‘Fuel Poverty’ and the Crisis of Welfare in Britain, 1970s–1980s

When former and present tenants of Hulme Crescents, a social housing estate in Manchester, were asked in 1990 to write down their thoughts on the estate as part of the Hulme Views Project,¹ their recollections varied. While some remembered their time in the Crescents as being rather depressing and precarious, others emphasized the feeling of home and the unique community spirit that prevailed among its residents. As different as the perceptions were, there was one (albeit not the only) recurring theme mentioned by numerous tenants—the inefficient electric heating system, resulting in exorbitantly high energy costs.

In fact, by 1990, high energy prices had made heating their homes a sort of luxury for many residents of Hulme Crescents. According to one tenant, Clive, the flats ‘may have seemed lovely’ ‘in the days of cheap electricity’, but they became a ‘damp, cold smelly place’ with ‘today’s high energy costs’.² Kristen, a mother of a two-week-old baby who had lived on the estate for eight years, ‘turned the heating on for the first time [this year]’ even though she ‘couldn’t afford it at all’. But with a newborn baby, she went on to explain, there was ‘not much choice’.³ For residents like Kristen, using the heating came with the risk of falling into arrears with the electricity company and having their power supply cut off. Victor Greenfield, a former tenant of the Crescents, remembered ‘old blokes getting their electricity cut off by uncaring electricity company [sic]’.⁴ Similarly, the Hulme Views Project’s introductory remarks referred to numerous tenants who lived for ‘months or even years’⁵ without electricity and used alternative heating methods like Calor Gas stoves or candles for light instead. Due to inefficient heating, and/or because residents did not use the heating due to lack of financial resources, tenants were faced with very cold and mouldy living conditions. Vibeke’s flat in the Crescents was so ‘cold and damp’ that her ‘dog’s water kept freezing’ during winter and ‘all [her] clothes, curtains and speakers grew fluffy greeny-grey mould’.⁶ Though Chris Hogg considered his flat to be ‘good and roomy’, he stated that it was ‘cold and damp’ with ‘fungus growing on the walls’.⁷ For many tenants, a functioning and affordable heating system was crucial to making the apartments more comfortable or just liveable. Indeed, for tenants like Fay, Hulme Crescents could have been a ‘spacious, comfortable home’ if it had had ‘cheap, effective heating and good insulation and security’,⁸ and Joe went as far as to say that he would ‘move back in tomorrow’ if the flats had functioning central heating.⁹

The Rise of ‘Fuel Poverty’

These accounts, published in the book Views from the Crescents: Writing, Photographs and Illustrations by People from the Crescents Area of Hulme in 1991, provide a concise insight into the living experiences of people threatened or affected by ‘fuel poverty’—that is, the inability of a household to generate sufficient financial resources to cover its own energy costs (for heating, for example). The term first emerged in the 1970s in Britain (and later in other European countries) when energy prices rose sharply in the wake of several miners’ strikes (1972, 1974, 1984–5) and the two oil price crises of 1973–4 and 1979. It became a widespread social problem, especially for people on low incomes like those living in Hulme Crescents. Residents of industrialized and cheaply built social housing estates like Hulme Crescents—‘the classic 1960s concrete housing estate disaster’⁵ in post-war Britain at the time—increasingly attracted public attention due to their precarious living conditions, of which living in ‘fuel poverty’ became an integral part. Although the issue of ‘fuel poverty’ was by no means limited to social housing estates but also affected private tenants and owners of older buildings, the failure of such estates to provide their residents with comfort and a decent standard of living received heightened attention in the 1970s and 1980s in the context of discussions on the role of the welfare state under the new social, political, and economic conditions.¹⁰

It is precisely this connection between energy consumption, poverty, and welfare that is at the centre of my research project, which aims to locate ‘fuel poverty’ in the context of a general crisis in the British welfare state at the end of the ‘Golden Age’¹¹ of the post-war economic boom.¹² To that end, ‘fuel poverty’ is understood both as a discourse reflecting the contemporary social perception and negotiation of the phenomenon of inadequate energy access and supply, and in terms of its material manifestations in the everyday lives of the people affected. The project seeks to expand the energy history of the 1970s and 1980s by including a social, environmental, and everyday historical perspective, which is crucial in understanding the social and ecological problems associated with the consumption or restriction of energy.

An Everyday, Social, and Environmental History of Energy

Using the example of ‘fuel poverty’, I will show how perceptions and practices of energy consumption in Britain changed in the 1970s and 1980s. In order to illuminate the different dimensions and ranges of the phenomenon, I link the micro level of the everyday life of people affected by ‘fuel poverty’ with the macro level of society. On the one hand, I examine how those affected experienced the fact that they could no longer afford the energy required to satisfy their needs (such as heat, light, and so on)—and thus lived in ‘fuel poverty’. On the other, I locate the everyday perceptions and practices of ‘fuel-poor’ households in the context of a crisis of welfare in Britain ‘after the boom’.¹³ In addition to this, at a meso level, I look at tenant action groups on social housing estates, consumer movements, and other voluntary organizations that denounced high energy prices and fought for adequate and affordable energy access and supply, often using the term ‘fuel poverty’. In this way, the project sheds light on the extent to which such actor groups served as intermediaries between the everyday lives of the people and the state.

