In the dark, chilly winter months, it's not unusual to walk down one of London's more affluent residential streets and notice the smell of wood smoke. Bittersweet and pungent, the odor typically comes from an appliance that has become the epitome of British middle-class aspiration: the wood-burning stove.
These squat metal burn boxes have become a must-have for the city's affluent homeowners. Between 2009 and 2024, the number of stoves in single-family homes, typically occupied by wealthier people in the UK, rose by more than 25%. Their appeal is easy to understand. They slot into the old fireplaces ubiquitous in houses built before World War II, but heat more cleanly and efficiently than open hearths. The sight of flames flickering behind glass front panels makes a room effortlessly cozy. For those who prefer their pleasures seasoned with virtue, they can be carbon neutral if fueled with sustainably sourced wood.
This year, however, the conversation around wood burners has darkened -- particularly in London. The government is considering tightening standards on new stoves in order to meet pollution targets. And activists' placards have begun appearing on fences and lampposts, highlighting that wood burners release potentially carcinogenic particulates into London's already polluted winter air.
Meanwhile, stove owners are complaining that what they see as a harmless, traditional way to brighten the long winter months is being discussed as a pollutant alongside private jets or coal-fired power plants. Appliances once seen as a double-win -- making your neighbors jealous and reducing your carbon footprint -- are now dividing people.
A New Tradition
Stoves have become popular partly because they meet a very contemporary hunger for cozy domesticity during troubled times. "Wood burners are just one of those aspirational middle-class things nowadays," says Tabitha Tew of north London fireplace and stove merchants Amazing Grates. "It's like only eating red meat once a week, and having a crossbreed dog that doesn't molt, " she says.
Tew first noticed the boom around 17 years ago when customers of Amazing Grates, founded by her parents, became drawn to the appeal of cleaner and safer stoves. "Unlike a fireplace, you can wander off and have a nap and it will be totally fine," she says. "The newest models are so good at reducing fumes that you'd put yourself in more danger frying bacon."
What really motivates people, Tew says, is how good wood burners make them feel. "Men typically don't make interior design choices in many families, but stoves have changed that," she adds. "I have never seen men happier than those who come back to buy wood after having their stove installed."
British homes were primarily heated by coal burned in open fireplaces until after World War II, leaving more efficient, enclosed stoves to the Germans, Dutch and Scandinavians. But Britain -- and London in particular -- weaned itself off open fires for a pretty stark reason: They were lethal. In 1952, a four-day December smog caused by temperature inversions (when warm air in the atmosphere traps colder air close to the ground) is estimated to have killed as many as 12,000 people across London.
The shock led to the Clean Air Act of 1956, which effectively banned open hearths in Britain's cities and replaced them with central heating or, for poorer people, gas and electric stoves. Inner London became a "smoke control zone," where only fuels designated "smokeless" such as anthracite were allowed to be burned. When wood burners came into vogue after the millennium, their appeal lay partly in novelty and in the idea that they could be carbon neutral if wood used for fuel was replaced by new growth. Their efficiency also kept emissions low enough to comply with London's smoke restrictions, still in force decades after the coal-burning ban.
Luxury Pollution
In a sign of early enthusiasm, environmentalist George Monbiot installed three wood-burning stoves in his home in 2008. But what some early adopters failed to account for was that wood burners still release fine particles, such as PM2.5, that can exacerbate asthmas and other respiratory diseases, and in some cases, may even contribute to cancer. Indeed, Monbiot would go on to regret his decision for precisely these reasons.
The fact that stove emissions are lower than from open hearths does not mean that these emissions aren't significant, says Jemima Hartshorn, founder of clean air campaign group Mums for Lungs, which designed the anti-wood burning placards now appearing around London, distributing them to activists who then put them up independently. "People say to me 'Calm down Jemima, love, man has always sat next to a fire.' Well, man used to die at 35, didn't he?" she says.
Hartshorn also finds it jarring that many households that burn wood also have central heating and don't rely on stoves for warmth. She says that Mums for Lungs is simply trying to highlight a health risk that stove users themselves are probably the most vulnerable to. "You can't even see particles of PM2.5, but our lungs are not a fine enough filter to exclude them, and so it goes into our bloodstreams," she says. "People simply aren't aware of what they are exposing themselves to."
Bad -- But How Bad?
At the heart of these tensions is the fact that definitive research linking wood burners directly to health impacts remains limited, partly due to the relative affluence of stove owners (while buying and installing a stove can cost as little as £1,500, users will still need to own their own home, have a working chimney typical of more expensive period properties and be able to afford to buy non-essential fuel.) This makes it tricky for epidemiologists studying the issue, explains Dr. Laura Horsfall, a principal research fellow at University College London's Institute of Health Informatics. "In the UK, people who tend to burn wood are often wealthier and therefore healthier, which makes showing the impact of wood burning challenging," she says.
Research conducted by Horsfall and her colleagues has still highlighted some concerns, however. Findings from an unpublished study monitoring stove users over eight years showed that lung function declined faster among people who reported using solid fuel at home -- predominantly wood -- than among those who didn't. "It's not the speed of decline you might see with smoking, but is substantial enough that following that trajectory, we could eventually see higher rates of adult-onset asthma, COPD, and so on," Horsfall says.
Some stove owners complain that focusing narrowly on the pollution created by people burning wood at home overstates the role they play compared to other sources of pollution. Again, evidence on this points in different directions. A 2023 report commissioned by the London boroughs of Camden and Islington found that wood burning was responsible for over 16% of London's PM2.5. However, only an estimated 4.3% of this percentage actually came from wood burned within London itself, with the rest actually blown in. Many of these blown-in particulates were not even created in the UK. Overall, 28% of London's PM2.5 -- from all sources, not just wood burning -- is blown across the Channel from continental Europe, according to a separate study from University College London.
A recent report by sustainability group Global Action Plan estimates that banning non-essential wood burning could provide £54 million in healthcare savings to Britain's National Health Service. By comparison, the Royal College of Physicians estimated in 2025 that the health effects of air pollution from all sources cost the UK over £27 billion annually (and possibly as much as £50 billion indirectly). While the latter figure covers more than the NHS bill, banning wood burners would only reduce air pollution's overall health costs by around 0.2%. These figures don't give London's wood burners a free pass, but they do complicate the idea that banning stoves would do a huge amount to transform the city's air.
While wood burners' overall contribution to pollution remains open to debate, the point still stands that few users -- and possibly none in London -- actually need them to keep warm. "According to the maps we developed, it is really the affluent areas that are generating, or have the capacity to generate, wood smoke pollution," Dr. Horsfall says. "Surveys have shown that wood burning at home is generally for aesthetic reasons, not because they are essential heat sources."
The real discomfort may not come from the smoke drifting across London's streets, but from the realization that pleasures people once framed as responsible were never quite as clean as they hoped. In the age of climate anxiety, even coziness has a cost.