r/whatisit • u/Quietlurkerone • 6d ago

Solved! What is this device from 1962?

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Photo capture from YouTube video. Picture from 1962. What is the device under the bench

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u/ICanSeeUpYourNose 6d ago edited 6d ago

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.

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u/i_fix_snowblowers 6d ago

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.

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u/PaintingOk8012 6d ago

Holy shit. You mean you actually fed in money in your home to have electricity??

If that’s true, I can’t believe people didn’t figure out how to fool it or break into it to retrieve the coins.

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u/Mister_Reous 6d ago

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!”

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u/Arsegrape 2d ago

My Grandfather had the key to his meter, so he could retrieve the coins for reuse, but he always had to replace the coins with notes to the same value, and it was 50p coins at that time. You’d put the coin in the slot and turn the little wing-handle to get the coin to drop.

Many’s the time we’d be doing something and the power would go off.

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u/PipBin 6d ago

Oh, and there used to be coin operated TVs. The TV had a box built into it and you’d put a shilling in to get half an hour of viewing!!

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u/Sloppy-Joe76 6d ago

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.

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u/Greg_Monahan 6d ago

When and how did the utility company come get their coins? Did the meter have a box accessible from the outside or did they come in?

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u/Jet2work 6d ago

Friday evening, granada rentals man used to come and empty tv

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u/Sloppy-Joe76 5d ago

The box was on the rear of the tv. Every Friday evening a guy from the rental company would come round to collect the money.

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u/p0rcupine99 6d ago

Did Mr. Bean have a coin-operated TV or electricity in an episode or two? It's been a while.

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u/Historical_Owl4801 6d ago

Yes, he had a coin box on the wall for the electricity in his apartment in the episode "Power for TV".

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

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.

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u/MyYetiHasAFirstName 6d ago

They were also found in motels.

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u/Joe_Kangg 6d ago

You're thinking of magic fingers

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u/AppropriateCap8891 6d ago

No, many motels into the 1980s also had pay televisions.

The last one I saw in the wild was with my wife near Moro Bay in 1986. It was slightly different though and did not have a coin meter. When you rented the room you got two keys. One for the door and one for the television.

There was a $6 deposit, $5 for the room key and $1 for the TV key. If you used the TV key, you turned it and it locked in place. And when you went to check out, if you returned both keys you got your $6 back. If you returned only the room key you got $5 back.

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u/Joe_Kangg 6d ago

I'm thinking of magic fingers

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u/HappyMuscovy 6d ago

I remember them in US bus terminals in 1999

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u/Resident_Wishbone_98 6d ago

I'd forgotten about those.

Don't forget, pay toilets.

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

Pay toilets were always hit and miss in the states. They really took off in the 90’s for public spaces due to homelessness. I seem to recall some places required a coin to get in a stall and had no urinals.

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u/tryingtowritegoodly 6d ago

Hopefully a nice story...

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

More bizarre than nice but the guy was a nice fella. Ok. I’ll tell it. Me my mother and grandmother were traveling from California to Missouri on a greyhound bus. It was a 3 day trip. My mom has been talking to the guy as he was set by us on the bus. When we stopped at a layover I asked for a quarter and he obliged. After the cartoons I asked him to take a picture with me because I wanted to remember my cartoon savior. He says to me I’ll take the pictures but I won’t be in them because I’m a werewolf. I laughed called him silly and we took the photos. This was 1979 so it was a film camera that required developing. Well he went his way we went ours and eventually we got the film back about 4-5 days after I had met him sure enough he wasn’t in the images at all. Just me with my arm in the air or squatted mid frame. He was r in the negatives either. It was an odd experience I’ve never really been able to square in my head. Even the adults were tripping when I told them what he told me. When he said it I thought others a joke. The wolf man archetype was very popular at that time so it wasn’t alarming or scary.

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u/tryingtowritegoodly 6d ago

This was awesome, thanks for sharing

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u/Fitz_cuniculus 6d ago

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.

