The Aga for me is the ultimate "I am an upper class British" item.
When I was at uni I made friends with a fellow. He was into theatre, so the invited me and the rest of the gang up to his house. Dude had an empty 5 bedroom house that he used for theatre nights.
So I arrive and I see his stove is on.
"Bro you've left your stoves on?"
"Yeah it's an Aga"
"A what? I thought we were eating out?"
"Yeah we are, we just keep this thing on to heat the house. Useful for keeping food warm as well."
"Wait so you have an empty house that has an oven in it which is always on?"
"Yes, feels great when I arrive before a theatre night!"
I would say it's a rural item. Plenty of farming households across the British and Irish isles would have them. Not all farmers are not wealthy nor come from old money.
You would throw wet laundry on top of them either and overnight they would dry. They have multiple purposes but ultimately a source of heat that is effcient for long grey wet winters presented by the Atlantic temperate climate.
Yes, indeed. In my (at the time) sister-in-law's 17th c. two-up two-down stone cottage an oil-fired Aga was, in fact, the sensible choice. Not to say running it wasn't costly, but electric heat would have been far more expensive. It was also lovely to cook with. Put the drying rack in front of it, and clothes dried so thoroughly they didn't mildew after you put them away; also, you could throw your shoes into the low oven before you went out (amazing!), and again after you came in to get them dry.
My then-partner and I lived in an even older house, whose only sources of heat were a defective boiler and a coal-burning grate in the (genuinely medieval) fireplace in the living room. Our experience was, shall we say, authentic to the time-period in which it was built.
People underestimate how miserable the British climate is in winter, and how energy-intensive those old homes are to heat. An Aga wasn't invented as a status symbol, but as a practical item for a particular circumstance. Moving it outside of its original context is what changes its meaning.
After he explains that it is used to heat the house, you then conclude that only "upper class" people need that? It's a basic need to survive winter, along with the landlord's interest in keeping pipes from freezing.
In the early 90s a friend bought a five or six chamber Aga. He had lived in a house in Europe that had had one and he loved it. It cost a fortune to acquire and to install as the house had to be structurally reinforced to accommodate the weight of the oven. I remember that it took at least a couple of days to come up to a stable temperature across the whole oven. Each of the cooking chambers had a different temperature.
a subgenre of the family saga genre of literature ... typically interpreted to refer to "a tale of illicit rumpy-pumpy in the countryside" ... it offers a "gingham-checked world" associated with "thatched English villages" and "ladies in floral dresses".
with predictable results w.r.t. quality-of-living when your house already has central heating.
Agas used to be a very rural middle-class thing: it was how I imagine most countryside homes' heating and cooking worked, and it scaled from a modestly-sized cosy cottage to being in expansive stately homes. But postwar, and especially since the 1960s, Agas are just a status-symbol appliance to me.
Like, in North America, you know you've made it when you have a Wolf range and a Subzero fridge in your kitchen. In the UK, it's when you've got an Aga.
...probably because the only comfortable way to run the thing is by also having central air-conditioning installed and running full-blast while you use the thing.
Semi-related, but they aren’t the status symbol they used to be. I know a guy who did quite well out of removing Agas for a few years because they are so expensive to run. Apparently up to 20x the cost of more sensible equipment. They were sold for scrap metal value because people weren’t buying them any more. He charged them to remove it and got paid scrap value.
The worst one I heard was someone who paid £10k for their top end Aga, found it was costing £700 a month to run and it was scrap in under a year.
They'd be better off installing a small data centre.
But yes - AGAs are ridiculous Veblen goods, literally coal-fired technology repurposed for modern fuels, with modern fuel costs.
They stopped making the always-on models in 2022. The UK has ludicrously high energy prices because of regulatory capture by the fossil fuel lobby. So Agas remain a status symbol for a decreasingly small segment of minor aristocrats who don't care about running costs. But the bulk of the market used to be the aspirational middle classes, and they've mostly moved on.
For smaller cooking jobs an air fryer cooks faster and better, and costs a tiny fraction to buy and run.
