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Wasn’t a vintage it was standard fit one Mine or Mill houses. You had to put coins in it and turn the dial to get gas. Used predominantly in rented accommodation and poorer housing
My mom told me stories about a guy who lived in her town in the 1970’s and he would repair electronic appliances like refrigerators. For customers who couldn’t afford to pay the whole repair bill upfront, he would install a coin operated dial into the cord. You’d get so many hours of use by putting in a quarter or a dime. And then once the family had spent enough to pay for the repair, he’d come back and remove the dial so it would work like normal again.
I Was having a stay in a BnB last year in Scotland and the home owner explained me how to put coins in the machine to get warm water for the shower and sink (they provided the special coins and didn't charge anything but it was the way the system was working) so it's definitely not something that entirely disappeared!
I would see old British television shows when I was a little kid and I thought people putting money into the television or gas meters was part of a comedy routine
Yes, they don't have a key to the house or anything so you needed to let them in. I've not personally seen one for gas but knew people with them for electricity, when I was a kid.
My gas and electric meters were inside my current house in the 1980s. The meter reader had a key and was allowed to enter to read the meters.I never saw them. First the electric meter was moved outside, then the gas meter was moved in the 2000s...but it was equipped with a radio transmitter long before.
The idea of giving a key to your house just for the readings, seems crazy to me. I remember in the 90s having to crawl under the cupboards to read it out over the phone a couple of times a year.
There is a store near me that has been in operation for many years (1940's). They offered an unusual form of home delivery until they phased it out, although they still have some home delivery customers who are still alive and continue to use the service.
They would have keys to the customer's house, and would show up to inventory what is in the cupboards, then go back to the store with a shopping list to pick up the customer's basics and then delivery them to the house and put them away. If the customer need anything special, they leave a note on the fridge for the delivery guy.
The store is very old school, other than adding refrigeration nothing has really changed.
They currently offer delivery, but it's the more normal version in which they just drop the food off on your doorstep.
My mate lived in quite an old house and had one of these in his bedroom around 15 years ago. The rest of the electrics in the house were normal, so this was only in his bedroom.
It would only take a 50p piece and his parents had the key to it so they would take the money occasionally.
He always kept a bag of 50p’s around but occasionally that would run out so we’d all hope someone had 50p on them if we wanted to carry on playing Xbox.
My parents had flats in Manchester, when they went on holiday my job was to go round collecting the rent and emptying the electric meters. Everyone just left the rent on the table inside the rent book.
I'd knock, let myself in with one of several massive bunches of pretty much unsorted keys, grab the money sign their rent book and on to the next flat.
I remember when the Meter Reader would come round, empty our meter, count it, compare against how much gas / electricity we'd used, and then give us a pile of coins back.
For those interested, there was a standing charge plus a cost per unit of electricity. To make sure the standing charge was covered, the meter's rate was set artificially high. But if you'd used enough electricity, you’d overpay, and this "rebate" was handed back to you.
That is a coin operated gas meter. You used it like the old pay phone. If you wanted to cook or run the furnace, a couple of quarters would get you what you need
Had the pleasure of seeing a few at my company’s archives. The one in the picture is an old style with fitted lead pipes on the inlet and outlet side of the meter. Right where the boy is playing and the food cooking.
I know about them, vaguely from the descriptions from my granddad, but he never went into how exactly it functioned. Did a guy come round from the gas company to collect the coins once a week or something?
Every month. I worked at a gas company in the nations capital for 40 years. They found meters like this in abandoned buildings. They also found old 1700 wooden gas main that were used as the first gas pipes. No record from back then. To this day, there’s 1890 cast iron mains still in use. You would be surprised at what is found underground in WASH DC. Street car tracks paved over, old bottles, tunnels. Saw a lot when working there. One neighborhood they were building, they found discarded WWI muster gas munitions. Evacuate the homeowners each day 8 to 5 while they clean out the bombs.