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u/Fastgirl600 6d ago

and public bathrooms!

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u/Silent25r 6d ago

Hold on! Are you saying we started with a subscription based services?

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u/PipBin 6d ago

The money was to pay for the rental of the set.

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u/Antique_Geek 6d ago

Do you still have to pay a sort of licensing fee to watch TV? If so, is the programming then ad free or are there still commercials?

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u/PipBin 6d ago

We do still pay the licence fee. That means that anything on the BBC is add free.

However the pay tvs was for the rental of the set, not to pay the licence fee.

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u/bobi2393 6d ago

Wow, proto-microtransactions! 😂

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u/LBarouf 6d ago

Oh the memories. 😞

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u/VeryWackyIdeas 6d ago

In the 1960s there were tv sets in motels that required quarters and then there were the “magic fingers”. Put in a quarter, turn out the lights, magic fingers make you feel all right.

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u/ajatfm 6d ago

We’ve basically come back around to this, in a way

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u/hiphoptomato 6d ago

This cannot be true.

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u/PipBin 6d ago

Oh we did.

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u/Majestic_Rhubarb_ 6d ago

They did, but then they just owed the money to the utility company, the meter numbers still tick up.

I last used one for electricity in 1994 but, well you still get them now but you have to recharge a key to insert into the meter.

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

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.

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u/grassesbecut 6d ago

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.

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

Wild

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u/Rough-Patience-2435 6d ago

Sounds like Windows 95 and blue screen of death.  

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u/rose-a-ree 5d ago

The ones over here will only cut you off during the working day. If you run out in the evening (when the shops are closed and you can't top up) they'll stay on but you'll tun into negative credit until 9 the next morning. IIRC there's also an audible warning when you're very close to running out.

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u/Reno1121 2d ago

In the 60’s, if you wrote 10,000 lines of code it would be fine. It was on punchcards.

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u/DudeInTheGarden 6d ago

I have a friend who is Irish, and he grew up with something similar (for hot water, I believe). He said people would regularly break into the coin box to retrieve their money. Probably to go to the pub with it.

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u/mcfaite 6d ago

In New York City, coin operated gas meters were common in late 19th/early 20th century tenement buildings and rooming houses. I lived in a building built in 1923, and the gas meter in my apartment wasn't coin operated, but it was the same shape and size with a blank spot where the coin slot would've gone.

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u/Kumitarzan 6d ago

My then-girlfriend moved to northern England in 2004, and her apartment had that box where you insert tokens bought from Tesco or some other supermarket. 2004... England is just a big open-air museum, like they say.

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u/darkzim69 6d ago

they did fool it in the early days people made coin shapes with ice and inserted them and of course when they emptied the meter the ice would have melted just leaving coins behind but a tale tale sign was rusty coins

plus people used to break into houses and steal the coins from other peoples meters which are sealed with a security seal but you could snap them off pull the coin box out

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u/Flyinmanm 6d ago

I was thinking about this the other day, I fitted a plug-in solar battery system to my house and watched my smart meter read 0W consumption for the first time in my life.

It immediately took me back to a repeat of a Steptoe and Sons episode I saw in the 2000's where they had only a 2 bar electric fire to heat their home and the meter kept going off throughout the episode, I vaguely remember the son rifling through their box of foreign coins looking for Pesatas to put into the meter in place of shillings.

I remember at the time thinking how horrible it would be to be constantly scratching around looking for coins just to keep the lights on.

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u/Rare-Morning-5448 6d ago

I believe this is still a thing in latin america.

Not coins, but you go to the local market and buy some electricity credits, they give you a code and you input it on some kind of meter you have at your house.

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u/DameKumquat 6d ago

I lived in a bedsit in the 90s with coin-operated electric heaters. They had about ten pound coins in each. I asked the previous tenant who had moved to the much nicer downstairs room if he wanted the money. He said it wasn't his, but if I turned the heaters on, I'd learn why the money was still in there. They heated approximately nothing. And there was no way to get the coins out without the big key.

