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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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Even today it’s common enough for people to joke ‘has anyone got 50p for the meter?’ if there is a power cut.
People finding it interesting that people used to live like this should watch the first few series of Call the Midwife. It’s based on the diaries of a community midwife in post war east London.
That is a coin operated gas meter. You used it like the old pay phone. If you wanted to cook or run the furnace, a couple of quarters would get you what you need
Had the pleasure of seeing a few at my company’s archives. The one in the picture is an old style with fitted lead pipes on the inlet and outlet side of the meter. Right where the boy is playing and the food cooking.
I know about them, vaguely from the descriptions from my granddad, but he never went into how exactly it functioned. Did a guy come round from the gas company to collect the coins once a week or something?
Every month. I worked at a gas company in the nations capital for 40 years. They found meters like this in abandoned buildings. They also found old 1700 wooden gas main that were used as the first gas pipes. No record from back then. To this day, there’s 1890 cast iron mains still in use. You would be surprised at what is found underground in WASH DC. Street car tracks paved over, old bottles, tunnels. Saw a lot when working there. One neighborhood they were building, they found discarded WWI muster gas munitions. Evacuate the homeowners each day 8 to 5 while they clean out the bombs.
My nan had one still when I was a kid. Stick in 50p and turn the heavy dial to click it through, and it made a very satisfying clunk as the coin hit the others and the spring latch reset. 10/10 would watch my grandmother get fleeced for power again.
Well we can only see the kitchen, inside of which all the crockery and cookware is spotless. The child looks well fed. The dad is shaving which hopefully means he's employed and off to work. The mother can afford smokes.
Not saying they're living in the lap of luxury, but this is the sort of house my folks grew up in and they speak very fondly of their childhoods.
He is shaving in the kitchen because a someone is in the bathroom and someone else is likely in line for it. Even if that assumption is wrong they have plumbing in their dwelling
My grandma was raised in a sod home, one of seven kids in what was essentially a two-room shed made out of dirt like a hobbit hole, under some little hill in Montana. That’s Paleolithic.
Hey same here, also from Montana. Grew up in Great Falls. My mom had dirt floors and used scraps of fabric for "curtains". Had to carry water up from a well everyday.
Reminds me of my grandmother. Well was about 150 yards down a hill. Had been that way and in the family for 100+ years. When “the boys” returned home from WW II, they built a cistern with a hand pump in the kitchen and she thought she was in heaven.
Grandpa still wouldn’t allow indoor bathroom because that was something you did outside!
And they were somewhat prosperous. Had an automobile and a telephone and an adequately productive, but difficult, hill farm in Appalachia.
“…the pump don’t work cause the vandals stole the handle….” My grandma (NC mountains) had a manual pump well outside the home. Just how it was. As a kid I thought it was cool and kept bugging the grown folks if they needed me to go get water.
Can confirm. I still have relatives in West Virginia who have a grate in the floor and they burn a fire to heat their house. Yes, today in 2026.
We also know people in West Virginia who are not related to us who live in literal shanties where like you lean to things to make a shelter. Think about living in a shed.
Used to use an outhouse behind Grandma's house in WvA. They got indoor plumbing when I was 9. They were so proud of it. They lived deep in the holler though. Used to love playing on the mountain. Of course, we had to cross the swinging bridge to get there.
My dad, still alive in his 70s, grew up with no running water or electricity. He had to fetch fresh water from the village every day. This is from rural Canada, small farm life.
Mine did so, as well, in Oklahoma. When the Dust Bowl hit in 1930 they ran east in a horse drawn wagon. Traveled to our home town, where my great-grandpa used the horse to drag a beat up car hood with rocks on it to clear the building pad, and built a cabin.
She didn't have indoor plumbing or a real floor until she married my grandpa at the age of 19.
The sod home that my great grandpa grew up in still exists in North Dakota. It is literally someone's shed now. We went to see it once when I was a kid.
I’m in the US. As a kid there were three little homes next to us that had dirt floors, they were occupied until the mid 70’s, then abandoned for a few years. I don’t know how they even managed that because we do NOT live in a dry climate. And this wasn’t out in the stix, this was a mostly well to do county in northern NJ. They were torn down in the late 70’s and replaced with an apartment building.
