The 1970s collection

Home ownership down and renting up for the first time in a century
Office for National Statistics, 2015 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Curator note: From ONS analysis of Census of England and Wales tenure. 1971: owner-occupation had reached half of households (51%), up from 43% in 1961; the social-rented sector (largely council housing) stood at 29% and would hold near that level through the decade. Private renting continued its long decline (76% in 1918 → 20% in 1971). Households, not families.
Source note: ONS analysis of tenure 1918–2011 from the Census of England and Wales, interpolated between census years. Reported as % of households: owned (owner-occupied), private rented, socially rented. Data CSV at https://static.ons.gov.uk/visual/2015/06/data.csv (HTTP 200 verified and byte-identical to the local copy). Figures are for households, not families — single-person and low-income households pull the tenure mix differently than a median four-person family would.
Assumption: The composite family

Earnings time series of mean gross weekly earnings from 1938 to 2025
Office for National Statistics, 2025 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Basis: Weekly figure
Curator note: From the ONS long-run earnings series. 1970 (April sample, NES methodology): adult male full-time employees £30.00/week. Occupational spread in the source: manual £26.80, non-manual £35.80. Adult female full-time: £16.30/week (manual £13.40, non-manual £17.80). Great Britain. This is individual earnings, not family income — a two-earner family earned more, a single-earner family less.
Source note: Long-run weekly earnings series. 1938–1968 from Annual Abstract of Statistics (adult manual workers); 1968–2003 New Earnings Survey (NES); 2004+ Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), weighted to LFS population totals. Male/female reported separately for 1938–1969; a combined all-employee series is available from 1970. Discontinuities at each methodology change are documented in the file. Data file resolves at /file?uri=.../current/19382025.xlsx (HTTP 200 verified).
Assumption: The composite family
Assumption: Values are shown in period money

The effects of taxes and benefits on household income: historical datasets — income, tax and benefit data by household type
Office for National Statistics, 2019 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Basis: Annual figure
Curator note: From the ONS effects-of-taxes-and-benefits historical dataset, 1977 — the first year of the series, and the earliest UK household-income figure in the archive. Non-retired households of two adults with two children: original income £5,073; plus £257 of cash benefits, gross income £5,330; less £1,214 of direct tax and employees' National Insurance, disposable income £4,116. A mean across such households, not a median. It is the income anchor for this room; nothing is yet priced against it, because no official UK house-price series in the archive reaches back before 1986.
Source note: One worksheet per financial year, 1977 to FYE 2017/18, from the Living Costs and Food Survey and its predecessors (Family Expenditure Survey). The cited row is 'Disposable income' — original income plus cash benefits, less direct taxes and employees' National Insurance — for the non-retired 'two adults with two children' household type, the closest published UK counterpart to the museum's four-person composite. It is a mean, not a median, and the two adults are not necessarily the children's parents; see the uk-household-not-family assumption. Values are transcribed by scripts/uk_etb_extract.py, which locates the column by its composed header because the header block shifts between the 1980s and 1990s sheets.
Assumption: The composite family
Assumption: Getting to a family of four
Assumption: Values are shown in period money
Assumption: UK income statistics measure households by type, not a four-person family

British Labour Statistics: Year Book 1976
Department of Employment (HMSO), 1976 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Curator note: From the New Earnings Survey results republished in the Year Book, all industries, April 1976. Manual men worked 45.3 hours and non-manual men 39.1 — the same manual basis the 1960s room reports, so the two decades can be read against each other without splicing populations. Full-time women averaged 37.3 hours. The Bank of England's independent compilation gives 41.1 hours for full-time adults of both sexes in 1976, which is what these men's and women's figures weight to.
Source note: The annual compendium republishing New Earnings Survey results. The cited table (page 58 of the scan, 'Average weekly earnings, hours, and hourly earnings of employees in manufacturing and all industries in April, 1972-1976') is the only source in the archive giving UK average hours and hourly earnings for the 1970s; hourly earnings are printed in pence. Read from a scanned volume: the transcription was checked against the rendered page and against the independent ONS long-run weekly-earnings series, which reproduces its 1976 weekly figures exactly (see docs/verification-log.md).
Assumption: The composite family