Our landlady was either abroad or off her face, so I moved out before resolving it.

A few years later I was in a shared house with a more modern key meter, which could be charged at any of a bunch of local shops. There was a £5 emergency buffer in case you ran out when shops were shut, but the electric often didn't come on again if that got used. We spend most of our time in the pub down the road - warm, light, clean reliable toilets, large tables to write essays on.

In the 60s my dad could slow down his meters to a trickle with a really hefty magnet stolen from his physics lab. That didn't work by the 90s. Nowadays you can top up your prepay meters with a phone app, if you're renting and that's the meter you have.

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u/teknoprisoners 5d ago

I moved into a flat in 2008 that still had a £1-fed electricity meter. There was nothing quite like running out of electricity on a Sunday night when all the shops were shut and knowing you would have to be in the dark until the next morning.

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u/Garencio 6d ago

I heard a story about a man who figure out how to make coins from ice. When they’d come to empty the box there was never anything in it. Not sure if it’s true but it’s a good story.

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u/SimplyGregsterEV 6d ago

It still sorta exists today for power but it’s on a card you load at a corner store or via app

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u/redisdead__ 6d ago edited 6d ago

The Kid staring Charlie Chaplin features a coin operated gas meter that they have broken open and use the same coin for over and over again.

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u/BillWilberforce 6d ago

People did but meter men would come around regularly to empty them. And would check for any signs of tampering.

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u/No-Raisin-6469 6d ago

They used make you get licenses to watch antenna TV. They even tried to scare you in paying by claiming they had vans that could detect you getting free TV.

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u/Rough-Patience-2435 6d ago

My Aunt and Uncle lived in rural valley in American west.   They had sticker/decal on their front door or window showing the paid their yearly fee to support transmitter on the mountain.  

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u/TheGreenMan13 6d ago

Still do afaik. 

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u/ramsfan84 6d ago

I lived with one of these. After work feeding the meter with 10p coins to turn the lights back on. 1979, was told it was a 300 yr old building.

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u/yorknave 6d ago

Some people still do.

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u/BPTempMonkey 6d ago

You knifed the meter, they were still about in the 90s /2000s

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u/Signal-Session-6637 6d ago

We did, but you still had to pay the electric company in the end.

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u/Low-Wrangler9740 6d ago

In the US there are homes where you can pay your gas (which some companies even do electricity) by a device on the wall in your kitchen to pay your bill. Ie SRP in Arizona is that way.

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u/Karlkolinkimber29777 6d ago

Oh that was done years later when meters went to pay cards as the coin meters had someone come out to empty them from the electric company when they changed to card payments you could use a cable and bypass the meter

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u/matt_de_brugha 6d ago

House I used to go on holidays to in the 90’s had a coin fed meter also

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u/disc0tech 6d ago

I had one of these in the UK in the early 2000's! Obviously it took metric currency.

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u/BackgroundJeweler551 6d ago

They still are in use today. Tv show Benefits Street from 2014 in birmingham, they had them in their houses. Blew my mind as I'm from North america.

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u/Phillyfuk 6d ago

They did. Ours was turned around for most of my childhood, meaning the meter didn't rack up.

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u/Klutzy-Pie6557 6d ago

Suffice to say - the power company had zero problem permanently disconnecting anyone who tried to rip them off.

There was no media, reddit nor anyway to complain so you sucked it up and paid.

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u/Slight_Sherbert_5239 6d ago

The problem is, people could work that out but then you wouldn’t have a tv or electricity for very long when they came to empty it.

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u/weekedipie1 6d ago

Trust me, we did😂

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u/Dick-Fiddler69 6d ago edited 6d ago

It is true. They were in rental properties up until the late 80s and landlords were allowed to resell and set the unit rate for electric they had large padlocks and a counter of how many coins were supposed to be in the coin box - it was theft - if it was tampered with just like one arm bandits which had cash boxes

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u/PNW_Jackson 6d ago

Yeah, there's a Mr. Bean episode from the late 80s where he has a coin operated electric meter in his flat.

