Coal in the bath : Poverty, modernity and the welfare state in post-war Britain

Lambert, Michael (2025) Coal in the bath : Poverty, modernity and the welfare state in post-war Britain. In: Objects of poverty : Material culture in Britain from 1700. Bloomsbury Academic, London, pp. 75-86. ISBN 9781350368187

Abstract

During the era of the ‘classic’ welfare state in postwar Britain, coal moved from being a symbol of industrial prosperity and national wealth to one of household poverty. Decline and deindustrialisation meant that coal came to symbolise what was backwards, dirty and old in contrast with the new, modern and clean. Here, the ‘coal in the bath’ myth became ubiquitous as it gripped both official and national consciousness, reimagining a range of social problems as behavioural ones. This chapter uses the underlying complex and contradictory meanings contained in the ‘coal in the bath’ mythologies and realities as a lens to explore tensions between modernity and poverty in the postwar British welfare state. Here, the materiality of coal is central, serving as an object of poverty exposing the gap between the promises of the welfare state and its capacity to deliver.