The right garden, planted with hemlock, foxgloves, nightshade or even tulips, can kill a human in half a dozen different ways – and that’s without even touching on the various different fungi whose consumption can usher in an agonising end. But what about the right house? Historically, our homes have been places of safety and refuge from the vagaries of the outside world; peaceful spaces we consider utterly unthreatening. But an Englishman’s home can also be his coffin. From toxic wallpaper to slow-decaying chemical compounds in your timber glue, we have some bad news: your house is out to get you.
There are a number of building materials that have since been banned in the UK due to the danger they pose. Asbestos, for example, was used throughout the 20th century up to as late as the 1990s to insulate homes, until it was proven to cause lung cancer. Now illegal, it can still be found in buildings constructed before the turn of the millennium (in other words, most of the UK’s housing stock), and in dozens of countries with less stringent building codes than ours. Even now, the UK Government’s Health and Safety Executive estimates that 5,000 people die each year from asbestos-related cancers, which can develop years after exposure.
But what about purely aesthetic features? Don’t let anyone tell you that wallpaper choices aren’t potentially history-altering – interior design trends may well have claimed the lives of several high-profile figures over the centuries. Most notably, Napoleon Bonaparte’s death in exile on the remote island of St Helena in 1821 has long been suspected of being caused by copper arsenite – an arsenic-derived pigment used to make yellow-green wallpaper, among other things. In 1961, three doctors first pointed out in a paper published in Nature that Napoleon was taken seriously ill after moving into Longwood, the house in which he eventually died. After obtaining a sample of the emperor’s hair, they tested it and found it contained arsenic content ranging from 10-38 parts per million, vastly higher than the average of 0.8 ppm found in normal human hair. The study, however, is inconclusive – arsenic was at the time also used in medicine, pesticides and rodenticides, clothing dyes and the face and hair powder that high-society French figures like Napoleon applied to themselves. His killer could have been hiding somewhere other than in Longwood’s charming chartreuse walls.
Napoleon is far from the only victim of copper arsenite. More recently, the American ambassador to Italy from 1953-56, Clare Boothe Luce, was forced to step down from her role after suffering serious psychological and physical poisoning symptoms. It being the 1950s, foul play by the Soviets was initially suspected, until the true cause was discovered: flakes of arsenic Luce had ingested after they fell from the painted stucco roses above her bed in the ambassador’s residence, the Villa Taverna. “The villa’s service quarters are immediately above the bedroom,” reported Time magazine in July 1956, “and the ambassador had noticed heavy footfalls shaking the beams as the servants went about their chores. Another random point: her breakfast coffee had always tasted bitter and metallic—so much so that she decided privately that no Italian could make American coffee, and installed her own coffeemaker.” Of course, the servants weren’t to blame. For twenty months, Ambassador Luce had been starting her morning by drinking coffee laced with arsenic.
In fact, arsenic had been widely used in manufacturing green Regency and Victorian wallpaper for decades, with specific shades of the colour such as Paris Green and Scheele’s Green – created in the 1770s by Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele – proving highly toxic. The Victorian era saw a huge boom in wallpaper production; in her book Bitten By Witch Fever: Wallpaper and Arsenic in the Nineteenth-Century Home, Lucinda Hawksley notes that there was a 2,615 per cent increase in the production of wallpaper rolls between 1834 to 1874. Green was one of the most in-demand colours, and while Sweden and Bavaria banned arsenic-based green wallpapers, Great Britain did not. What’s more, Scheele’s Green was used in paints, waxes and dyes as much as it was in wallpaper, offering a sort of double jeopardy, as not only would your walls kill you; your art, textiles and candles would, too.
By the 1860s, the chemical’s danger was widely known and, coupled with the overly reactive nature of the colour compounds, which led them to change colour and stain too easily, poisonous greens fell out of fashion. By 1892, the reputation of yellow-green wallpaper was widespread enough that American writer Charlotte Perkins Stetson could use its debilitating effect as a plot device in her short story The Yellow Wallpaper.
Second only to arsenic – and indeed related to it chemically, as a toxic heavy metal – is lead. The Romans used lead pipes to carry their water for more than 800 years, and Roman elites often ate and drank from lead vessels, to the extent that lead poisoning has historically, though contentiously, been posited by some as one of the causes of the empire’s eventual downfall. A 2014 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of America concluded that Roman tap water may have had a lead concentration more than a hundred times that of natural spring water.
These days, you’re unlikely to be poisoned by an aqueduct or an amphora, but lead paint is an altogether more recent threat. Only banned in the UK in 1992, lead in paint can lead to high blood pressure, headaches, dizziness, diminished motor skills, fatigue and memory loss, and is particularly dangerous when degrading (if, for example, flakes of it are falling into your morning coffee). Lead poisoning may have led to the deaths of Beethoven, whose hair was posthumously found to have higher lead concentration than average, and of Caravaggio, who displayed violently unpredictable behaviour throughout his life and who, famously, spent rather a lot of time messing around with paint.
And finally, in case paint, wallpaper and insulation didn’t pose enough of a threat, for those with serious allergies, the spectrum of dangerous substances used in interior design widens drastically. In a 2018 episode of Grand Designs, Kevin McCloud presented a segment on substances that produce “volatile organic compounds”, or VOCs. Without delving too deeply into the chemistry behind them, these are materials that produce vaporous gases at low pressures and temperatures, many of which have only negligible effects on most people but are much more damaging to those with allergies. According to McCloud, household building products that can produce VOCs include “glues, varnishes, sticky tapes, sprays, foam and paint,” as well as carpet glue and timber products held together with formaldehyde (yep – the Victorians’ favourite pickling ingredient).
Naturally, all of this gives the idea of an absolutely killer design scheme a whole new meaning. Next time you’re sitting in your friend’s Victorian parlour, and you notice it has beautiful emerald-green wallpaper, you might do well to choose the seat furthest from the walls.