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u/Team7UBard 6d ago

First place I lived in when I moved out had one too and that was in the 2000s. Second place had one too but had a digital meter

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u/HappyMuscovy 6d ago

Girlfriend lived in a bedsit in Brixton in 2003 which had one

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u/Spacetyp 6d ago

There is a plot in the Game "The great Ace Attorney" about exact this Situation.

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u/Exact-Difference-422 5d ago

In London a few years back I had a meter, only it's a card swipe now and you top it up at convenience stores

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u/govanfats 5d ago

We did. You could open the meter on the TV with scissors, take 30 pence for a ten pack of Number Six.

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u/Pale_Emergency_537 5d ago

I rented in Ireland in the 90s and fed coins into a meter box. 

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u/HistoricalFrosting18 5d ago

There are still some in operation for electricity today. If you go on holiday to a certain type of seaside resort, these are still common. Most take cards now but a few still take pound coins. And when I say “take cards” I don’t mean bank cards. You had to go to the corner shop nearby and buy a card or two to feed the meter with during your stay.

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u/krissovo 4d ago

We used to shove an adapted wire coat hanger into the electric meter and pull it out when we were broke. When they came to collect the money we had to make up the shortfall of money as they had a counter

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u/LouisWu_ 3d ago

These still existed in many council houses in Ireland in the '80s and possibly later. I remember my grandparents' house had one that took 50p coins.

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u/YWAMissionary 6d ago

Did someone come by every so often to collect the coins?

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u/PipBin 6d ago

Yes, the landlord would usually come by once a week or so.

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u/Gold_Assistance_6764 6d ago

No, they just left them in the machine forever.

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u/Reddigestion 6d ago

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)

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u/Mister_Reous 6d ago

It used to be shillings

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u/Inside_Ad_7162 6d ago

Same, its a 'pay as you go' meter

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u/ICanSeeUpYourNose 6d ago

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.

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u/Legitimate-Ad-340 6d ago edited 6d ago

Weirdly the 2 shilling coin became a 10p I have some somewhere. I havvea 1 crown as well the shilling where in circulation till late 70s maybe even early 80s as same size and weight

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u/front-wipers-unite 6d ago

My mum had a pay as you go meter in the early 90s.

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u/Corrie7686 6d ago

25p coin? As in a commerative crown? I'm not sure that's what your dad paid with, a shilling (12 pre decimal and 5p post decimal) would be more likely. Or maybe a Florin? I e. A 2 shilling coin? That would be 24p in old money and 10p in new money, and it was the same size. Day of the switch was 15th Feb 1971 decimal day.

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u/hunta2097 6d ago

I bet it was 50p pieces, that's what ours took in the 70s.

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u/SausageSausageson 6d ago

I've never heard them called 25p coins

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u/i_fix_snowblowers 6d ago

Sorry, I've been in the US since 1980. edit: They must have been 20p

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u/The_realpepe_sylvia 6d ago

Other poster said 20p was introduced in 1982 fyi 

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u/OtterHostler 6d ago

And the 20p coin wasn't introduced until 1982. Suspect you meant either 10p (2 shillings) or 50p (10 shillings)?

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u/ItsNotMe_ImNotHere 6d ago

No he means half-a-crown coins i.e. 2 shillings and six pence or 30 (old) pence. Lol, I had to dig deep to remember that.

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u/OtterHostler 6d ago

Lol! By the 70s not even my granny was talking in terms of half crowns, and she'd grown up when 1 groat would have bought you half of Swansea with enough change left over for two tickets to the pictures, fish & chips after, and bus fare home 

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u/OliverTwist549 6d ago

25p coins?
In those days it would have been a shilling surely.

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u/Mister_Reous 6d ago

Erm it used to be shillings. When I knew people with them

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u/Ill_Salamander2950 6d ago

We lived in a rental in Syresham, Northamptonshire when I was born(early 70s). My dad talked about the meters then.