> The UK has ludicrously high energy prices because of regulatory capture by the fossil fuel lobby.
I can't really agree with that. It's true the UK's energy (surely "power"?)-mix is depressingly natural-gas heavy, but I don't believe that's not due to regulatory capture: it's because natural-gas plants are what get approval to be built because 15 years ago no-one in the Lib/Tory-pact wanted to sign-off on new nuclear.
You're right. Wikipedia says 425kWh per week which in the UK would cost 26 pounds for gas. That's the two oven model, maybe he had a bigger unit which let's say used double, which comes to about 200 pounds per month still far away from 70o euros, but also pretty expensive to just run your oven.
The electric ones are just regular ovens in the traditional aesthetic, not on all the time.
They can be solid fuel, possibly oil too, but in recent decades mainly gas - not sure new solid fuel ones are even made, that would just be people who already have them or buying them second hand.
Up until the late 20th century, British homes were very poorly served for heating during their long damp winters. No insulation, no central heating, etc.
Coal was the usual source of energy, and coal fires were usually continually burning, being "banked" at night. In this context, the "always on" AGA was not so unusual.
So the AGA stove served not only as a cooker, but also as a source of heat, similar to masonry heaters. Many were also connected to a hot water tank.
The sales manual above states that the cost of running an AGA stove in 1935 was £4 per year, or £247 (~US$330) per year today.
And the inventor was blind! From the same article:
Dalén lost his sight in an explosion while developing his earlier invention, a porous substrate for storing gases, Agamassan. Forced to stay at home, Dalén discovered that his wife was exhausted by cooking. Although blind, he set out to develop a new stove that was capable of a range of culinary techniques and easy to use.
I would love to know how the blind guy who invented it did his day to day work of tinkering. The Wikipedia entry just says he made it but it seems like a big deal to do that when he did.
>Go to the back door (most salesmen go to the front door, a manoeuvre always resented by maid and mistress alike).
Being seen at the front door to imply to others that they are your guest is what gives salesmen a bad name. It's like when someone tries to talk to me about what "execs" want in my org. I've had engineers talk to me about "the business," and it's difficult to hear anything after that through the cringe. Sales people presenting themselves as peers makes them seem oily.
>If you add confidentially that the transaction will show you a profit, the prospect will prefer to buy her own fuel.
"the maintainance cost isn't that high, but if you were really budgeting that much, I may be in the wrong business, and I would consider hiring a subcontractor to deliver it for you myself at that price. It's really much lower."
>Learn to recognise vegetarians on sight. It is painful indeed to gush over roasting and grilling to a drooping face which has not enjoyed the pleasures of a beefsteak for years.
Is this person involved in security? There are some people who are just going to be negative without ever being a strong or valuable ally if even you convince them.
>Try and avoid being drawn into discussing competitive makes of cooker, as it introduces a negative and defensive atmosphere.
Apple does this probably the best of anyone. They sell the experience. They didn't even acknowledge security, viruses, and malware until recently because it wasn't a part of their brand. A different product isn't even part of the discussion because it's the enabler for a different vision.
I think the best ad examples are ones where people are doing something cool and powerful and not having to think about your product at all.
>>Go to the back door (most salesmen go to the front door, a manoeuvre always resented by maid and mistress alike).
To most of us Yankees, this makes no sense. Many of not most of our single-family homes are built in areas that don't implement an alleyway, so the back door is really only for the residents to get to the back yard or carport, etc.
If a salesman knocked on the back door it's likely they'd have the police called on them / or worse.
it's a passive reference, and kind of a dog's eye view of why things happen. things have concrete causes, with people who want things for specific reasons.
in tech, if you have accepted that tech is inferior and what you have when you aren't valuable, then sure, you're a dog, but if you are engaged in delivering a product that delivers value, there is no separate "the business," just the concrete need that you are a part of, imo.
When engineers use vague terms like "execs" and "the business" it's not (necessarily) because they don't care or aren't willing to understand concrete causes and concrete needs. Sometimes it's because the organization lacks transparency, so those causes and needs have been obscured from them (intentionally or unintentionally).
