What is adequate heat?
Rebecca Wright - Northumbria University
This talk will explore how the state has tried to define 'adequate heat' and the impact this has had on health and energy policy since 1945. Warmth is far more complex than a number on a thermostat and is deeply subjective and embodied. Despite this, past governments have been forced to articulate norms and expectations about heating practices through their health and welfare policies. This talk will explore how past governments have approached and modelled 'warmth' and tried to account for ‘heat’ across the welfare state. It will consider how past governments have confronted the challenge of cold homes, how different policy framings have shaped the response to the problem, and how the right to heat has been fought for and articulated. In unravelling this history, the talk will show how the 'responsibility' for warmth has been shifted across the welfare state and ultimately fell on consumers.
This talk draws on wider research from the Wellcome CDA project Carbon Bodies: Warmth and Fuelling Health in Britain, 1918 to 2022 based at Northumbria University, Newcastle.
Speaker Bio: Dr Rebecca Wright is an Associate Professor in History at Northumbria University, Newcastle. She is the PI of the Wellcome Trust funded project, “Carbon Bodies: Warmth, and Fuelling Health in Britain, 1918 to 2022”. Her monograph, Moral Energy in America: From the Progressive Era to the Atomic Bomb was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2025.