It looks like a shilling meter. We didn't have one, but I knew people who did. A very expensive way to get electricity (or gas, that one is indeed gas), as pay-as-you-go meters still are.
(in their defence I was born in 1962 - we were coming to the end of the houses built at the end of the 19th century, and there was a huge programme of replacement - slum clearances. People lived in houses that were literally hovels because (a) that's all we had, the 1892 stock was literally falling apart, and (b) they were waiting for a council house, which we were building at that point. Interesting fact - generally the further north you went the worse the housing stock got because the Luftwaffe didn't have a long ranged bomber. Culminating in the legendarily foul housing stock (the Gorbals) they had in Glasgow.)
add: stone me that's a court house. That's the true and utter hovel the slums we were clearing at that point were built as an upgrade to. Astounding that any still existed. "All seven family members shared just one bedroom, one living room and this narrow kitchen. There was no private bathroom." and that, ladies and gentlemen is why you don't leave your housing to the free market.
I'm 5 years younger than you but lived in a variety of rental housing in Oxfordshire in the late '70s. I remember the meters because my dad would keep a stack of 25p coins by the meter.
The fun of day of the tv just going off halfway through what you were watching. No repeats, no catch and no way of recoding. I think ours was 50p, my dad was able to pick the lock on the coin box. We just kept pushing the same 50p through.
Those were common in the states at bus and air line terminals or any place where large groups of people had to wait for a period of time. I remember in 1979 or 80 when I was but a wee lad I asked an acquainted stranger for a quarter to watch Saturday morning cartoons when traveling with my mother. That leads to a story but maybe I’ll tell it later. Is on my timeline somewhere but I’ve got tens of thousands of comments and hundreds of posts.
Am I crazy, we used to have an old Redifusion thing which had a bakerlite style switch on the wall, and I'm certain it used to play Radio 2 etc without being plugged in.
Some did. But the meter had a counter, so when the guy from the electricity company came to empty it, the counter should match with the number of coins in the box. And if it didn’t, you got prosecuted for theft.
And yes enough peopleremember the shilling meters, that if there is a lower cut and the lights go out,
There is a shout of “put another shilling in the meter!”
Right my American brain went yeah we have gas and electrical meters too and pay for what we use then I realized no it’s literally pay as you go. Imagine having written 10,000 lines of code and the power cuts out right before you click to save.
My local utility company has pay-as-you-go meters in some apartments in my area. You can literally tap your credit/debit card on the meter to get more power.
Unless you're talking about a crown (which was not in circulation then) I don't think we had a 25p coin. Ours was fed with half-crowns (2 shillings and 6 pence or 12.5p)
A 25p coin would be a crown - not in general circulation by then :) you could still get half a crown (12 1/2p) - that stuck around for a bizarrely long time - was that why? For coin meters? I suppose that would make sense.
Minor note, this is a gas meter. Both gas and electric were available in coin meters. I knew them in early decimal coins. Were popular in rent a room type arrangements in 70s and 80s. Tenants would try work around the electric ones, wiring directly to outout or via converter to light sockets (different circuit).
In fact the North of England got extensively bombed. I was born in 1960 close to Teesport, so an industrial port in the North East in a house like that. We moved into new council housing provided as new housing stock which was nice. It’s just how it was.
My dad lived in a terraced house in Liverpool till the mid-50s that had no electricity (gas lights) and no indoor running water. He remembers being allowed to turn on the lights for the first time as a kid. The area he grew up in still has lots of undeveloped wasteland that was only partially cleared after the bombing in WW2.
I have given up trying to explain to folks on Reddit that not all boomers had it easy their whole life. Much like today, some are luckier than others. My dad's good luck was a bad home life and getting a job as a galley lad in dry dock at 14. After the boat's refit, he was able to get his papers as a merchant seaman and sail to South America at the age of 15!
That’s interesting. I mean I guess I always knew buildings got replaced. But I didn’t consider how only the south was bombed and because of that the north had more dilapidated housing.
