Editors' blog
Hannah Bullock, 5 Nov 2008
The low winter sun that blinded me from behind the City buildings did look s...
Exchange of Fire: bring on the bulldozer?
Can’t stop our ageing homes from wasting heat? Then replace them as fast as possible, and move Britain on to a lower carbon path.
In a nutshell, that’s the case for demolition. But it smacks of barbarism to the conservationists, who are even loath to let a major energy makeover spoil our housing heritage. We ask rival protagonists to set out their stalls - and look for common ground.| YES: Brenda Boardman Environmental Change Institute | NO: David Drewe English Heritage |
Brenda Boardman: We seem to do more in this country to protect ‘heritage’ than to look after the environment. The grant system is really set on ‘fossilising’ our housing stock, rather than encouraging new innovation or construction. It gives a bit of money for loft insulation here, a bit of draught-proofing there, for Victorian homes that are pretty close to unfit to live in, and are so energy-inefficient that they’re unsustainable.
David Drewe: But I see older buildings as part and parcel of a sustainable society - you can’t just narrow it down to ‘energy efficiency’. The link to the past is sometimes what keeps people going.
Green Futures: Can you balance these conflicting priorities?
BB: We’re meant to reduce the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions by 60% by 2050. Renewable technology and lower-energy appliances can only do so much. The 40% House report presents our scenario of a housing stock that emits only 40% of the carbon it does today. To achieve this, we need to demolish many, many more old buildings - to quadruple the annual demolition rate to at least 80,000 - and start replacing them with new, energy-efficient homes.
DD: But does everyone want to live in a modern environment?
BB: Knocking down 80,000 a year would still leave 87% of homes standing by 2050. And I’m not talking about knocking down Bath terraces! We’ve excluded the 1.2 million properties that are listed or in conservation areas. What I’m talking about is today’s pre-1919 slums. If society hasn’t deemed them important enough to be earmarked as special, why is English Heritage worried about them?
| Adam Wilkinson, SAVE Britain’s Heritage It makes more sense to retrofit old buildings than knock them down. They’re listed for their historic and architectural interest, because they have a story to tell, and because of their ‘civilising’ influence. |
DD: Because heritage is wider than that. ‘Historic stock’ isn’t just about listed buildings or ancient monuments, but your ‘traditional’ buildings, your Victorian terraces. It could even be where you went to school. The fact that these older buildings have been around a long time shows that they’ve got longevity built into them, and that they can be adapted to modern-day living.
BB: We recognise that there is an issue of losing the embodied energy and carbon in these structures when they’re demolished. But we’ve calculated that if you put up really energy-efficient replacements, you still make an overall energy saving after about 10 or 12 years. DD: Even so, the charge that buildings aren’t energy-efficient can be made against newer buildings too. I mean, couldn’t we do with looking at poorly built tower blocks from the 70s?
| Kate Gordon, Campaign to Protect Rural England Often, just the gems in the landscape get preserved and the rest gets destroyed. But we need to pay more attention to the details of local historical significance. They can be just as important as the castle at the top of the hill. |
BB: Yes, but there are a lot of things that make it particularly difficult to get old houses energy-efficient. It’s just about impossible to lay insulation under the floor; you’ve got a solid wall, so you can’t put in cavity insulation; and it’s expensive and impractical to double-glaze sash windows.
DD: These buildings are different, and you’d probably cause yourself all sorts of problems in the long term - not least for the occupants’ health - if you used modern insulation techniques on houses that were designed to be breathable. But that’s not to say that they can’t be improved...
