North Sea Gas is coming…

In the November 1967 issue of Good Housekeeping a double page advertisement announces that ‘North Sea gas is coming’. On one side there is writing persuading you to invest £263 on a ‘High Speed gas central heating system’ – ‘the only kind that’s going to run on gas from the North Sea’ – on the other side a photograph of the North Sea (presumably) at sunset. The cold, dark abyss of the sea is glowing yellow and orange from the reflected sun. Perhaps central heating could do this for you – add a warm glow to the cold, dark abyss of your home? At the bottom of the photograph there is a slightly embarrassed aside “…the best bit of luck for 100 years!” It wouldn't do to crow too much about national good fortune.

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.

Morning Delivery

Sheffield’s Park Hill flats opened in 1961, the year I was born. The flats are still the most complete example of the architectural project optimistically named ‘Streets in the Sky’ urbanism: networks of one-sided residential streets of maisonettes stacked on top of one another, threaded through the landscape and surrounded by park land, yet close to the city centre. The streets in the sky aren't quite the same as the streets that they set out to replace: these have roofs over them for a start, and a long drop on one side. Today they probably have more detractors then they do fans, and when in 1998 they were awarded grade II listing it caused a furore that is still going on today. The streets-in-the-sky were by any standard substantial. Rather than mere practical walkways they were designed for conviviality – for children to play and for adults to pass the time of day. The scale of the streets was also meant to accommodate traffic – but only one type of vehicle – the electric milk float.

The eager, breathless whir of the milk float – like an ordinary car calling out with a stage-whisper – isn't a sound you hear too much anymore. There is clearly much less milk being delivered. When I was about 11 or 12 I, like many other kids at the time, used to supplement my pocket money with money I earned by having a paper round. I used to get to the newsagents at about 5.30 in the morning to pick up my stack of daily papers (supplemented with a few magazines and comics); these were arranged by the newsagent in the well-practiced order of the route. Apart from at the height of summer, it was nearly always dark when I started and usually light, or getting light when I finished. Sometimes, especially if it was raining, it was really miserable, but often I enjoyed the quiet, empty streets and the crisp unfolding of the prelude to the day. It was a time of the day I shared with others who were out delivering papers and post, the odd insomniac dog walker, and the asthmatic wheeze of the milk float.

For the most part post, papers and milk are distributed differently today. Park Hill flats has changed too. Some of it has been erased, some of it remains as social housing, and a large chunk has been taken over and refitted by an architectural group called Urban Splash. Urban Splash has successfully turned many of the maisonettes and flats into up-market, urban living, for those who want the adrenalin of inner-city life and the aesthetics of the warehouse flat. The scheme is all bright colours and wooden floors. It is hard to tell, though, what has happened to the network of elevated streets that were the social heart of the complex. Have they gone? Or are they still functioning? Perhaps amongst the sounds of carbonated water being opened you can just about hear the ghostly echo of the milk float.