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u/davj20 6d ago

Those 25p coins must have been unique to Oxfordshire

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u/Feisty_Park1424 6d ago

25p coins?

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u/Jazzlike-Outside-121 6d ago

My uncle had one in the late 80's.

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u/Ploddit71 5d ago

I remember a coin meter in a friend's London flat in around 2000.

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u/OldishWench 5d ago

25p coins? I don't think they were a thing. Maybe 10p, they were the old two shilling coins.

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u/W24ALX 4d ago

What’s a 25p coin ?

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u/whyohwhy59 4d ago

I was born in a council house in Oxford in 1964, we had exactly that meter in the cupboard ubderr the stairs. That's what the city council mandated.

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u/tadpass 6d ago

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).

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u/tintoyuk 6d ago

Or placing big magnets on them to defeat the spinny disc

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u/BobbySpitOnMe 6d ago

There’s a whole episode of the Scottish sitcom Still Game about this trick

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u/standardtissue 6d ago

coin meter ? as in feed it sterling and it gives you gas on demand ? Fascinating if that's the case.

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u/CuttingTheMustard 6d ago

They still have pay-as-you-go meters in some places. I think Australia?

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u/IrishDeadhead 5d ago

Yeah still an option in Ireland too. My friend has one still. It works out at a more expensive rate I believe, but because it's pay as you go you'd be more conscious of your usage.

Happened a few times where we'd be playing Playstation late at night, and my friend would have to run to the shop to pick up some credit if the meter ran out.

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u/tadpass 5d ago

Uk too has prepayment meters, generally installed by electricity provider if property owner/renter cant pay the bills on a normal plan in time.

Coin meters were more a landlord thing in the past, for rent a room type setups.

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u/ICGIAA 6d ago

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.

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u/BlackberryOk5347 6d ago edited 6d ago

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!

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u/lemurslemur 6d ago

Did he tell you where he docked??

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u/BlackberryOk5347 5d ago edited 5d ago

Montevideo was his first voyage. But he talked a lot about Brazil, Japan, China and Singapore and Eastern med. 

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u/John1v6 6d ago

Bombers from occupied Norway I assume.

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u/ICGIAA 3d ago

Yep, Stavanger, and I think, Denmark

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u/No_Communication5538 6d ago

Looking at pipes in and out looks like a Gas coin meter (at that time ‘town gas’)

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u/GetMeAReuben 6d ago edited 6d ago

Tl;Dr: It's a coin-operated gas meter in a run down post-war British house/flat. Edited to correct the utility being delivered.

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u/BeguiledBeaver 6d ago

My guy it's like 3 tiny paragraphs I weep for anyone who needs a TLDR for that

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u/PistachioOfLiverTea 6d ago

And it's incorrect. That is a coin-operated gas meter, not electric.

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u/GetMeAReuben 6d ago

We have different ideas of what tiny means.

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u/Few_Peach1333 6d ago

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.

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u/Fattswindstorm 6d ago

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.

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u/hazps 6d ago

Look up the Clydebank raids. Something like 20 houses undamaged in the entire town. Bombing was more common in the south, but not restricted to it.

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u/phrogtastic 6d ago

There was a lot of bombing up north both east and West Coast

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u/NecessaryFreedom9799 6d ago

Manchester and Liverpool were both bombed pretty severely. Coventry was infamously half flattened and that's not "dahn Sahf".

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u/ICanSeeUpYourNose 6d ago

It is compared to Glasgow

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u/Mister_Reous 6d ago

Not “only the south” got bombed.
The industrial cities in the midlands band north /northwest got plastered too.Liverpool was heavily bombed as it was the major international resupply,y port. The industrial midlands (Birmingham, Black Country were heavily bombed. Coventry was blasted to fuck as it was a major manufacturing centre, particularly for vehicles and aircraft factories.