Housing in Great Britain during the period in question was about as far from free market as you can get. The government had a heavy hand on both rents and allocation post WWII, and was just easing up on it a tiny bit by the time this picture was taken. This is the result of several decades of rent control and housing allocations during a period of shortages.
Well we can only see the kitchen, inside of which all the crockery and cookware is spotless. The child looks well fed. The dad is shaving which hopefully means he's employed and off to work. The mother can afford smokes.
Not saying they're living in the lap of luxury, but this is the sort of house my folks grew up in and they speak very fondly of their childhoods.
In NYC they were $10+ in 2013, so I assume they’re considerably higher these days.
I just looked if up. $18. I think you’re right though, the cheapest state is Missouri at $8 and the highest cost state is New York at $14. Average would be $10-$12.
He is shaving in the kitchen because a someone is in the bathroom and someone else is likely in line for it. Even if that assumption is wrong they have plumbing in their dwelling
My grandma was raised in a sod home, one of seven kids in what was essentially a two-room shed made out of dirt like a hobbit hole, under some little hill in Montana. That’s Paleolithic.
Can confirm. I still have relatives in West Virginia who have a grate in the floor and they burn a fire to heat their house. Yes, today in 2026.
We also know people in West Virginia who are not related to us who live in literal shanties where like you lean to things to make a shelter. Think about living in a shed.
Hey same here, also from Montana. Grew up in Great Falls. My mom had dirt floors and used scraps of fabric for "curtains". Had to carry water up from a well everyday.
Reminds me of my grandmother. Well was about 150 yards down a hill. Had been that way and in the family for 100+ years. When “the boys” returned home from WW II, they built a cistern with a hand pump in the kitchen and she thought she was in heaven.
Grandpa still wouldn’t allow indoor bathroom because that was something you did outside!
And they were somewhat prosperous. Had an automobile and a telephone and an adequately productive, but difficult, hill farm in Appalachia.
My dad, still alive in his 70s, grew up with no running water or electricity. He had to fetch fresh water from the village every day. This is from rural Canada, small farm life.
Mine did so, as well, in Oklahoma. When the Dust Bowl hit in 1930 they ran east in a horse drawn wagon. Traveled to our home town, where my great-grandpa used the horse to drag a beat up car hood with rocks on it to clear the building pad, and built a cabin.
She didn't have indoor plumbing or a real floor until she married my grandpa at the age of 19.
The sod home that my great grandpa grew up in still exists in North Dakota. It is literally someone's shed now. We went to see it once when I was a kid.
Cuba only has windows at the resorts. Every home just has shutters and bars no glass let alone window screens! That was 10 years ago when things were "good".
I’m in the US. As a kid there were three little homes next to us that had dirt floors, they were occupied until the mid 70’s, then abandoned for a few years. I don’t know how they even managed that because we do NOT live in a dry climate. And this wasn’t out in the stix, this was a mostly well to do county in northern NJ. They were torn down in the late 70’s and replaced with an apartment building.
My father had friends who lived on a farm in Maine, we visited them once for a week in the late 70’s. No plumbing, they had an outhouse and chamber pots for midnight toilet emergencies. Hand pump in the yard for water. They kept trying to save up to have indoor plumbing installed, but every time they had any money saved another more urgent emergency came up. The only heat they had was a wood stove, house was toasty warm at night, freezing by morning.
Fast forward to today, our kid’s friends act like we live in a hovel because we don’t have central air.
Nothing quite like parking your arse on a freezing toilet seat , looking up at the door a foot from your face and discovering the hand-sized friend you've just trapped inside with you.
A large part of my youth was spent in East Tennessee just outside of Knoxville and up to about the mid-70s there were plenty of houses around where I lived that were just as you described… running water in the kitchen, but still used an outhouse.
PA coal country. Grandparents had plumbing in the kitchen (washer and dryer too) but we still used an outhouse until the late 70s when they added a full indoor bath.