To put it another way - they're being treated like a dog, so why is it surprising that they talk like one?
For those who aren't familiar with the document, it has been described as "probably the best sales manual ever written." It was one of the first things ever written by a young David Ogilvy.
It's mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but one of the best books I have ever read on advertising and marketing is Ogilvy on Advertising. If you have even a passing interest in selling anything to anyone, or just want to see how the sausage is made, I would strongly recommend it. One thin book, no fluff, with more concrete advice than ten thousand blog posts.
By marketing legend David Ogilvy, who listeners of the marketing/advertising podcast Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly will no doubt have heard tale of.
It's funny how differently AGA cookers are perceived in Britain and Sweden.
In Britain, an AGA is luxury status symbol. In Sweden, an AGA is awkward lump of scrap metal that comes in an old house.
I don’t know about status symbol. My 80 y/o mum lives in rural Scotland and it heats the house. There is no gas main in the area and using electricity to heat is expensive.
Heat pump conversion would involve ripping the house to pieces and lots of cash too.
The Aga for me is the ultimate "I am an upper class British" item.
When I was at uni I made friends with a fellow. He was into theatre, so the invited me and the rest of the gang up to his house. Dude had an empty 5 bedroom house that he used for theatre nights.
So I arrive and I see his stove is on.
"Bro you've left your stoves on?"
"Yeah it's an Aga"
"A what? I thought we were eating out?"
"Yeah we are, we just keep this thing on to heat the house. Useful for keeping food warm as well."
"Wait so you have an empty house that has an oven in it which is always on?"
"Yes, feels great when I arrive before a theatre night!"
I would say it's a rural item. Plenty of farming households across the British and Irish isles would have them. Not all farmers are not wealthy nor come from old money.
You would throw wet laundry on top of them either and overnight they would dry. They have multiple purposes but ultimately a source of heat that is effcient for long grey wet winters presented by the Atlantic temperate climate.
Yes, indeed. In my (at the time) sister-in-law's 17th c. two-up two-down stone cottage an oil-fired Aga was, in fact, the sensible choice. Not to say running it wasn't costly, but electric heat would have been far more expensive. It was also lovely to cook with. Put the drying rack in front of it, and clothes dried so thoroughly they didn't mildew after you put them away; also, you could throw your shoes into the low oven before you went out (amazing!), and again after you came in to get them dry.
My then-partner and I lived in an even older house, whose only sources of heat were a defective boiler and a coal-burning grate in the (genuinely medieval) fireplace in the living room. Our experience was, shall we say, authentic to the time-period in which it was built.
People underestimate how miserable the British climate is in winter, and how energy-intensive those old homes are to heat. An Aga wasn't invented as a status symbol, but as a practical item for a particular circumstance. Moving it outside of its original context is what changes its meaning.
> electric heat would have been far more expensive.
Surely that’s only true with a resistive heater? Heat pumps must more more efficient than burning oil.
Probably, now? This was a while ago, when heat pumps weren't widely available.
After he explains that it is used to heat the house, you then conclude that only "upper class" people need that? It's a basic need to survive winter, along with the landlord's interest in keeping pipes from freezing.
I had to go lookup what it was, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGA_cooker Apparently it’s a stove/range that is always on.
In the early 90s a friend bought a five or six chamber Aga. He had lived in a house in Europe that had had one and he loved it. It cost a fortune to acquire and to install as the house had to be structurally reinforced to accommodate the weight of the oven. I remember that it took at least a couple of days to come up to a stable temperature across the whole oven. Each of the cooking chambers had a different temperature.
I thought the whole thing was ridiculous.
It would have been more ridiculous had his wife left him for one of the burly men fitting the unit in place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aga_saga
> I remember that it took at least a couple of days to come up to a stable temperature
Funny, the doc says 2-3 hours.
That would be with coke, the modern AGAs are electric and definitely took more than a day before they were at temperature
My friend’s Aga was natural gas. I remember him saying it cost very little to run (early 1990s). I doubt that is still true today.
