I find it hard to believe that in 20th century Great Britain, people in urban/suburban environments were still cooking on hearth fires instead of using cookers connected to town or bottled gas.
That's the kind of thing I expect to see in farm houses.
I don't think the author is referring to a fire used for cooking. Most houses did have gas cookers (stoves) in those days.
It was quite normal in houses built before about 1950 to have a fireplace in the kitchen. In my grandmother's house for example, which was built in about 1926, there's a fireplace with a backboiler (heats water) in the kitchen.
The author seemed to be implying that kitchen waste was often burnt in that fire rather than disposed of in the trash.
Waste disposal / garbage disposal units never really took off here at all. Even today, they're pretty unusual, most people just put food waste into the trash.
The author is definitely right about the houses of that era though. Many of them had very small kitchens which were totally impractical for installing appliances. Most of them at this stage would have been ripped out and completely modernised.
You have to remember that construction and home design sort of froze in time from 1939 until well after WWII had ended. So, many of the modern concepts of home design and domestic appliances arrived late and in many ways the UK and Ireland were sort of stuck in the 1930s right into the 1950s.
In Ireland, we started to see practically sized kitchens and utility rooms appearing in suburban houses really only from the 1950s onwards. That's around the same time that central heating started to become a standard feature of new-build homes too.
Both in Ireland and Britain central heating was very much an optional extra in older houses!
I do think that a combination of rationing and lack of money during WWII and after it in both countries had a huge impact on attitudes. People didn't spend money and put up with a lot more hardship in the home than they should have.
That generation, now in their 80s and 90s can be quite strange about seeing quite normal things as "unnecessary luxuries".
Continental Europe definitely picked-up faster, perhaps because there was an effort to reconstruct and pick up the pieces. The UK and Ireland kind of stumbled on after WWII returning to some kind of normality.
The UK and Ireland also had very uneven distributions of wealth until the 60s and 70s when the middle-class revolution started to happen. Working class people in these two islands had very low standards of living and really very few prospects of pulling themselves out of poverty as they'd no access to educational opportunities beyond 2nd level and faced a very rigid class system, particularly in England.
It's quite difficult to appreciate from the rose-tinted view of 2010 just how things were back then. People 'knew their station' and put up with a lot of misery for no good reason really.
Working class houses were most definitely small and basic.
It wasn't really until the late 1960s and even into the 1970s that you could have said that they were approaching normality and beginning to see serious consumerism blooming again.
That era also saw the class system in the UK beginning to crumble and a lot more social and financial mobility emerging.
It was quite a slow process though!
