Why the English stopped opening the windows

On 'House Burping'

Houses in Hampstead (1930) – from Rasmussen London: the Unique City (1934)

In general the ethos of this newsletter is ‘zero connection to contemporary discourse,’ so treat this as an exception. Several recent media explainers on ‘house-burping’ — the seemingly entirely foreign and previously unknown practice of opening the windows a bit in the morning and evening to air the house out, drew my eye. Some of this coverage is performative stupidity. What’s with the making-foreign of a banal practice with a totally idiomatic English name — ‘airing out’? On the other hand, maybe the stupidity isn’t wholly fake. A story like those linked above can really only be addressed to an audience suffering from a degree of genuine cultural amnesia. This is what is unarguably strange, because an enthusiasm for domestic ventilation — here rendered as a sort of bizarre cultural foible, like infant cranial deformation, or fermenting whale-shark in an earthen pit — was within living memory not only extremely normal in England, but quintessentially English, the most English thing, a well-known English obsession. The one thing you ought to know about English people is they have the windows open all the time.

Exhibit one: a funny moment in one of Alistair McLean’s mid career thrillers where the hero is searching the house of a missing scientist:

The room, though cold, was rather stuffy — Gregori had obviously not as yet succumbed to the English madness of flinging open the windows under any and all conditions — and I seemed to smell some peculiar odour in the air, so faint as to be unidentifiable.¹

Madness or not, it’s not English any more. Apparently it’s German — they call it Lüften. In the McLean novel it’s a rather human slip, where you inadvertently hear the (insanely masculine, basically invincible) protagonist start speaking in the voice of the (home comforts-appreciating) author. Won’t someone shut that window? I’m trying to write! In his defense, throwing the windows open in all conditions really was, the first half of the 20th century, absolutely the norm. Read any book of household management and you’ll find advice along these lines:

To keep the atmosphere of a house healthy and fresh, it must be frequently changed. Have all the windows and doors at the lower part of the house opened the first thing in the morning for five to ten minutes, and see that a staircase window is always open…

In the bedrooms, windows should be open by night as well as by day, and where these are badly placed with regard to the doors and chimneys, screens may be resorted to for the prevention of draughts.²

To recap: at least some of the windows should be open all the time. The others — only a couple of times a day. English houses of the time were not expected to be fully heated. You would only really ‘heat’ the rooms you spent time in — banking up the fire in the living room when you were actually planning to sit there. You would never heat the bedrooms unless someone was ill, and at all times, at least some of the windows were meant to be open.

The whole design of the traditional English house was based on this peculiar form of life and its associated norms of thermal comfort and management. The English preference for single glazed sash windows and open hearth fireplaces over European-style double casements and stoves was, among foreigners, a baffling but charming eccentricity, generally understood as an adaptation to the wet oceanic climate.

Small House in Hampstead, c. 1820. From Rasmussen (1934)

Here’s the Danish architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen, writing in the 1930s about the typical London house:

Many houses are provided with sash-windows. Their frequent occurrence seems strange to a foreigner. If he be an architect he will invariably ask how it is possible to construct them, so that they fit. The answer is simply that they do not fit, sash-windows never fit - that’s why they are used. The use of sash-windows and of open fireplaces, a perfectly medieval way of heating, may be considered as an outcome of the proverbial English conservatism. But considering the matter from the standpoint of an Englishman it may be admitted that there is a certain method in his madness. As he considers it absolutely necessary that the living-rooms be constantly ventilated it must be admitted that it is quite logical to use open fireplaces which can only draw when the air in the room is continually renewed; but that means that the windows must not fit closely, a quality therefore that cannot be considered a drawback but rather a virtue in sash-windows. It is worthy of notice that double windows are rarely used, not because they are too expensive, but because a draught is preferred to stuffy air. An Englishman going to American or Continental countries where the rooms are better heated and less ventilated than in England suffers terribly. He will long for his lightly constructed houses where the damp winter air whistles through the rooms accompanied by the rattle of the doors and the windows.³

Central European-style double casements — in the Villa Rothmayer (1929). This is how you actually keep the house warm.

Thirty years earlier, in his three volume treatise on the English House, the German architect Hermann Muthesius made much the same argument. For Muthesius, the English house, of which the inglenook-heavy ‘free building’ of the late 19th century was the highest expression, was the artistic product of an island ecology. It ‘embodies totally English ways of life… totally suited to local climatic and geographic conditions.’ Muthesius understood the English interior as a modus vivendi with the constant draughts of cold air, which the national preference for open fires and ventilation-at-all-costs produced.

To an Englishman the idea of a room without a fire-place is quite simply unthinkable. All ideas of domestic comfort, of family happiness, of inward-looking personal life, of spiritual wellbeing centre round the fire-place. The fire as the symbol of home is to the Englishman the central idea both of the living-room and of the whole house; the fire-place is the domestic altar before which, daily and hourly, he sacrifices to the household gods.⁴

English Inglenooks, from The English House (1908)

Vilhelm Hammershøi — Interior with a Stove (1909) — the European model of heating

So ‘airing out’ came to an end, and is now barely remembered.⁵ The form of life changed, but the houses didn’t keep up. I think it’s possible to reconstruct how it happened, albeit a little speculatively.