Still a class signifier amongst a certain type of Brit (particularly if it's been disposed of as a climate sacrifice)
> ...that is always on
with predictable results w.r.t. quality-of-living when your house already has central heating.
Agas used to be a very rural middle-class thing: it was how I imagine most countryside homes' heating and cooking worked, and it scaled from a modestly-sized cosy cottage to being in expansive stately homes. But postwar, and especially since the 1960s, Agas are just a status-symbol appliance to me.
Like, in North America, you know you've made it when you have a Wolf range and a Subzero fridge in your kitchen. In the UK, it's when you've got an Aga.
...probably because the only comfortable way to run the thing is by also having central air-conditioning installed and running full-blast while you use the thing.
Semi-related, but they aren’t the status symbol they used to be. I know a guy who did quite well out of removing Agas for a few years because they are so expensive to run. Apparently up to 20x the cost of more sensible equipment. They were sold for scrap metal value because people weren’t buying them any more. He charged them to remove it and got paid scrap value.
The worst one I heard was someone who paid £10k for their top end Aga, found it was costing £700 a month to run and it was scrap in under a year.
Dead technology.
They'd be better off installing a small data centre.
But yes - AGAs are ridiculous Veblen goods, literally coal-fired technology repurposed for modern fuels, with modern fuel costs.
They stopped making the always-on models in 2022. The UK has ludicrously high energy prices because of regulatory capture by the fossil fuel lobby. So Agas remain a status symbol for a decreasingly small segment of minor aristocrats who don't care about running costs. But the bulk of the market used to be the aspirational middle classes, and they've mostly moved on.
For smaller cooking jobs an air fryer cooks faster and better, and costs a tiny fraction to buy and run.
> The UK has ludicrously high energy prices because of regulatory capture by the fossil fuel lobby.
I can't really agree with that. It's true the UK's energy (surely "power"?)-mix is depressingly natural-gas heavy, but I don't believe that's not due to regulatory capture: it's because natural-gas plants are what get approval to be built because 15 years ago no-one in the Lib/Tory-pact wanted to sign-off on new nuclear.
*typo, should read "...but I don't believe that's due to regulatory capture".
Unfortunately I'm past the edit time window, bah.
Being less attainable makes it less of a status symbol?
£700pcm to run sounds like something's wrong anyway.
You're right. Wikipedia says 425kWh per week which in the UK would cost 26 pounds for gas. That's the two oven model, maybe he had a bigger unit which let's say used double, which comes to about 200 pounds per month still far away from 70o euros, but also pretty expensive to just run your oven.
Most country houses don’t have gas so use oil or electric ones, mostly oil I think.
The electric ones are just regular ovens in the traditional aesthetic, not on all the time.
They can be solid fuel, possibly oil too, but in recent decades mainly gas - not sure new solid fuel ones are even made, that would just be people who already have them or buying them second hand.
Up until the late 20th century, British homes were very poorly served for heating during their long damp winters. No insulation, no central heating, etc.
Coal was the usual source of energy, and coal fires were usually continually burning, being "banked" at night. In this context, the "always on" AGA was not so unusual.
So the AGA stove served not only as a cooker, but also as a source of heat, similar to masonry heaters. Many were also connected to a hot water tank.
The sales manual above states that the cost of running an AGA stove in 1935 was £4 per year, or £247 (~US$330) per year today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonry_heater
And the inventor was blind! From the same article:
Dalén lost his sight in an explosion while developing his earlier invention, a porous substrate for storing gases, Agamassan. Forced to stay at home, Dalén discovered that his wife was exhausted by cooking. Although blind, he set out to develop a new stove that was capable of a range of culinary techniques and easy to use.
I would love to know how the blind guy who invented it did his day to day work of tinkering. The Wikipedia entry just says he made it but it seems like a big deal to do that when he did.
Many of these are timeless bits of gold:
>Go to the back door (most salesmen go to the front door, a manoeuvre always resented by maid and mistress alike).