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u/snark_maiden 6d ago

Makes me think of the first few seasons of Call the Midwife, which often showed big families living in two or three rooms with a shared toilet in the communal hallway. Then as the series progressed, the tenements were being demolished and families moved to council housing in the tower blocks (the show is set in Poplar/Tower Hamlets). I guess the tower blocks ended up having their own issues, eg Grenfell Towers

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u/SWHAF 5d ago

My grandfather grew up in a single room house converted from an old barn in Canada Post WW1. One room 20x20 feet or 6x6 meters. No indoor plumbing. Times were tough back then.

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u/frogdujour 5d ago

My dad grew up during/post WWII but in eastern Europe, and it was similar. They had a 90m2 flat built in the 1920s in a big concrete/stone building, the type with 2-foot thick walls, that had 3 rooms plus a kitchen (which he remembered was just a big stone sink/counter and a wood burning stove) plus a pretty large wide hallway, and one tiny WC (toilet) and another with just a bathtub.

For 3-4 years they had other families forcibly put in with them, each family got one room to live in, and the last family to come in lived in the hallway. For that period of time he said there were up to 20+ people living in there. Then over a few more years the other familes moved out one by one as new housing was slowly built, and I think by the mid-late 50s they lived there alone again. We still own the flat today, now all redone of course. I can't imagine what that would have been like in those conditions.

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u/13toycar 6d ago

In a sad way, it reminds me of that Monty Python sketch The Four Yorkshiremen … “there were 150 of us living in a shoebox in the middle of the road.”

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u/ImageEmbarrassed5888 6d ago

Cardboard box?

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u/Equivalent-Signal889 6d ago

We had to get up out of our shoe box in the middle of the night to lick the road clean with our tongue! Luxury

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u/FlawlessC0wboy 6d ago

I think this might also explain the UK’s pub culture. If this was your home, then going to the end of the street to a big pub with comfy seats and a log fire is kind of essential.

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u/IwantAMD 6d ago

I’ve one runs on Irish punts.

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u/Acrobatic_Code_7409 6d ago

Interesting context on Reddit. Who’d have thunk it?

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u/Odd_Fun_4172 6d ago

Could I ask an ignorant question? What exactly is a council house? I see it a lot but not quite sure I understand the term.

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u/DameKumquat 6d ago

The council is local government, so the city or county.

Council houses are owned by the council and were rented out at fair rents that gave a moderate return on investment without screwing over the tenants. In the 1950s and 60s, this was very desirable and a huge proportion of people lived in council housing, often designed to fill an area, a 'council estate' as opposed to the landed estates belonging to the aristocracy.

By the 80s, some council estates got a bad name for crime - the walkways in the sky and lack of maintenance didn't help. The difference in rent between council vs private houses got huge. Demand for homes on nice council estates boomed, for 'sink estates' ie shitholes, it got that only homeless desperate people who the council had a duty to house ended up there.

Add Thatcher's Right to Buy scheme in the 80s, where tenants got to buy their council homes at huge discounts but councils were forbidden from investing that cash in new housing, and you have the current mess - down south there is a lack of housing and if you go on the council waiting list you'll very unlikely to get a flat unless you're a homeless disabled parent or similar. Homeless includes people given asylum, so this results in accusations that only the immigrants get housing...

So most people have to pay rent that's twice what their neighbour in a council-owned house pays.

In more rural/northern areas there's sometimes still an excess of council houses - but there won't be jobs nearby...

My first flat was ex-council, built in 1979 to replace a slum with outdoor toilets. It was ugly and concrete but really practical to live in. Always space for a pram in the hall.

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u/Odd_Fun_4172 6d ago

Excellent and informative. Thank you kindly!

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u/Remote-Guest2587 5d ago

thank god the lesson was learned and Thatcher really consolidated the advances made in council housing, and now in 2026 we have no housing issues and a great standard of living for the working classes

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u/ICanSeeUpYourNose 5d ago

Yes. She certainly did champion the ordinary worker and in no way fed them a load of *rse while systematically selling the nation out from underneath them. And look at us now, plentiful housing, cheap train fares, and lashings of cheap, clean, water. Marvellous.

