Low carbon heating transitions and Actor Network Theory: Entanglements with the fireside

This paper sets out early findings from the UK component of a European project seeking to establish a social and cultural history of home heating, in order to distil lessons for a more socially conscious shift from fossil fuelled to low carbon heating systems. Here we share findings from 30 oral histories of home heating (from 1945 to present day) gathered in the former coal mining town of Rotherham in the North of England. By analysing the findings through the lens of Actor Network Theory (ANT), including the use of art, we reveal the coal fire (or coal fired range) as a powerful actant shaping domestic life in the decades following the end of the second world war. We argue that relational-material entanglements with the fireside endure, despite many decades of gas central heating in the UK, and have implications for current policy efforts to transition to more abstracted and technological low carbon heating systems, such as heat pumps. These entanglements with the fireside hold important implications for the sensitive handling of the current heating transition.