Trumpy:
Gas burners operating in a room producing heat directly from a flame is pretty rare here these days. It's actually illegal to install open flue natural gas heaters.
95%+ of heating with gas (or oil) here is via either closed (pressurised) or open (head tank), radiator systems.
Ducted systems appeared in the 60s/70s for a very short while and were so problematic and noisy that most people who had them replaced them with radiators.
As for smog reduction. If you ask anyone in Cork or Dublin they would NEVER go back to allowing smokey coal. Londoners would be the same !
As for heat pumps, they're starting to appear in commerical settings but most domestic users would never have heard of them either.
A lot of people also don't realise how mild the weather in most of the UK and Ireland actually is. It's never really extremely cold and it's never really extremely hot either. The rain however is most definitely not a myth!
Winter tempratures tend to sit at around 8-15C with the odd day where it dips into low single figures.
Summer tends to be like 18-28C with the very odd chance of it hiting 30+.
It's colder in Scotland and possibily northern England. (?) but in comparision to even Northern France the British Isles are very mild!
So air conditioning / heatpumps etc are all a bit unnecessary.
A typical central heating system here would be utterly useless in most of the rest of the world. The pipes would more than likely freeze and it wouldn't produce enough heat.
Bear in mind that until the 1960s most houses here had no insulation and central heating was very much an optional extra.