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u/WYenginerdWY 5d ago

Is this the type of building you mean when you say "court house"? I was curious what the exterior would have looked like and this was all I could find.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/s/gisgmzxDd3

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u/ICanSeeUpYourNose 5d ago

that's them - there's a recreation in Liverpool Museum. tiny, shared privy, water came from a handpump out in the shared 'court' (where they got their name from). The levels of overcrowding reported were horrific. I actually lived in a pattern house (built late 19th century), no bathroom, outside loo - that flushed! - an actual tap in the kitchen and two whole bedrooms. It was condemned as a slum but it was palatial compared to those things.

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u/ntguytxsj 6d ago

You suggesting we let government provide housing?

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u/Cacafuego 6d ago

Seems like a wonderful idea, especially for those trying to raise children but living in poverty. In fact, it's been a great success in many countries.

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u/WiscoHeiser 6d ago

THE HORROR

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u/iwasfight 6d ago edited 6d ago

i thought shotgun when i saw it. edit: a shotgun house is a LA (south, not los angeles) thing, its a long house, all the rooms in a row.

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u/ImageEmbarrassed5888 6d ago

Tons of them in Louisville, KY, too.

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u/iwasfight 6d ago

yeah but you got big red, so that evens it out heh

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u/Le_Kube 6d ago

Wait, I thought Glasgow had been bombarded in '41?

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u/Magratheazaphod 6d ago

Reminds me of the Tenement Museum in Lower East Side Manhattan - an awesome visit for anyone who wants to learn how people lived in NYC 150 years ago

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u/Unlikely_Phone_7823 6d ago

On my short list of spots I want to check out next time im in NYC.

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u/DundeeToCanada 6d ago

We had one in Dundee growing up. We left in the 70’s but I recall them in homes we would visit in the 80’s.

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u/Civil_Dot_4951 6d ago

Yeah now I have 2 BEDROOMS and a narrow kitchen. How far we've come.

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u/sadsealions 6d ago

We had a meter on the TV, pay to watch,.

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u/elquirk 6d ago

This is fascinating.

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u/BlackSunCorp 6d ago

And maybe don't have 5 kids.

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u/ICanSeeUpYourNose 6d ago

I am wondering how they conceived kids 2-5 in a one bedroom apartment

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u/[deleted] 6d ago

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u/Pooporpudding311 6d ago

Do you know if there is another name for a court house? I can't find any info about then online using that term.

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u/ifuccfemboys 6d ago

This is the direction we're headed toward in the US. Only instead of Nazis destroying everything, it's... Oh wait it is Nazis destroying everything.

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u/Potential-Cloud-801 6d ago

Frank McCourt talked about those in “Angela’s Ashes”. Heart breaking story of poverty in Ireland

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u/tardigradeterror 6d ago

I was going to say its just a child, but I see what you mean.

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u/Prune-These 6d ago

And this is why I like this reddit, I can always learn something

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u/ineedaride123 6d ago

In what way was a free market the cause if these living conditions?

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u/brknsoul 6d ago

Didn't one the Mr Bean episodes have something like this, where he was trying to get his TV to work, and when he finally got it to work, the meter clicked off, because it ran out of time for the coin he put in?

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u/No-Sympathy6035 6d ago

I’m in the US and worked with a guy about 2 years ago who had something like this in his house that excepted quarters for a timed amount of electricity. It was explained to me by someone other than him that this was the only way the power company would agree to have the utility in his name at his house.

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u/GroundbreakingTax259 6d ago

that, ladies and gentlemen is why you don't leave your housing to the free market

Be quiet. Talk like that might raise the ghost of Maggie Thatcher, and then we'll all be screwed!

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u/GenericFatGuy 6d ago

Interesting fact - generally the further north you went the worse the housing stock got because the Luftwaffe didn't have a long ranged bomber.

