The brick walls and coal fires I mentioned in an earlier post mean that many houses are hard to heat. I did not live in a house with a central heating system to 1960 and it was fairly rare at the time. Although there were often fireplaces in each room by the end of the war coal was expensive and only one fire was usually lit. The boomer generation grew up in cold houses for the most part. Schools, factories and churches were likewise cold.

Older houses were even colder. The thatched timber frame houses shown in tourist books have glazed windows and ceilings. The older ones were not built that way. They had open windows with wooden 'mullion' bars across them and leather curtains across them at night. The floor was solid earth. There was no ceiling and the smoke from an open  fire escaped through a hole in the roof. Such houses were common in rural areas up to 1700. Visitors to England might like to visit the open air museum at Singleton SW of London to see such houses restored to what they were like when they were built.

An acquaintance of mine is a chemistry professor at a Scottish university. He lectured once in California showing slides of his work with 12°C (54°F) given among the reaction conditions. His talk was well received but was asked at the end how he refrigerated his apparatus. It did not occur to his audience that in a cash strapped Scottish university imbued with a Calvinist frame of mind 12°C is room temperature.

Screens are not common because to our perception bugs are not common enough to cause a problem
In the days when it was quite common not have a refrigerator (up to 1965) screened larders were common but not other rooms.

My central heating and hot water boiler died 2 years ago and I decided to see how I would manage without it.

I have one small thermostatic fan heater which stops me from freezing downstairs, lol, and a small convector heater in my bedroom to warm my pyjamas or if it drops well below freezing outside.

Guess what? I've acclimatised. I need almost no heating. I live in a 1930s semi-detached house with minimal insulation, I'm sitting here in my pyjamas at past 3am with outside temp about 5 C (40 F) and I feel fine. You think I must be bonkers, maybe so. I guess the inside temp is about 50 to 55 F (10 to 12 C) and I would be fairly comfortable naked.

About 30 years ago there was a UK TV prog where people had to live like the late stone age - seriously, they had to grow their own food, solve their health probs, live in appropriate tech roundhouses, FOR A YEAR. Now that's what I call reality TV. They were debriefed a year after returning to modern life and the overwhelming thing they'd had a problem with was heat! They felt uncomfortable living in modern domestic temperatures.

I promptly covered both sides of the doorwall with heat-shrink plastic film, making it triple-pane.  It still got some frost on the frame during the depths of winter, but overall it was far better than before.  Amazing how far a little cleverness will take you.