Living the green dream:

by David Hoppit

Jeremy Harrall has a dream. He knows he can’t save the world (well, not immediately) but he aims to make his Lincolnshire homeland the greenest, most environmentally friendly place in Great Britain — and his dream is already becoming reality.

Jeremy, an award-winning doctor of architecture, started realising the dream in 2002 by rolling up his sleeves and building his own earth-covered home and office close to the little town of Long Sutton, near The Wash, wheeling hundreds of barrow loads of Lincolnshire soil to cover the solid concrete structure.

Drive along the road towards Gedney and, if you glance left by a bus stop, you might see a shrub-covered  hillock, which anywhere else in UK would not seem unusual; but this is Lincolnshire, where hillocks hardly happen.

The structure, more like a giant mole hill than a house, is probably the ‘greenest’ house in Great Britain and it has been home ever since to Jeremy, his wife Kay and three children, Penelope, aged 15, Royston 14 and Molly, who is 12.

The trial was so successful that this summer his practice, SEArch Ltd (sustainable ecological architects), teamed up with Lincolnshire Rural Housing Association to design a community for six families in a remarkable experimental village nearby, named Unity Gardens.

Nearly 50 families answered a small local advertisement for volunteers to occupy the earth-bunded homes (a veritable mumbling of molehills) and the list was eventually whittled down to just six. What they were letting themselves in for, very willingly, was a dose of the good life with knobs on.

The pioneers are having their lifestyles and energy consumption monitored and recorded and they also agreed to grow their own fruit and vegetables on the ample allotments at the rear of the development. Some have already built chicken houses for egg and meat production.

The adult residents of Unity Gardens (the site was bought from the Odd Fellows) represent a spread of ages, from 30 to nearly 70, but all are having a honeymoon period in their new homes. The children range from toddlers to teenagers.

Families at Unity Gardens enjoyed massive savings on energy costs during the first few weeks of occupation. The shared 35 foot wind turbine and solar panels produced five times the energy they needed, bringing each of them an income of about £40 a month from electricity sold to the national grid.

Taken over the year, including winter months, they are expecting to pay nothing for their electricity. The earth-covered bungalows, which cost little more than conventional houses, have huge south-facing windows to capture the sun’s warmth, with high thermal mass walls surrounded by a further 12 inches of wall, floor and ceiling insulation.

The aim is for the houses to be what Jeremy calls “autonomous” – or at least as near autonomous as possible. Each house ‘harvests’ rain water, stored in large underground tanks, which is used for flushing toilets and supplying washing machines.

“We have evolved into a happy, sharing community, each keeping an eye on the children and the properties, so if we forget to lock up it doesn’t really matter,” says 61-year-old Barbara Holmes.

“We have all thrown ourselves into the good life with enthusiasm. I make bread every day and we all save as much water as we can for irrigating the allotments.”

Barbara’s husband Steven (51) was equally enthusiastic. “We had a 1950s two-bedroom ground floor council flat in Spalding, but people upstairs were noisy. I used to get home from work, plonk down in front of the telly and go to sleep.

“Now, as soon as I can, I’m out on the allotment, whatever the weather. Our lives have been completely changed by this move – changed for the better.”

The six bungalows have either two bedrooms or three and tenants pay weekly rents of between £80 and £83 to the housing association. The development is not far from shops in Long Sutton and Wisbech is a short bus ride away. The Ship public house is just 300 yards down the road.

One of the youngest residents is 33-year-old Claire Lovett, who moved to the community with partner Clive and daughters Maisie, aged six and Charlotte, who is three, on July 17^th, the same day as the rest of the families.

Strolling round the allotments we marvelled at her girls’ ‘champion’ sunflowers.

“We moved in on a day when there was a tornado, with hail and lightning; but since then life here has been idyllic – we all love the houses and the sense of community,” said Claire.

Nearby Andy Thompson, aged 30, his wife Jo’ann and eight-year-old son Frank were collecting the day’s supply of eggs from the flock of Black Rock hens, before earthing up the leeks and hoeing the football sized cabbages.

“We love it here and spend most of our spare time pottering on the allotment. The house is snug and bright and we are pretty well self sufficient…the best move that we could possibly have made,” said electrical engineer Andy.

At present the six houses have a strange appearance – beautiful they are not; but as the shrubs and ivy planted in the earth banks grow and mature they will dissolve into the rural scene, with only the wind turbine betraying the existence of a community.

