Putting the kit in kitchens

The Times ran a piece I wrote on my top six innovations in the kitchen. This is what I wrote:

The desire for convenience, for labour-saving devices, has been a dream that has shaped the modern kitchen. Sometimes labour-saving was merely labour-displacing: a 1950s dishwasher had a cycle of just three minutes (compared with an average of ninety minutes today) but every single item had to be packed in its own separate plastic container and then unpacked afterwards. But labour wasn't the only thing that needed saving – so too did space and money. Space was saved with items and devices that could have multiple functions – a stool that was also an ironing board as well as a step ladder, for instance. Money was saved, not just through scrimping but also by spending. At least that’s what the advertisers were telling us: buy this expensive food processor and save, save, save.

Kitchen devices came with a price tag that was social as well as financial. Fridges and freezers, for instance, sounded the death knell for neighbourhood shops and announced the era of the supermarket. And all the gizmos that found a place in the post-war kitchen could be seen as an attempt to return women to the kitchen to create more and more complex dishes after a wartime spent out of the house in paid employment.

While gadgetry has put the kit in kitchens, changes in energy and the introduction of new materials that have had the most significant effect. The shift from solid fuels (primarily coal) to piped and wired fuels (gas and electricity) was decisive, but it wasn't till after World War Two that many rural communities would be on the grid. Today it is probably hard to imagine kitchens without a host of synthetic materials like Teflon and silicone; in the 1950s and 60s it was new forms of plastic that transformed the kitchen.    

1.      Electric Kettle. This electric kettle from the 1920s would have boiled water much faster than a pan on the stove. It would also have been cleaner because most stoves used solid fuel in the 20s. Ubiquitous electricity was needed for the electric kettle to become an everyday reality.

2.      Fridge-Freezer. The first fridges were often gas powered, but it was the electric version that came to stay. My parents bought me a small fridge in 1987 and it cost exactly the same amount as the first fridge they had bought when they got married thirty years earlier in 1957.

3.      The food mixer. If you could afford it US imports like the Sunbeam Mixmaster were available in Britain from the 1930s. They could ‘mix drinks, grind coffee, open cans, turn ice cream, polish silverware, sharpen knives and scissors’. A home-grown version became popular in the 1950s when Ken Wood developed his Kenwood Chef.

4.      Spitfire saucepans. These saucepans from the 1946 exhibition ‘Britain Can Make It’ utilised a manufacturing process discovered while trying to develop longer lasting exhaust stubs for Spitfires during the war. Other domestic appliances that were developed during the war included the electric blanket, for pre-central heating living.

5.      Plastics. New synthetic material such as composite vinyl and melamine transformed the kitchen in the 1950s and 60s. Here Dunlop claimed that their 1967 Vynolay range could ‘cover a fair-sized kitchen floor for as little as £5’.

6.      Vegetable Peeler. The Rex vegetable peeler (from the Swiss company Zena) is a classic design: simple, cheap, and superbly functional. It was first produced in 1947 and soon found its place in kitchens all over the world. Sometimes it is the small and modest that makes the difference.

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.