With this thematic and conceptual orientation, the project makes an essential contribution to the ‘historicization’ of ‘fuel poverty’ itself—both as a discourse and as a practice in the everyday lives of the people concerned. Although ‘fuel poverty’ is located at the interface of various historiographically well-developed research fields, including energy, social, and environmental history, there are still no historical studies that have dealt systematically with its emergence as a social and political issue in the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, the project also contributes to the expansion of energy history—which has so far been strongly characterized by political and technological history—by combining approaches from everyday, social, and environmental history with an energy history. This means not only offering a thematic focus on ‘fuel poverty’—a phenomenon that, by definition, is concerned with the social dimension of energy consumption—but also exploring people’s everyday experiences on the one hand, and the overarching social significance of these experiences on the other. In so doing, the project also seeks to critically address questions and categories of social inequality. Initial results from an early phase of my research have shown that various factors of inequality—such as class, gender, race, age, and disability—intersected and reinforced each other within the issue of ‘fuel poverty’. Precisely because of this inherent intersectional dimension, I aim to elaborate on the ways in which the welfare crisis in the 1970s and 1980s was experienced and perceived differently by various population groups.

In addition to linking everyday and social history, the project provides further insights into environmental history, especially concerning the development of a new environmental awareness in the 1970s and 1980s and the actors who contributed to this. I examine examples of the everyday practices of people living in ‘fuel poverty’—which range from the excessive use of Calor Gas or paraffin stoves to not using heating at all—in order to explore the extent to which this represents a variant of the so-called ‘environmentalism of the poor’¹⁴ in the Global North. At the same time, by analysing these everyday practices, I shed light on how people have perceived, experienced, and coped with very cold and often mouldy indoor environments, and how this in turn has impacted their physical and emotional well-being. In so doing, I explore how issues of energy consumption are historically intertwined with both environmental and health concerns.

Key Archives

During my four-month research scholarship at the Institute (July–November 2023), I paid longer visits to the National Archives in Kew, the British Library, and the London Metropolitan Archive, but also accessed numerous local archives across Britain, with a focus on the records held in Manchester Central Library, the Greater Manchester County Record Office, and the Library of Birmingham. The source materials consulted in London consist of internal reports, correspondence, and documents from various government departments—like the Department of Energy, the Department of the Environment, and the Department of Health and Social Security—as well as newspaper articles and social science studies; they also include reports, letters, and papers documenting the work of voluntary organizations, for example the National Fuel Poverty Forum. The holdings of local archives across Britain, such as the Greater Manchester County Record Office, focus on tenant groups spurred into political action in the 1970s and 1980s by the inadequate housing conditions and high energy costs on various social housing estates. They document the tenant groups’ activism and include letters of complaint, reports, petitions, and internal documents from the city councils. This source material sheds light on perspectives at the micro, meso, and macro levels.

The scholarship from the German Historical Institute London enabled me to conduct crucial archival research. During my trip, I collected a vast amount of archive material, which I have been evaluating since my return to Freiburg. I was also able to benefit from the unique and diverse offerings of the GHIL, most notably the vast library holdings and the archive of the Anglo-German Foundation. I am also very grateful for the feedback I received on my project from GHIL historians and other scholarship holders at the research colloquium.

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Feature Image: View across a snow covered Leicester city by Mat Fascione, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence.

1. The Hulme Views Project was initiated in 1990 by the residents of the Hulme Crescents and was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. At the time, demands for demolition of the Crescents ran high and captured the interest of the public. The aim of the project was to produce ‘a book, which tells the overall story of Hulme from . . . [the] residents’ point of view.’ Views from the Crescents: Writing, Photographs and Illustrations by People from the Crescents Area of Hulme (Manchester, 1991), n. pag. [Introduction]. [↩]
2. Ibid. [Clive]. [↩]
3. Ibid. [Kristen]. [↩]
4. Ibid. [Victor Greenfield]. [↩]
5. Ibid. [Introduction]. [↩] [↩]
6. Ibid. [Vibeke]. [↩]
7. Ibid. [Chris Hogg]. [↩]
8. Ibid. [Fay]. [↩]
9. Ibid. [Joe]. [↩]
10. See the newly published article by Damiana Salm, ‘Living in the “All-Electric Alcatraz”: Fuel Poverty in 1970s British Social Housing’, which examines this development in more detail using the example of Hunslet Grange in Leeds in the 1970s. [↩]
11. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London, 1995), 223. [↩]
12. I selected Britain as a case study for Western Europe because issues and problems related to energy consumption and its social costs were raised there early on in debates about ‘fuel poverty’. I would like to expand the study to include further case studies such as France and the Federal Republic of Germany. [↩]
13. Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Raphael Lutz, Nach dem Boom: Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte (Göttingen, 2012). Cf. Sebastian Voigt (ed.), Since the Boom: Continuity and Change in the Western Industrialized World after 1970 (Toronto, 2021). [↩]
14. Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (London, 1997). [↩]

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