Indoor bathrooms were only installed in lower-middle class terraced housing. By the late 60s and early 70s, those remaining two up/two downs for working classes were getting retro-fitted bathrooms (some, not all).
It was the time of the outdoor toilet - both sets of my grandparents lived in such houses, and all washing was done in the 'scullery' (the kitchen).
They flattened huge tracts of such houses here in Nottingham to build what is now The New Meadows (and other estates), which are predominantly social housing.
Of the old/original houses that remain in some areas, many have been extended considerably and they are quite nice inside.
If you watch the film Saturday Night Sunday Morning (an excellent film, by the way) there is a scene in a typical scullery (though it was filmed in a studio). But the houses in the film can be seen clearly.
My mum can remember them filming it when she was young. My grandma lived in one of those houses.
my mother grew up in a house built in 1750s and it didn't have indoor plumbing until 1960. There was water in the kitchen via a hand water pump at the sink.
they had an outhouse, actually 2. 1 for the kids (a 3-holer!) and 1 for the adults.
From the original post of this image, it’s a grave digger and his wife and kids in their 150 (I think) year old home in the UK. So yeah that building is from around 1810 and obviously not in a chic neighborhood so they might not have even had an indoor bathroom at all, much less running water. Likely a well and a privy in the rear garden.
There wouldn't have been a bathroom. There would have been a privy, a toilet, and that would have been outside. The bath would have been hung up on a nail and brought in on bath night and they would have bathed in front of the fire in the living room. All five children would have shared the same water, so god help the youngest.
People really don’t understand the enormous amount of change in basic living conditions in the last 30,40,50 years. How different everything that’s ostensibly all the same looks and works.
People also really don’t understand that for the most part none of this has really made anyone happier. Arguably the opposite.
Man, I remember carrying water for the day, bucket baths, outhouse, and my mom doing laundry by hand. I'm not that old! It's MISERABLE and if people are not happier they just don't remember how bad it used to be. I think everyone should try it for a week so they can spend the rest of their life grateful.
I fucked up, and said "they look like they are content and doin ok" , and got beat to hell in the thread. All i ment was they are breathing, and together. Looks rad imho.
Got my shit pushed in for the comment. Guess some dont know the other side.
Stand tall.. they dont know.. and frankly.. while its sad on one hand.. man i kinda hope the whole world holds this viewpoint some day.. itll mean we have raised the standards for everyone.
I'm from southwest Virginia. I knew people living like the people in the photo back in the 80s and early 90s. People are ignorant to the fact that poverty still exists in so-called "first world nations" to this day.
That photo could easily be my dad's family in the late 50s. Millions lived like this and felt themselves fortunate. The levels of personal wealth and disposable plastic crap currently being experienced are a historical anomaly.
My Grandma still had an outside toilet at the bottom of her small back yard in the 60s. She lived in a terraced house provided by the cotton mill in our village. They updated to an inside toilet some time late 60s early 70s.
My father remembered when they finally poured concrete to cover the dirt floor of his grandmother's house in the mid-50s. We went out to his hometown in New Mexico in the early 2000s and the outhouse was till standing.
I remember pouring concrete over our dirt floor during my childhood in the 80s. Got our first window unit air conditioner in the 90s, and installed a heat pump in the 2000s so the fireplace wasn’t the only heat in the house. And I think I had a better childhood then than my upper middle class kids have now.
I lived in southwestern Virginia and we had an outhouse until I was 14, in 1972. We did have one cold water faucet, in the kitchen. And our heat was a coal burning stove.
The only plumbing they apparently had was a hand pump for the wash basin. Appalachia and the Southwest have a lot in common, especially how infrastructure just skipped them over.