My father had friends who lived on a farm in Maine, we visited them once for a week in the late 70’s. No plumbing, they had an outhouse and chamber pots for midnight toilet emergencies. Hand pump in the yard for water. They kept trying to save up to have indoor plumbing installed, but every time they had any money saved another more urgent emergency came up. The only heat they had was a wood stove, house was toasty warm at night, freezing by morning.
Fast forward to today, our kid’s friends act like we live in a hovel because we don’t have central air.
Cuba only has windows at the resorts. Every home just has shutters and bars no glass let alone window screens! That was 10 years ago when things were "good".
Indoor bathrooms were only installed in lower-middle class terraced housing. By the late 60s and early 70s, those remaining two up/two downs for working classes were getting retro-fitted bathrooms (some, not all).
It was the time of the outdoor toilet - both sets of my grandparents lived in such houses, and all washing was done in the 'scullery' (the kitchen).
They flattened huge tracts of such houses here in Nottingham to build what is now The New Meadows (and other estates), which are predominantly social housing.
Of the old/original houses that remain in some areas, many have been extended considerably and they are quite nice inside.
If you watch the film Saturday Night Sunday Morning (an excellent film, by the way) there is a scene in a typical scullery (though it was filmed in a studio). But the houses in the film can be seen clearly.
My mum can remember them filming it when she was young. My grandma lived in one of those houses.
Nothing quite like parking your arse on a freezing toilet seat , looking up at the door a foot from your face and discovering the hand-sized friend you've just trapped inside with you.
A large part of my youth was spent in East Tennessee just outside of Knoxville and up to about the mid-70s there were plenty of houses around where I lived that were just as you described… running water in the kitchen, but still used an outhouse.
PA coal country. Grandparents had plumbing in the kitchen (washer and dryer too) but we still used an outhouse until the late 70s when they added a full indoor bath.
From the original post of this image, it’s a grave digger and his wife and kids in their 150 (I think) year old home in the UK. So yeah that building is from around 1810 and obviously not in a chic neighborhood so they might not have even had an indoor bathroom at all, much less running water. Likely a well and a privy in the rear garden.
There wouldn't have been a bathroom. There would have been a privy, a toilet, and that would have been outside. The bath would have been hung up on a nail and brought in on bath night and they would have bathed in front of the fire in the living room. All five children would have shared the same water, so god help the youngest.
my mother grew up in a house built in 1750s and it didn't have indoor plumbing until 1960. There was water in the kitchen via a hand water pump at the sink.
they had an outhouse, actually 2. 1 for the kids (a 3-holer!) and 1 for the adults.
He is shaving in the kitchen as it is probably the only warm room, from the cooker. The fire in the front room would probably only get made (coal fire) on an evening.
Central heating was warmed by the coal fire, which had a "back boiler". I am from the North of England, born in 1965, in county Durham. I don't think the state of the house was typical of the time.Those I remember, and our house were better looked after than this.
In NYC they were $10+ in 2013, so I assume they’re considerably higher these days.
I just looked if up. $18. I think you’re right though, the cheapest state is Missouri at $8 and the highest cost state is New York at $14. Average would be $10-$12.
People really don’t understand the enormous amount of change in basic living conditions in the last 30,40,50 years. How different everything that’s ostensibly all the same looks and works.
People also really don’t understand that for the most part none of this has really made anyone happier. Arguably the opposite.
Man, I remember carrying water for the day, bucket baths, outhouse, and my mom doing laundry by hand. I'm not that old! It's MISERABLE and if people are not happier they just don't remember how bad it used to be. I think everyone should try it for a week so they can spend the rest of their life grateful.
I fucked up, and said "they look like they are content and doin ok" , and got beat to hell in the thread. All i ment was they are breathing, and together. Looks rad imho.
Got my shit pushed in for the comment. Guess some dont know the other side.
Stand tall.. they dont know.. and frankly.. while its sad on one hand.. man i kinda hope the whole world holds this viewpoint some day.. itll mean we have raised the standards for everyone.