BB: So do you have a target in mind for a minimum efficiency standard? Where exactly on the scale of sustainability do you hope to bring these houses?
| Rob Webb of low-carbon engineering company XCO2 People need to think about what they’re trying to conserve and for whom. Climate change means we’re facing the end of life as we know it; losing a few buildings of historic character is a price we have to pay. What’s important is if streets work for people or not. South London is dominated by old two-storey terraced houses with no room for parking or dedicated cycle and bus routes. Demolition and reconstruction would let us create a place that’s appropriate for 21st century living. |
DD: English Heritage is looking at how close we could get them to the 9,000kWh heating demand you mention in the report. We’re starting with passive, low-impact stuff like glazing or internal insulation. And we are already in discussions on getting buildings actually generating their own power, like putting ground-source heat pumps in churches - which are listed buildings.
BB: Yes, but it’s hard to see how anyone could object to these practically invisible technologies anyway. What I want to know is if you’ve made any progress in accepting the kind of improvements that are going to be visible.
DD: It’s going to be very difficult to persuade anyone to put more ‘intrusive’ technology on a Grade I listed building. Heat pumps, fuel cells - not a problem. The only thing that’s going to be an issue is anything you want to put on the outside of a building. Although there could possibly be potential for solar cells in the hidden valley of a roof.
| Jeremy Leggett, solarcentury Are solar panels really worse than satellite dishes? You can save the world with them, rather than subside into a vegetative state watching reality TV while the world goes to hell around you. |
BB: That’s the kind of ruling that creates the frustrating situation we’re in in Oxford. The Environmental Change Institute is in a conservation area, and you’re not allowed to put solar panels on roofs that are visible from the road. It’s alright for us, as our south facing roof is on the garden side, but people on the other side of the road have theirs overlooking the street, and they run into a lot of opposition. The silly thing is, you can get photovoltaic tiles which are almost any colour - and they’re very attractive. Is having these on a roof really altering it more than putting up aerials or gutters?
DD: I agree, the new slim-line PV tiles are quite neat. But from a conservation point of view, the aesthetics of a shiny tile might not be acceptable on all buildings.
BB: We all know heritage is a lot more than the visible surface! Isn’t it a complete cop out to leave the façade because it looks good, while behind the scenes people are totally gutting the bathroom and putting on an extension to make it liveable?
| Richard Silson, the Planning Cooperative It’s not enough to rigidly conserve features of a building just because a conservation officer gets a buzz out of it. The planning system values what happens to be there already, and resists change for change’s sake. Because it doesn’t differentiate between good and bad change, there are no incentives to stimulate good design. |
DD: But if you were to completely renovate an older building and took away its character, would people still be interested in it? It’s as bad as putting up one of those mock Tudor houses people used to go in for.
BB: I agree, we don’t want mock anything. What it really boils down to, David, is if you start saying that it’s impossible to make these older houses this efficient and you don’t want to them demolished, then you have made the burden of reducing carbon dioxide emissions much tougher on everybody else.
DD: So if I were to come back to you in six months’ time and say ‘We’ve found a wonderful way to get these old terraced houses down to below 9,000kWh a year’, you’d say ‘Great, we’ll leave them there’?
BB: Yes, probably. As long as you can bring non-heritage houses up to a much higher standard too.
DD: That’s my target then.
Maev Kennedy,The Guardian’s arts and heritage correspondent
You do need to respect the character of a building. The whole value of a Georgian terrace could be lost because the lines of the doors or windows are dramatically changed. These aren’t listed buildings, but there’s a lot of local history locked up in them.
You can get refurbishment right. The Great Court in the British Museum [see below] is an example of a striking contrast between old and new. Or there’s the visitor centre at Whitby Abbey. They literally dropped a modern glass box into the shell of the burnt out ruins of the Banqueting House. It’s unashamedly modern, but they’ve kept the glamour and excitement of the place.
Richard Rogers, architect and urbanist
Heritage and sustainability aren’t mutually exclusive. Indeed the reverse is true. The imaginative conversion of a historic building can give it a completely new life - a new agenda. We transformed the old Billingsgate fish market from a derelict site into something that is revived, dynamic, challenging. That’s what good design is all about: adapting to changing needs. If you can add into the equation a system that is energy-efficient, so much the better.