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There are three stages:

First, the houses got central heating. Central heating was uncommon in houses before before 1960, but spread rapidly after the invention of small bore pipework which could be easily fitted into existing buildings. In 1960, fewer than a million homes had central heating; by 1965 more than 2.5 million did. When you get central heating, you use your house differently. Kids started hanging out in their bedrooms. No more huddling around the fire — the whole house is warm.

Second, they got double glazing. You didn’t absolutely need double glazing, even in new houses, until 1991. There wasn’t any minimum thermal standard for windows at all until 1985. But gradually this has become ubiquitous — the sashes are all uPVC now — which makes homes both a little more thermally isolated, and a lot more airtight.

It’s worth noting how late both these changes took place. The median UK dwelling by age was built around 1965. Half predates the widespread availability of central heating, and at least three quarters of the stock likely pre-dates the requirement for double glazing. I don’t know when the median home actually got central heating — some time in the 1970s? It’s quite possible that over half the stock were single glazed into the 21st century. The stock as a whole was designed and constructed for a past (and increasingly wholly forgotten) model of household thermal management. It’s important to consider this when they misbehave.

Third, and finally, the heating got expensive, at first slowly, and then all at once. We got used to being warm all over the house. At first the windows were still leaky, so the ventilation sort of took care of itself. You might open the windows if it got too stuffy. Back in the 1980s, UK energy was the cheapest in Europe. Then gradually the bills started to rise. The price of domestic gas tripled between 1991 and 2014, and then got rapidly worse after 2023. Now they’re by far the most expensive in the developed world. You’d have to be mad to open the windows — we’re trying to keep the heat in. Now the English huddle by the radiator, sucking up CO2 and mould spores. The houses struggle to feel warm because it’s 80% humidity inside.

Sash window details – from McKay’s Joinery (1947)

Epilogue — and thus, the ‘mould crisis.’

I don’t intend to spend a lot of time on here on contemporary moral panics, or policy, but this one does intersect with my field. As I’ve said, the majority of the housing stock dates from a previous thermal paradigm — an era of roaring fires, cold bedrooms and throwing open the windows. It has often been minimally and ineffectively jerry-rigged for the new era of ultra-heat-scarcity, retrofitted with the aforementioned uPVCs or a bit of spray foam. But it’s still fundamentally the same lightly constructed box that Rasmussen described in the 1930s. If you want it to stay warm you have to heat it, and when it inevitably gets humid inside, you have to let the water out ASAP through air changes or else have it condense on the walls.

The best way to think about the mould crisis is as a wicked control problem that has to be addressed somewhere. You have to do something, but all the solutions involve doing something hard. The English house is flying in a sort of coffin corner, trying to stay warm, dry, mould free with too many people inside the house. The status quo ante was that people had to be responsible for dealing with the problem in their own homes. But even for a competent person with a mental model of how relative humidity works, this is non-trivial, and gets progressively harder the more you try to save money on heating. In a post- ‘Awaab’s Law’ world, this expectation has been deemed unreasonable, at least for social housing tenants — it remains to be seen how this will actually work out, since there’s often no alternative.

You can make things easier by refurbishing homes to make them more thermally efficient, and install systems which handle ventilation and heat recovery. The bottleneck here is the actually-existing UK construction industry. In a recent, well publicised, case, it turned out that 98% of installations in an energy scheme were seriously flawed. There are millions of homes that would need to be addressed if you went down this road and a minuscule number of competent people to do the work. The design is innately fiddly and easy to get wrong.

A third option — just ‘make energy cheap.’ If people are able to use as much heat as they want, they mostly don’t get mould. They open the windows more. They rediscover the love of fresh air. The downsides in financial and environmental terms are obvious.

In place of any of those options, the current government thinking — Housing Ombudsman ‘It’s not a lifestyle’, Renter’s Rights Bill 2025, etc etc — seems to be to try and make landlords fix more of these problems, and to increase the legal remedies for those suffering from them. I don’t find this a very convincing approach because the landlord can only fix the problem in one of the ways outlined above. They can improve the domestic management by imposing some kind of regime on the tenant, or doing their work for them. They can ‘retrofit’ the property for better thermal performance, but the capacity of the industry to do this work correctly and to a reasonable cost is low. Or they can pay for utilities, at hazard. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of money around to pay for any of this, so in general, I expect things to stay just as bad, but with an ever-increasing incidence of litigation.

Consider returning to an older way of life. Unblock the chimney. Throw open the windows. Put on a padded dressing gown. Break down the Billy bookcase for kindling, sit and watch the chipboard resins deflagrating from the comfort of your high-backed chair. Allow the soul of the house to return.

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1. The Satan Bug (1962)

2. This one is from E. Stoddart Eckford and M. S. Fitzgerald’s Household Management: A Handbook of Domestic Economy and Hygiene (1915), but they’re all like this. Link

3. London: the Unique City (1934)

4. Das englische Haus : Entwicklung, Bedingungen, Anlage, Aufbau, Einrichtung und Innenraum (1908)

5. Not coincidentally, the country is gripped by a condensation-induced mould crisis. Perhaps throwing the windows open at the drop of a hat wasn’t so mad after all.