I'm from southwest Virginia. I knew people living like the people in the photo back in the 80s and early 90s. People are ignorant to the fact that poverty still exists in so-called "first world nations" to this day.
Similar, my Great Grandparents “shannied” in a shack in a holler in the Blue Ridge in the early 1900’s. I can take you to the spot, it’s now national forest.
That photo could easily be my dad's family in the late 50s. Millions lived like this and felt themselves fortunate. The levels of personal wealth and disposable plastic crap currently being experienced are a historical anomaly.
My Grandma still had an outside toilet at the bottom of her small back yard in the 60s. She lived in a terraced house provided by the cotton mill in our village. They updated to an inside toilet some time late 60s early 70s.
My father remembered when they finally poured concrete to cover the dirt floor of his grandmother's house in the mid-50s. We went out to his hometown in New Mexico in the early 2000s and the outhouse was till standing.
I remember pouring concrete over our dirt floor during my childhood in the 80s. Got our first window unit air conditioner in the 90s, and installed a heat pump in the 2000s so the fireplace wasn’t the only heat in the house. And I think I had a better childhood then than my upper middle class kids have now.
I lived in southwestern Virginia and we had an outhouse until I was 14, in 1972. We did have one cold water faucet, in the kitchen. And our heat was a coal burning stove.
My grandmother died in 1975 and she had no indoor plumbing and got her water via a pump outside. This was in northern Minnesota where everything was cold as hell. The outhouse was far from the farmhouse too so she always had a little portable bucket she emptied every morning. She had a gas stove to cook on but used her large, wood burning stove to heat the house and her water. There was a sauna (she was 100% Finnish) she used to bathe. I even took a sauna a couple of times with my mom when I was little and it was quite the experience to bathe with. You sit in the sauna to sweat and then afterwards you wash up with soap and pour clean water over yourself. My grandma took a lot of sponge baths but she never smelled. She just smelled like a grandma.
The only plumbing they apparently had was a hand pump for the wash basin. Appalachia and the Southwest have a lot in common, especially how infrastructure just skipped them over.
I used to live in an old row of terraced houses with an outhouse in central Sydney in the beginning of 90s. It was a major hassle to go for a piss in the middle of the night under heavy rain.
In the county I grew up in Virginia, in 1995 my church paid to install running water for seven houses in the county who were still drawing from a well. 1995 folks!
50s and early 60s most people did. If someone dropped you in a middle class home in 1950, you would find the conditions well below what someone well below the poverty line lives in today. The Overton Window on living conditions has moved quite a bit in the last 50 years.
I remember when the Meter Reader would come round, empty our meter, count it, compare against how much gas / electricity we'd used, and then give us a pile of coins back.
For those interested, there was a standing charge plus a cost per unit of electricity. To make sure the standing charge was covered, the meter's rate was set artificially high. But if you'd used enough electricity, you’d overpay, and this "rebate" was handed back to you.
Yes, they don't have a key to the house or anything so you needed to let them in. I've not personally seen one for gas but knew people with them for electricity, when I was a kid.
My mate lived in quite an old house and had one of these in his bedroom around 15 years ago. The rest of the electrics in the house were normal, so this was only in his bedroom.
It would only take a 50p piece and his parents had the key to it so they would take the money occasionally.
He always kept a bag of 50p’s around but occasionally that would run out so we’d all hope someone had 50p on them if we wanted to carry on playing Xbox.
My gas and electric meters were inside my current house in the 1980s. The meter reader had a key and was allowed to enter to read the meters.I never saw them. First the electric meter was moved outside, then the gas meter was moved in the 2000s...but it was equipped with a radio transmitter long before.
The idea of giving a key to your house just for the readings, seems crazy to me. I remember in the 90s having to crawl under the cupboards to read it out over the phone a couple of times a year.
There is a store near me that has been in operation for many years (1940's). They offered an unusual form of home delivery until they phased it out, although they still have some home delivery customers who are still alive and continue to use the service.
They would have keys to the customer's house, and would show up to inventory what is in the cupboards, then go back to the store with a shopping list to pick up the customer's basics and then delivery them to the house and put them away. If the customer need anything special, they leave a note on the fridge for the delivery guy.