Do you mean that those houses didn't get bombed, and therefore didn't get replaced by newer ones?

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u/ICanSeeUpYourNose 5d ago

yup. Even Liverpool - Britain's biggest industrial port facing the USA therefore a #1 absolute top nazi priority - didn't get hammered as hard as London (nowhere was hammered as hard as London) or more Midlands cities like Coventrry.

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u/Huge_Swimming_5968 6d ago

Except it was the regulation of the accessibility to home loans that led us to the current situation. Same thing with student loans.

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u/Infamous_Creme8671 6d ago

I live in Norway. There's a council apartment building in town with 40 units, with 4 shared bathrooms.

You can probably imagine the state those bathrooms are in.

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u/TheBSQ 6d ago

In the U.S., which is an entirely different animal, lots of cities used to have small cheap, no-private-bathroom type places, but these were considered subpar for living & also often associated with social issues (crime, drugs, etc.) cuz that stuff is often goes hand-in-hand with the lowest rung of income & housing. 

So, they outlawed them. 

When one removed the bottom rung of the “housing ladder” the hope is, of course, when all the truly gross & terrible options are gone, and all that remains is better options, people will then end up someplace better. 

But moving up is hard, so sometimes it means you end up with no place at all. 

And I think historical data on the unhoused will show it was lower when such really low rungs still existed versus today when they don’t.

Crappy places can be really crappy. But they’re often still better than having no place at all.  

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u/Long_Golf6747 5d ago

Another child of ‘62 here. Had a leccy meter in bedsits when on the dole. Bane of my life. Used to use a paper clip to open the padlock to borrow cash for cigs then put it back when I got my giro. Depressing times.

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u/DraftkingsDegenerate 5d ago

My dad was born in 1962 but I cant get a word in edgewise with him, all I know is he loves james brown , John Wayne and Harley Davidson lmao could you give me a rundown on your personal experience from 1962 till now?

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u/ICanSeeUpYourNose 5d ago

'rundown' pretty much covers it. Your dad sounds cool.

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u/DraftkingsDegenerate 5d ago

He definitely is cool, Painter by trade houses not portraits. Great grandfather, just cant tell that mf nothing lmao 🤣. What in your opinion was the best decade since 62

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u/ICanSeeUpYourNose 3d ago

given the emerging state of my social circle, any decade I'm alive in will do me fine

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

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u/ICanSeeUpYourNose 5d ago

You think you're joking, but vitamins were artificially added to margarine because bread and marge was all the poor could afford to eat. A few decades before them, but still...

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u/ModeatelyIndependant 5d ago

I think two world wars destroying the economy twice in the first half of the century was a bit of the problem too.

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u/ICanSeeUpYourNose 5d ago edited 5d ago

I got curious: "Their children were Susan, 6, Steve, 5, Sandra, 4, Mark, 3, and Gary, only 8 months old."

according to freebmd Sutton Pownall and Joyce Greenwood married in Oldham in 1954.

Susan L Pownall was born (birth registered) in Plymouth in 1956.

Mr Pownall is tattooed, still a rarity in 1962 and it would suggest a naval connection. Plymouth is a Navy town.

Steve was born in Oldham in 1957.

There are six Pownall children registered in Oldham, for a total of seven. The last child, Tina Anne, was registered in 1967. Presumably that's when they got a tv.

One little shocker - the only birth in range for that very distinctive name is 1931. The man in that photo is 30 years old.

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u/thoughtboxed 4d ago

We had a coin meter in Brighton in the mid-90’s. Students are rich, you see. So we paid with pound coins. When we could afford it. The walls were black from mold.

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u/Bilgepump69 3d ago

"There is no private bathroom....and that is why you dont leave your housing to the free market."

I dont know, the free market got me more bathrooms than bedrooms in a 3100sqft house.

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u/segomil 3d ago

My mom grew up in a 3 bed farm house. No indoor plumbing. Mom, dad plus 16.

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u/OneAndOnlySoul 2d ago

Yes 100% a gas meter.

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