind of capitalism, where the Keynesian consensus is just about still breathing and the responsibility of the state is to manage the country as a self-sustaining organism.
In a commercial made around the same time a big orchestral score accompanies seagulls flying around heroically on the British coast. One year before Jonathan Livingston Seagull is published the popular imagination is already invested in the gull as a figure of admiration. After about 20 seconds of birds a male voice over in an R.P. accent says: “In a recent fact finding pollution poll 98% of British seabirds preferred clean natural gas, the other 2% were don’t knows”. A caption fades up: “Natural Gas the civilised fuel”. Here again we have a sense of British sophistication, patriotic pride in landscape and birdlife.
In these two artefacts transition from town gas to natural gas was communicated as a matter of duty. Both a benefit to householders, to the nation, and the landscape. Implicit is the threat of the non-British and the non-natural, which compared to the clean natural gas are, by inference, dirty. There is a sense of post-colonial xenophobia and anxiety at a loss of status in the globalising economy.
On the other hand there is something to be admired I think about the sense of the collective, and the sense of ownership taken by the institutions of the state. In order to undertake the huge transition required to decarbonise the home this kind of reassuring intervention would be valuable.
Changing the way that we cook, the feeling that comes from central heating, even the prospect of a homme without drafts when the aging British housing stock is eventually insulated; all of these things will be hard to accept. The tendency of the neo-liberalised state to individualise responsibility for energy use make it hard to imagine a transition ushered in with such a calm imperative, one that is both urgent and supportive.