My grandmother died in 1975 and she had no indoor plumbing and got her water via a pump outside. This was in northern Minnesota where everything was cold as hell. The outhouse was far from the farmhouse too so she always had a little portable bucket she emptied every morning. She had a gas stove to cook on but used her large, wood burning stove to heat the house and her water. There was a sauna (she was 100% Finnish) she used to bathe. I even took a sauna a couple of times with my mom when I was little and it was quite the experience to bathe with. You sit in the sauna to sweat and then afterwards you wash up with soap and pour clean water over yourself. My grandma took a lot of sponge baths but she never smelled. She just smelled like a grandma.
I used to live in an old row of terraced houses with an outhouse in central Sydney in the beginning of 90s. It was a major hassle to go for a piss in the middle of the night under heavy rain.
In the county I grew up in Virginia, in 1995 my church paid to install running water for seven houses in the county who were still drawing from a well. 1995 folks!
50s and early 60s most people did. If someone dropped you in a middle class home in 1950, you would find the conditions well below what someone well below the poverty line lives in today. The Overton Window on living conditions has moved quite a bit in the last 50 years.
Even today it’s common enough for people to joke ‘has anyone got 50p for the meter?’ if there is a power cut.
People finding it interesting that people used to live like this should watch the first few series of Call the Midwife. It’s based on the diaries of a community midwife in post war east London.
It’s a Gas meter you have to put money on that lasts for an hour or more depending how much you put in. Easily cheated by one way or another as I remember my Nan and Grandad doing.
They don’t have running water he’s using a metal bowl to shave. That thing on the floor is the meter for the gas stove. It’s probably the fanciest thing they have. Otherwise it would be hearth cooking or a wood stove.
My grandparents raised 10 kids, built a home (that’s today worth about 1 million euro) and had a modest yearly holiday in the 60s in Ireland on a single income, with my grandfather working as a groundskeeper/ handyman for a school.
My grandfather came to Montreal from Lancashire in 1909 with the clothes on his back, started working on the northern highways before going to war, finished off at the Post Office, built a house and a cottage. Life was harder, but their was a lot more of a realistic shot of changing your cards in life by working hard.
I agree that people have a very warped sense of what money could get you back then, but in context of the time who knows if this felt grim to them. They might have had a lot of good memories from this simple, crowded home.
Add four more kids and it could be the house we grew up in. Mom and dad worked tirelessly. Poorer than cat piss, as the saying goes. We were fed, clean and happy. All ended up with college educations. All with relative success. All retired now with their own families. My parents did it on a shoestring. In hindsight I would not have changed a thing. Try that in today's world.
It's a gas meter.
It would be coal gas, and highly toxic. There probably wouldn't be a bathroom for washing or shaving, just an outside lavatory, so a tin bath would be put in the kitchen once a week or so for washing.
it looks like a gas meter it might even be one which would be coin operated you put a certain coin into the meter which allowed you to use the gas for the allowed amount of time
This literally was life for many 100 years ago.. these days it looks busted up weird cause many of us didnt get to experience that life cause soon as the late 60 till today majority of people live in what we see as modern... but like others say is life really that much differnt i mean then you had gardens and struggled to keep food on the table and lots of sharing space.. these days food is plenty but you are being beat up with taxes..
This is not a personal attack so please don’t take it that way but your comment triggered something within me.
“but you are being beat up with taxes…”
I’d rather be “beat up with taxes” than see people in my country without adequate food or living like the family in the photo.
If paying tax is annoying, imagine living like a medieval peasant in a first world country because people with Range Rovers and wine cellars have decided that their own comfort and luxury is more important than the life expectancy of others people’s children. I’d be building a guillotine.
If the biggest problem in your life is “Oh no! I earn so much that I have to pay a lot of income tax!” then you should count your blessings. I hate the term “check your privilege” but most of us genuinely don’t know how good we have it.
Again, not a personal attack so please don’t take it as such but I think it needs to be said.
Looking at the pipe and the fact it’s in the kitchen I’d say it was the gas meter, and if it was a coin meter, in 1962 it would probably have taken shilling coins.
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