When did the UK have central heating?

Your home probably has central heating because a wave of change in the 1970s and 1980s put it there, and the system behind your walls may be older than you think. For Heating in Greater London, we deal with the radiators, pipework and boilers that history left behind.

Drainplumb is a plumbing and drainage business covering London and the towns around it. We can also help if you need heating in City of Westminster, and you describe the job at no charge.

Get a quick quote from Drainplumb for heating work anywhere in Greater London, and see a written price before any work starts.

When did the UK have central heating?

The UK has had central heating in some form since Roman hypocausts, but in ordinary homes it only became common in the 1970s and 1980s. Before 1960 only a small share of British houses had it, and by the late 1970s it had spread to most.

Where the dates actually fall

The question has three honest answers, depending on what you mean by "central heating". Each one belongs to a different era, and mixing them up is how most of the confusion starts.

• Roman Britain: hypocaust systems carried hot air under floors and through walls in villas and bathhouses. It was real central heating, but it vanished when the Roman administration left.
• Victorian and Edwardian era: hot-water and steam heating appeared in grand houses, churches, schools and factories during the Industrial Revolution. Ordinary households still relied on open coal fires in individual rooms.
• The 1950s to the 1980s: this is when central heating reached ordinary homes. A boiler-to-radiator system, with a pump moving hot water round pipework, became a normal part of a house rather than a luxury.

Before 1960 only a small proportion of UK homes had central heating of any kind. By the late 1970s a clear majority did, and by the 1980s a home without it was the exception. So if you want one answer for the typical British household, it is the 1970s and 1980s.

Several things pushed the change along:

• Clean air rules: the Clean Air Act of 1956 cut back smoke from open coal fires in cities, which made cleaner, centrally fired heating more attractive.
• Narrow-bore pipework: smaller pipes with a pump made systems cheaper and far easier to fit into an existing house without tearing it apart.
• Public housing: new council and estate homes of the 1950s and 1960s were often built with heating included, which normalised it.
• North Sea gas: the conversion from town gas to natural gas from the late 1960s gave households a cheap, piped fuel for a boiler.

What this history tells you about the system in your own home

Your age of property is the quickest clue to what you are living with. In Greater London the housing stock is a mix, and the heating usually tells the story of when the house was last worked on.

• Victorian terraces and Edwardian houses: built for coal fires, so any central heating was added later. Look for pipework that runs along skirting boards or through awkward routes, a sign of a retrofit.
• Interwar semis: often fitted with heating in the 1960s to 1980s. Older steel radiators and large-bore pipes can still be in use.
• Post-war and 1960s to 1970s flats and houses: some were built with heating, and some use narrow-bore pipework from that period.
• Newer builds: sealed systems with modern controls and, in many cases, underfloor heating.

Cold spots at the bottom of a radiator, noisy pipes and a boiler that needs topping up are the usual signs of an older system showing its age. They tell you where you stand, and they are the cue to have the system looked at before winter, not during a cold snap.

The same team covers heating in Islington.

How long a heating job takes and what to expect

Timing depends on whether you are adding central heating to a house that never had it or replacing a system that is already there. Fitting the first system into a Victorian house is the biggest job, because pipes have to be routed under floors and up through walls. Swapping a boiler or a few radiators on an existing system is much smaller.

• Pipework: lifting boards and running pipes is where most of the dust and noise come from.
• Radiators and boiler: positions are decided with you, and the water has to be drained down, so you will be without heating for part of the job.
• Commissioning: the system is filled, tested, balanced and checked before it is handed over.

We can also help if you need heating in Islington or elsewhere in the capital, and the disruption is the same story: planned in advance, floors covered, and rooms dealt with one at a time where possible. Larger old houses simply take longer than a compact flat.

What to do next if you are thinking about heating

If the history made you wonder about your own system, the next step is simple: find out what you have. Check the age of the boiler, note any radiators that stay cold, and see whether the pipework looks original or modernised. That gives anybody looking at the job a head start.

Then describe the job to us. We take that description at no charge and send a written price before any work starts, so you know where you stand before committing to anything. If you are searching for a heating plumber near you anywhere in Greater London, we cover the capital and the towns around it, including Westminster, Croydon, Harrow, Romford, Sutton and Wimbledon.

Not every house needs a new system. Sometimes the answer is a repair, a bleed or a flush of the existing pipework, and a straight description of the symptoms is enough to tell which.

The rules and safety points that apply to heating

Modern central heating involves gas, electricity and pressurised hot water, so the rules matter more than they did in the era of open coal fires. The law requires anyone doing gas work to be competent, and anyone doing it as a business to be Gas Safe registered; HSE and Gas Safe Register advise using a registered engineer. That is advice worth following for any boiler work.

Some points apply regardless of age of property:

• Carbon monoxide: a faulty boiler or flue can produce it, so working alarms are sensible in any home with a gas appliance.
• Annual servicing: a yearly check keeps an older system safe and reliable.
• Landlords: a yearly gas safety check by a Gas Safe registered engineer is a legal duty for rented homes.
• Building standards: new and replacement systems have to meet current rules on controls and efficiency.

If you need heating in London, we cover that too, from a single radiator through to a whole system. The history above is a reminder of how far the technology has come, and how much of it is still sitting behind the walls of older homes.