In
the May of 1967 the Natural Gas Conversion Programme was started. Every
appliance that ran on gas (cookers, the odd fridge, water heaters and so on)
needed altering to be able to use the new type of gas. In the end some forty
million appliances were converted, at the cost of £563 million. Britain was ‘switched
over’ district by district. A district would be isolated from the network and
purged with a huge flame, flaring off what was left of the old gas before the
new gas was introduced. Armies of gas engineers went house to house to ensure
that all appliances were safe and working. The programme took ten years to complete.
Natural
gas might have been expensive to install but it was a cheaper product than the
old coal gas. Coal-gas, town-gas, or (with more than a nod to its original
purpose) illuminating-gas was the result of an industrial process, and that
required large factories for its production. Natural gas arrived, ready to go,
from beneath the seabed. The cheapness of natural gas, and its sense of national
luck, would have been one crucial incentive for many households to have central
heating fitted. The years of the conversion programme follow the years in which
central heating gathers momentum in Britain. It is only towards the end of the
1970s when over 50% of households have central heating. But another crucial
incentive is home ownership: who would install central heating in a house they
were renting? If old Victorian terraces were the architecture of coal-burning
grates, and 1930s suburban semis the architecture of the gas fire, then the
architecture of central heating was open-plan. Central heating fuelled a
culture of shag-pile, floor cushions and informality.
Town
gas was the kind of gas you could kill yourself with. ‘Sticking your head in
the oven’ used to be the vernacular expression for suicide in general. I don’t
know whether death by gas was more or less common than other forms of suicide,
but it had a symbolism that other suicides didn't have. I guess it was the ease
and domesticity of it that gave it such an awful symbolism, as well as the link
to the Holocaust. It was a form of death that was available in the kitchen, on
tap, so to say. I'm sure that Sylvia Plath would have had an intuitive sense of
that symbolism when she chose this as her way of ending it all in 1963. Natural
gas, on the other hand, wasn't going to kill anyone any time soon. You were
more likely to blow yourself up than suffocate, and no chance of the woozy
dreamless embrace of carbon monoxide poisoning. Natural gas was modern, clean
and looked to the future.
In
1968 I started going to school in Chelmsford. Approaching Chelmsford from the
east on the A12 on a dark winter’s morning, facing the inevitable traffic jam
coming off the duel carriage-way you could see the Chelmsford gasworks on the
right hand side. Or at least this is what I remember. It was huge. A mass of
gleaming metal pipework, with each pipe illuminated by a string of electric
light. It looked other-worldly. A gleaming citadel of metal and light with a
flame jet burning off some residual gas. It smelt of sulphur. Natural gas would
mean the end for the Chelmsford Gas Works, which had been producing gas since
the early nineteenth century. Now the Gas Works has gone, the ground is
contaminated, and the wasteland is home to some of the most respected graffiti
art in Essex. In 1968, in the dark, with all that fire, electric light and
metal, it looked like the beginning of the film Blade Runner. When Blade
Runner came out in 1982 it seemed to be describing a future of ‘replicants’
and ‘off-world colonies’, but really it was showing us our past.
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