British Labour Statistics: Year Book 1976
Department of Employment (HMSO), 1976 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Curator note: From the same Year Book table, all industries, April 1976: 166.6p an hour excluding overtime pay and hours, 166.8p including them. Manual men earned 141.0p and 143.7p on the same two bases — the gap between them is the overtime premium, which non-manual men barely drew. This is not set as the room's wage anchor: a tenth of a penny cannot be held in whole pence, and rounding it to £1.67 would put a number on the page that no source printed.
Source note: The annual compendium republishing New Earnings Survey results. The cited table (page 58 of the scan, 'Average weekly earnings, hours, and hourly earnings of employees in manufacturing and all industries in April, 1972-1976') is the only source in the archive giving UK average hours and hourly earnings for the 1970s; hourly earnings are printed in pence. Read from a scanned volume: the transcription was checked against the rendered page and against the independent ONS long-run weekly-earnings series, which reproduces its 1976 weekly figures exactly (see docs/verification-log.md).
Assumption: Values are shown in period money

General Lifestyle Survey: 40 years of data collection (Figure 40.2 — consumer durables and cars)
Office for National Statistics, 2013 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Curator note: From GHS 40-year overview, Figure 40.2 (unweighted). The telephone was still a minority good in 1972 (42%), under the nationalised Post Office monopoly; new-line waiting lists ran years. Rose to 54% by 1975.
Source note: Figure 40.2: percentage of households with consumer durables and cars, 1972–2011. Reports colour television, home computer, telephone, and car or van (the fuller durable basket — central heating, refrigerator, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, dishwasher — is in a separate table not included in this overview). Unweighted data. The GHS covered Great Britain (England, Wales, Scotland); the survey was discontinued after 2012. Values transcribed from the figure's underlying data CSV (ghs-data-chart3.csv); an OCR pass of the figure misread two cells (telephone 42→43, colour TV 61→60), confirming the CSV, not the OCR, is authoritative.
Assumption: The composite family

General Lifestyle Survey: 40 years of data collection (Figure 40.2 — consumer durables and cars)
Office for National Statistics, 2013 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Curator note: From GHS 40-year overview, Figure 40.2 (unweighted). Car ownership crossed half of households around 1970 — far behind the US (which passed 60% of families by 1929) but rising fast (56% by 1978). UK ownership was held back until the 1970s by lower incomes and denser cities; the majority of car-owning households had one car.
Source note: Figure 40.2: percentage of households with consumer durables and cars, 1972–2011. Reports colour television, home computer, telephone, and car or van (the fuller durable basket — central heating, refrigerator, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, dishwasher — is in a separate table not included in this overview). Unweighted data. The GHS covered Great Britain (England, Wales, Scotland); the survey was discontinued after 2012. Values transcribed from the figure's underlying data CSV (ghs-data-chart3.csv); an OCR pass of the figure misread two cells (telephone 42→43, colour TV 61→60), confirming the CSV, not the OCR, is authoritative.
Assumption: The composite family

General Lifestyle Survey: 40 years of data collection (Figure 40.2 — consumer durables and cars)
Office for National Statistics, 2013 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Curator note: From GHS 40-year overview, Figure 40.2 (unweighted). Colour television began in 1968 (BBC2); by 1978, 61% of households had a colour set. Total TV ownership (black-and-white plus colour) was near-universal by the late 1960s, so this colour figure understates TV access. The GHS did not record colour TV before 1978.
Source note: Figure 40.2: percentage of households with consumer durables and cars, 1972–2011. Reports colour television, home computer, telephone, and car or van (the fuller durable basket — central heating, refrigerator, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, dishwasher — is in a separate table not included in this overview). Unweighted data. The GHS covered Great Britain (England, Wales, Scotland); the survey was discontinued after 2012. Values transcribed from the figure's underlying data CSV (ghs-data-chart3.csv); an OCR pass of the figure misread two cells (telephone 42→43, colour TV 61→60), confirming the CSV, not the OCR, is authoritative.
Assumption: The composite family