Carbon Bodies: Warmth and Fuelling Health in Britain, 1918 to 2022

“Carbon Bodies” explores how far human health and wellbeing have become entangled with carbon over the past century. Focusing on the most energy intensive area of everyday health, domestic heating, the project will develop a thermal history of British homes between 1918 and 2022, to unpick the forces that shaped the relationship between energy and health. This process was never even and the project will uncover a hidden history of fuel poverty, and the role that experts, community groups, and activists had in redefining heat as a matter for social policy. A case study centred on the North East (led by a PDRA) will assess the regional specificity of the 'carbon body', and its impact on national policy (WP2). An exhibition at City Library, Newcastle, and events at the Discovery Museum, run with the Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums (TWAM), will facilitate a wider public debate about heat, carbon and the body. WP3 will draw on the historical findings (from WP1 & WP2) to co-produce a policy toolkit with the UK's leading fuel poverty charity, National Energy Action, that illuminates the challenges of decarbonising the body at a time of environmental crisis and growing energy insecurity.