About the project
This winter (2023-24) has been a difficult season. With the growing cost-of-living crisis, cuts to Universal Credit and a sharp rise in energy prices on the horizon, many people in London will engage in everyday decision making on how to stay warm. People with homes will decide when to turn on the heater and when to turn it off.
Precarious private renters will rely on their landlords for the workings of their boilers and for making other changes to increase the energy efficiency of their homes. Council tenants in housing blocks undergoing regeneration will face the threat of their heating being lowered to create uncomfortably cold homes, a strategy employed as part of ‘managed decline’ to push tenants out of their homes and make way for demolition.
Demands for coats, socks, duvets and electric blankets will rise (Reuters report shows a 8% rise in sales) as people make decisions between keeping their bodies warm or keeping their homes warm, with the latter being more costly.
People without homes will be offered blankets by charities and emergency accommodation by councils for days that are decided to be “too cold” under the Severe Weather Emergency Protocol.
On the other hand, homes without people will continue to remain warm as several second homes in London will have their heating turned on to maintain the condition of their properties while their owners live elsewhere.
Several luxury property managers have advice on their websites about how to keep empty homes ‘winter proofed’ to avoid any material damage in the cold absence of its residents.
The previous winter had seen some governmental assistance in the form of a one-off council tax rebate, cost-of-living payments to households below a certain threshold, and the capping of energy bills. Most of these forms of support were not going to be offered for the winter that was approaching at the end of 2023. A taskforce was set up by the government to insulate homes in the country and upgrade boilers, therefore seeing the problem of heating as an infrastructural problem, but this scheme was scrapped in September by Rishi Sunak. Amidst uncertainties around governmental assistance in heating homes in the coming winter, there was a boom of online articles advising people on how to best trap heat in their homes and how to use heat “smartly”.
Energy companies began sending out emails to their customers to alert them to the coming winter and encourage them to get smart meters that would help them monitor their use. Banks started ringing customers to offer savings plan around better managing money. People also developed their own ideas of “better” and “smarter” practices around heating, which involved a complex navigation along the spectrum of comfort and discomfort. Staying warm is not a straightforward feeling. Several calculations were being made around how to organise within a home, what room to spend more time in, and what room/corner to abandon for the time being, and also decisions around how much time to spend at home at all.
The heating workshops we organised revealed that several women and children moved between homes of their neighbours and family and friends to manage and share heating costs. Objects like hot water bottles became important as sources of both comforts, as well as discomfort due to the fear of them ‘popping’.
In the workshops, participants shared ideas around warming foods and drinks as well as advising each other on how to best care for the hot water bottles to ensure that they don’t leak at night. Questions around sleeping, cleaning, eating, and resting became interlinked around practices of heating.
Alongside the project, the genocide in Gaza has been unfolding on our mobile screens and TV screens. Many participants discussed feeling cold at home while watching the telly to see how the UK funds arms and wars.
The question of heating could not be divorced from the wider politics, and by focussing on bodily comfort, we held together various scales and metrics through which people understand and describe their feelings and thoughts about heat.
The ‘heat map’ is produced through the initial workshops and interviews across London, and it also offers a live portal to input data in real time to collect more heating stories and heating feelings.
We see this project as archiving many winters in London and demonstrating how the feeling of staying warm is produced on multiple scales linking the immediate bodily sensations with bigger imaginations.
Warm Bodies Cold Homes is a project that explores how people stay warm in London during the winter. The initial data is collected through interviews and workshops that took place during the winter of 2023-24 but the live map will continue collecting ‘heating stories’ in the winters to come. The stories are plotted onto postcodes on a map of London.
I want to understand the process of creating warmth and document people’s relationship with heat in real time.
Mayanka Mukherji, Research Fellow, LSE