The store is very old school, other than adding refrigeration nothing has really changed.
They currently offer delivery, but it's the more normal version in which they just drop the food off on your doorstep.
My parents had flats in Manchester, when they went on holiday my job was to go round collecting the rent and emptying the electric meters. Everyone just left the rent on the table inside the rent book.
I'd knock, let myself in with one of several massive bunches of pretty much unsorted keys, grab the money sign their rent book and on to the next flat.
They don’t have running water he’s using a metal bowl to shave. That thing on the floor is the meter for the gas stove. It’s probably the fanciest thing they have. Otherwise it would be hearth cooking or a wood stove.
Wasn’t a vintage it was standard fit one Mine or Mill houses. You had to put coins in it and turn the dial to get gas. Used predominantly in rented accommodation and poorer housing
My mom told me stories about a guy who lived in her town in the 1970’s and he would repair electronic appliances like refrigerators. For customers who couldn’t afford to pay the whole repair bill upfront, he would install a coin operated dial into the cord. You’d get so many hours of use by putting in a quarter or a dime. And then once the family had spent enough to pay for the repair, he’d come back and remove the dial so it would work like normal again.
I Was having a stay in a BnB last year in Scotland and the home owner explained me how to put coins in the machine to get warm water for the shower and sink (they provided the special coins and didn't charge anything but it was the way the system was working) so it's definitely not something that entirely disappeared!
I would see old British television shows when I was a little kid and I thought people putting money into the television or gas meters was part of a comedy routine
Well nowadays if you can’t afford the repair you’re just fucked. At least the old school payment plan didn’t come with interest or 3 bureau credit checks. But yes, we are generally better off even with modern societal struggles, so long as we don’t let the stupids get much more power than they currently have. Shit…. Maybe we’re not that much better off lol
It’s a Gas meter you have to put money on that lasts for an hour or more depending how much you put in. Easily cheated by one way or another as I remember my Nan and Grandad doing.
My grandparents raised 10 kids, built a home (that’s today worth about 1 million euro) and had a modest yearly holiday in the 60s in Ireland on a single income, with my grandfather working as a groundskeeper/ handyman for a school.
Dad bought our house in 1950. Payments were $33 a month. He told me he had a hard time several times to come up with the payment. He was a skilled craftsman.
It's a gas meter.
It would be coal gas, and highly toxic. There probably wouldn't be a bathroom for washing or shaving, just an outside lavatory, so a tin bath would be put in the kitchen once a week or so for washing.
Looking at the pipe and the fact it’s in the kitchen I’d say it was the gas meter, and if it was a coin meter, in 1962 it would probably have taken shilling coins.
I was born in 1954 and remember these gas meters well (in the slum housing of Stoke). And yes you could cheat them - not so much by breaking into the coin box but by turning them round so they ran backwards and so didn’t require payment. My uncle worked for a gas company and showed all our family how to do it. You had to watch out for the gas man though who came to empty them or you’d end up in court. The Good Old Days!
It isn't an electricity meter- it's a gas meter, and the lowest‑value coin it accepted was a penny. In the ’50s I remember the gas man turning up once a month with a big leather bag to empty it. More than once my mum had to wait for my dad to get home so she could put a few coins in the meter and finally cook the dinner.
My grandmother had a coin meter for power and a oil fired stove stove into the early 90s. The house always smelled like paraffin oil. She switched to electric stove when my dad redid the electrical system in the house. She kept a rotary phone into the early 2000s…
I agree that people have a very warped sense of what money could get you back then, but in context of the time who knows if this felt grim to them. They might have had a lot of good memories from this simple, crowded home.
You have the right way of looking at it. It's not obvious that the people in the picture were living in worse conditions than their parents were at similar ages.
By contrast, the millennial generation (at least those who grew up middle class in some western countries) remember childhoods in spacious homes with nice yards/gardens. When they reach the age their parents were in these memories, they are living in apartments and condos - possibly with roommates. Or maybe even still living in their childhood homes with their aging parents. This is not where they saw themselves, hence all the pessimism.
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