Air-Con Discomfort

In Manchester, the heatwave continues and I have availed myself of the air-con in a new coffee-bar that has opened in the lobby of the hotel across the road. It’s a good place to cool down, quiet and comfortable, with a friendly barista who is ‘passionate’ about coffee. Nevertheless, somewhere in the back of my conscience lurks a qualm. It has to do with the state of the environment and a statistic I read recently: in 2015, the power consumed by air-con units in the USA exceeded that used in the whole of Africa for everything. Air-con is essentially selfish: not only does it consume power, but it also dumps the heat extracted from interior spaces to the atmosphere, thereby exacerbating global warming. It was partly guilt at my participation in this ecologically questionable technology that drove me to find a natural method of cooling off: I took the campervan out to the hills of Derbyshire where, for a few days, I lived in a field where breezes blew, trees provided shade and refreshing dew formed on the lush, green grass overnight.

The site was close to the village of Eyam, famous for its grim history. (When the Great Plague of 1665 reached Eyam, the villagers voluntarily isolated themselves from surrounding populations to minimise contagion.) While there, I visited Eyam Hall, the home of a rich family, which is now open to the public. Built six years after the plague, it is of interest for reasons other than morbidity, i.e. architectural, horticultural and historical. Sitting in the middle of the village the double-fronted manor house is isolated from others by a courtyard, outbuildings and extensive grounds. Strolling around the handsome house and beautiful-but-modest gardens caused me to reflect on social inequality and the ways in which it is manifest. Here, in a 17^th century English village, rich and poor lived on the same few streets, in differing states of comfort, but with one thing shared: the unpolluted environment. How different from what was to come!

Industrialisation caused the movement of people to centres of manufacturing, where the combination of pollution and inadequate housing separated rich from poor in ways that persist to this day. Those who could afford to built their houses away from the filth, while those who could not were obliged to huddle together wherever was cheapest. Friedrich Engels, in the 1880s, was appalled by the “teeming cellars” inhabited by Manchester’s workers. He also reflected on the adage ‘out of sight, out of mind’ as applied to the physical separation of the classes, which made it less likely that empathy might play a part in stimulating compassionate social reform.

Meanwhile modern cities such as New York and Chicago were building upwards rather than outwards and those who could afford to would leave the squalor of the streets for the clean air, light and security of skyscraper apartment blocks. In Britain’s low-rise cities, residential towers gained currency post 1945, albeit translated into low-cost units for the workers and, although they provided access to cleaner air and light, they have generally been a failed experiment in social engineering and worse, cost many lives through deficient construction, unlike the more recently built ‘luxury’ apartment towers in some city centres. Meanwhile, another phenomenon has occurred: those who own valuable houses in cities are resorting to digging out their basements to increase their living space. It is, apparently, less expensive than buying land on the surface or up in the air.
As for the old advice to “buy land, they ain’t making it any more”, it no longer applies – to the rich, at least. In Dubai they are sucking up sand from the seabed and depositing it to form ‘new’ land. Then they import sand from Australia to mix the concrete to build skyscrapers, which are uninhabitable without air-con. It’s enough to make you choke on your cappuccino.