URBAN GREENS
Nottingham ecohome and urban permaculture garden
I live with my family in West Bridgford Nottingham. We live in a Victorian semi outwardly typical of millions in the UK but that is where the similarity ends...
Our house has made a little stamp on history because it was the first Victorian house in the UK to undergo a complete radical ecological retrofit. We began our retrofit journey 15 years ago when we purchased a tumble down large Victorian villa in West Bridgford, just over the river from the City of Nottingham.
Before I can go forward with an explanation of what we did, I need to explain why we did it.
Gil and I met at the Hockerton Housing Project, near Southwell. This was when the project was in the very early stages of what was to become the UK's first development of earth sheltered houses autonomous in energy and water and high levels of food production. The time came for us to leave the development and to set up in our own home in Burton Joyce where we lived in a little 18th century cottage in Burton Joyce.
We outgrew the cottage and fell out of love with the commute into the city centre to our work, so we decided on a whim to look at properties in West Bridgford. This area is stuffed with Victorian houses. We both loved period homes for their lofty ceilings and generous room sizes.
In 1998 we bought our first home together. A 3 storey, Victorian semi with huge cellars and a dated, mouldy interior to slash your wrists by. It was perfect for our purpose. We had decided that we wanted to see if we could take this crumbling former student house and transform it into an eco home. The obvious route was to look on the internet. That is where we hit the buffers, there wasn't any information. That was our eco lightbulb moment - a dim little light, more a glimmer of an idea that we could do something together that was mad and marvellous and that might make a difference.
We decided to undertake a huge experiment to see how far the two of us could take an existing building in an urban setting, with a tiny plot, along the principles of autonomy in energy, water and food. These principles were pioneered in a rural, new build development with 25 acres of land and 5 households to take it forward. It was a gamble to say the least. Our families and friends thought we were utterly nuts. We were naive, in love and full of high ideals. Deaf to the voices of reason we embarked on the biggest upcycling project of our lives.
Over 6 months, we developed a number of strategies to tackle our energy, water and food needs - our life support systems. We decided to undertake a radical ecological retrofit of the whole building and later the whole plot to make our use of natural resources as efficient as possible and to integrate our systems to maximise those efficiencies.
Some readers might wonder what a radical eco retrofit, it is taking a resource hungry building and applying new measures to the old fabric to enable the inhabitants to:
Efficiently use energy, water, and other resources
Benefit from a healthy home minimising the use of harmful man made materials
Reduce waste, pollution and other impacts on the environment
Aside from all that groovy altrustic stuff, we needed to make serious savings on household bills. Direct electric heating, an immersion tank naked of insulation and the wind whistling through gaps in the fabric of the building made ours a very badly behaved home with expensive habits.
We developed a number of strategies;
Thermal - to include high levels of insulation and
renewables
Water - to radically reduce our use of potable water and manage rainfall
Food - to grow as much food as possible on a small site using permaculture principles and new technologies.
Interior design - to use natural, breathable materials to create a healthy environment
Key
to our ambition was to demonstrate that behaviour change could also be a
valuable tool in achieving significant reductions in our use of resources.
We
decided to use the house as a laboratory to test new ideas, new products and
construction techniques and to share what we learnt with as wide an audience as
possible. The
greatest challenge that we faced back in 1998 was that there was no information
available on eco retrofit. Therefore there were no products or techniques
specifically designed for our needs so it meant we needed to employ a
completely new philosophy and approach to the treatment of older houses. We had
to train builders, explore new products and often to rely on our instincts and
calculations that what we were doing would work.
At this time, Gil was not yet a fully qualified architect so he was cutting his teeth as a designer on a real project at a very early stage. I was moving into full time work on environmental projects and continuing to write on green subjects for a variety of publications.
Our efforts gained national attention, we were seen as loony greens. Our first news clipping was in the Financial Times and featured a cartoon of us gazing up at a ceiling light dangling out of a hole surrounded by insulation! But that first feature was followed by a flurry of interest and our mission to get eco retrofit on the national agenda ramped up.
As time went on, we realised that to retrofit the house was not enough, we needed to complete the eco retrofit of the entire plot in order to maximise resource efficiency. We call this a Whole Plot Approach to Retrofit. We have immersed our building in an edible urban landscape which manages all rainfall on site and supports biodiversity. We are of course a Bee Friendly garden.
So 15 years on and we are recognised as retrofit pioneers, we even got an award to say so!