Being seen at the front door to imply to others that they are your guest is what gives salesmen a bad name. It's like when someone tries to talk to me about what "execs" want in my org. I've had engineers talk to me about "the business," and it's difficult to hear anything after that through the cringe. Sales people presenting themselves as peers makes them seem oily.
>If you add confidentially that the transaction will show you a profit, the prospect will prefer to buy her own fuel.
"the maintainance cost isn't that high, but if you were really budgeting that much, I may be in the wrong business, and I would consider hiring a subcontractor to deliver it for you myself at that price. It's really much lower."
>Learn to recognise vegetarians on sight. It is painful indeed to gush over roasting and grilling to a drooping face which has not enjoyed the pleasures of a beefsteak for years.
Is this person involved in security? There are some people who are just going to be negative without ever being a strong or valuable ally if even you convince them.
>Try and avoid being drawn into discussing competitive makes of cooker, as it introduces a negative and defensive atmosphere.
Apple does this probably the best of anyone. They sell the experience. They didn't even acknowledge security, viruses, and malware until recently because it wasn't a part of their brand. A different product isn't even part of the discussion because it's the enabler for a different vision.
I think the best ad examples are ones where people are doing something cool and powerful and not having to think about your product at all.
>>Go to the back door (most salesmen go to the front door, a manoeuvre always resented by maid and mistress alike).
To most of us Yankees, this makes no sense. Many of not most of our single-family homes are built in areas that don't implement an alleyway, so the back door is really only for the residents to get to the back yard or carport, etc.
If a salesman knocked on the back door it's likely they'd have the police called on them / or worse.
Out of curiosity what’s wrong with talking about “the business”? I hear it plenty but I have totally neutral feelings about it.
it's a passive reference, and kind of a dog's eye view of why things happen. things have concrete causes, with people who want things for specific reasons.
in tech, if you have accepted that tech is inferior and what you have when you aren't valuable, then sure, you're a dog, but if you are engaged in delivering a product that delivers value, there is no separate "the business," just the concrete need that you are a part of, imo.
When engineers use vague terms like "execs" and "the business" it's not (necessarily) because they don't care or aren't willing to understand concrete causes and concrete needs. Sometimes it's because the organization lacks transparency, so those causes and needs have been obscured from them (intentionally or unintentionally).
To put it another way - they're being treated like a dog, so why is it surprising that they talk like one?
For those who aren't familiar with the document, it has been described as "probably the best sales manual ever written." It was one of the first things ever written by a young David Ogilvy.
It's mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but one of the best books I have ever read on advertising and marketing is Ogilvy on Advertising. If you have even a passing interest in selling anything to anyone, or just want to see how the sausage is made, I would strongly recommend it. One thin book, no fluff, with more concrete advice than ten thousand blog posts.
By marketing legend David Ogilvy, who listeners of the marketing/advertising podcast Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly will no doubt have heard tale of.
Also the author of a well known book, “Confessions of An Advertising Man”.
And 'Ogilvy on Advertising'. Both are brilliant and should be required reading, especially for those interested in business or practical psychology.
written by David Ogilvy ( GOAT of Advertising) this gave me enough reason to read this.
It's funny how differently AGA cookers are perceived in Britain and Sweden. In Britain, an AGA is luxury status symbol. In Sweden, an AGA is awkward lump of scrap metal that comes in an old house.
I don’t know about status symbol. My 80 y/o mum lives in rural Scotland and it heats the house. There is no gas main in the area and using electricity to heat is expensive.
Heat pump conversion would involve ripping the house to pieces and lots of cash too.
I would feed this as a prompt into an LLM agent and see if it could sell an AGA to me.
I'm really fascinated by this use of the apostrophe, where it seems to function similar to a colon or emdash:
> Find out all you can about your prospects before you call on them' their general living conditions, wealth, profession, hobbies, friends and so on
(another example)
>Tell the person who opens the door frankly and briefly what you have come for' it will get her on your side
Edit: also find this spelling of Nobel prize interesting:
> he has actually won the Nobel Prices
OCR errors?
Ah, that's probably it.
Looks like a semi-colon gone awry.