Our architectural heritage is, essentially, the story of our culture. Of course it should be preserved. But that doesn’t mean banning all intervention, because that story continues - society and its requirements are constantly changing. The current challenge is to forge an environmentally responsible architecture, and it’s vital that planning laws don’t exert a stranglehold on new creativity and groundbreaking design. Today’s buildings can have electronic ‘nervous systems’, controlling lighting, tailoring heat and ventilation - all feeding off solar and wind power.
We’ve shown in the new National Assembly for Wales that sustainability can be aesthetically pleasing. There, durable materials such as slate, stone and timber were chosen to create a dramatic, natural beauty. We’ve maximised natural daylight and ventilation to reduce energy usage and create a unique relationship between the outside and the inside.
The worst possible solution is to dabble in pastiche as a way of pandering to earlier styles. Cityscapes have evolved naturally over the centuries, and we cherish their vitality and variety of architectural ideas. We have to celebrate that process of change, rather than preserve the past in aspic. That’s a kind of death. Ideas are fluid and architecture is part of that process.
Dale Vince, Ecotricity
We’ve coined the phrase ‘Future Heritage’ to describe today’s wind turbines. If you think about it, somebody once had the idea to put up the structure or shape the view that people want to protect today. So what people are really treasuring is innovation. Traditional windmills are seen as picturesque today, but they were innovative and risqué several hundred years ago. The Dutch Masters ‘airbrushed’ them out of their landscape paintings.
You do need to respect the character of a building. The whole value of a Georgian terrace could be lost because the lines of the doors or windows are dramatically changed. These aren’t listed buildings, but there’s a lot of local history locked up in them.
You can get refurbishment right. The Great Court in the British Museum [see below] is an example of a striking contrast between old and new. Or there’s the visitor centre at Whitby Abbey. They literally dropped a modern glass box into the shell of the burnt out ruins of the Banqueting House. It’s unashamedly modern, but they’ve kept the glamour and excitement of the place.
Richard Rogers, architect and urbanist
Heritage and sustainability aren’t mutually exclusive. Indeed the reverse is true. The imaginative conversion of a historic building can give it a completely new life - a new agenda. We transformed the old Billingsgate fish market from a derelict site into something that is revived, dynamic, challenging. That’s what good design is all about: adapting to changing needs. If you can add into the equation a system that is energy-efficient, so much the better.
Our architectural heritage is, essentially, the story of our culture. Of course it should be preserved. But that doesn’t mean banning all intervention, because that story continues - society and its requirements are constantly changing. The current challenge is to forge an environmentally responsible architecture, and it’s vital that planning laws don’t exert a stranglehold on new creativity and groundbreaking design. Today’s buildings can have electronic ‘nervous systems’, controlling lighting, tailoring heat and ventilation - all feeding off solar and wind power.
We’ve shown in the new National Assembly for Wales that sustainability can be aesthetically pleasing. There, durable materials such as slate, stone and timber were chosen to create a dramatic, natural beauty. We’ve maximised natural daylight and ventilation to reduce energy usage and create a unique relationship between the outside and the inside.
The worst possible solution is to dabble in pastiche as a way of pandering to earlier styles. Cityscapes have evolved naturally over the centuries, and we cherish their vitality and variety of architectural ideas. We have to celebrate that process of change, rather than preserve the past in aspic. That’s a kind of death. Ideas are fluid and architecture is part of that process.
Dale Vince, Ecotricity
We’ve coined the phrase ‘Future Heritage’ to describe today’s wind turbines. If you think about it, somebody once had the idea to put up the structure or shape the view that people want to protect today. So what people are really treasuring is innovation. Traditional windmills are seen as picturesque today, but they were innovative and risqué several hundred years ago. The Dutch Masters ‘airbrushed’ them out of their landscape paintings.
Brenda Boardman and David Drewe were in discussion with Hannah Bullock.
8 March 2006
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