The houses are beside what Jeremy calls “a living street”, which he says provides vehicle and pedestrian compatibility. There are no hard kerbs or official parking places, freeing up the street for recreational and pedestrian use.

The houses achieve virtually zero heating status, with vastly reduced CO² emissions. They are Code 5 in the new building regulation category but are actually more environmentally friendly than the top Code 6.

“Perversely, the coding does not promote environmentally friendly property and it actually penalises houses such as these because they use little or no fossil fuels,” commented Dr Harrall.

His crusade is now gathering pace. Soon he hopes to build 49 more conventional houses near Unity Gardens (“better boxes”, he calls them) and already two families have completed self-build “molehills”, one overlooking Rutland Water and the other near East Tudenham, in Norfolk.

Jeremy and his practice SEArch is also spearheading a campaign which he calls “Greening the box”. Working alongside Wherry Housing Association he is taking a poorly insulated 1920s three-bedroom semi and turning it into a truly energy efficient home. The aim is to demonstrate to the housing industry that it is cheaper and more environmentally friendly to up-grade existing housing stock than it is to demolish and rebuild.

by David Hoppit.

New homes built of mud or bales of straw, with a lawn on the roof, sheep fleeces for insulation and heat from the ground or a boiler fired with sawdust pellets – this is a vision of the future, not for some third world country but for our still green and pleasant land.

Profound changes to the way we build and then run our homes will have to be made – and made quickly – if Great Britain is to lift itself from the bottom of the European energy efficiency league; and house-builders are at the sharp end of this reality.

The bald truth is that we are squandering resources. Our houses use three and a half times as much energy as those in, for example, Germany and Denmark. Government ‘carbon-budgets’ seek a 50 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, if we still have a planet to save by then..

Help is at hand in Wales, where for more than 30 years a team of dedicated scientists and volunteers has been exploring and developing, or eliminating, alternative building and energy methods. Many of the ideas thought to be radical years ago are now common practice.

The Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Machynlleth, the ancient Welsh capital, opened its gates to the public back in 1975. I was impressed by the innovation and enthusiasm back in 1982, but was astounded by the progress made when I made a second visit recently.

The centre, in a former slate quarry, is blessed with mountain streams, which help fire up some of the energy projects and also power a water-balanced funicular-style cliff railway. The CAT, in Dovey Valley, is in the foothills of southern Snowdonia, close to Cardigan Bay, providing a fun and educational day out for the family.

Many of the techniques currently being explored are not new – indeed, much of the work at CAT revolves around materials and methods that have been used for centuries. It is often a case of ‘looking forward to the past’.

There’s nothing new about rammed earth walls, for example. Ancient cob cottages built by labourers trampling mud and straw have survived for hundreds of years, provided they had “a good hat and boots” (roof and footings). Visit Norway, as I did recently, and you will see plenty of grass-covered roofs.

Taking shape at the centre is WISE – the Wales Institute of Sustainable Education, a large conference hall that is being built using many of the materials and techniques developed at the centre. It will, of course, be orientated to take full advantage of solar gain from the southern sun and the main structure will be of timber frame with hemp and lime infill.

Foundations will use ‘limecrete’ rather than cement based concrete – cement now being known to account for more than five percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Some of the techniques being tested at CAT may at first sound bizarre, but the policy there is to leave no stone unturned in the quest for a more environmentally friendly lifestyle. These ‘stones’ include not just energy conservation and generation but also conservation of wildlife and a more organic approach to food production. Visitors can go underground to get up close and personal with worms and other micro-organisms.

Lucy Stone, a spokesman for the centre, is in no doubt that the world is at last listening to them.

“The government’s declared quest for zero carbon homes by 2016 must spur the construction industry to give greater priority to the energy performance of housing,” said Miss Stone.

She added: “Energy generation is considerably more expensive than energy conservation, so simple economics dictate that a more rigorous approach must be taken to energy efficiency.

“If and when total energy use is reduced, then the renewable element can be met by smaller, cheaper systems.”

Among the energy saving building techniques being developed and used in its public buildings are grass roofs and rammed earth bricks covered with hemp and lime render. These, unlike traditionally fired bricks and clay tiles, use hardly any energy in manufacture. To the visitors, of course, a wall is a wall and few realise that what they are looking at is a tidy heap of mud.

Bricks may be beautiful to behold, but a kiln uses huge amounts of energy in the baking process. So they may become museum items and house-builders will have to use other materials to give their houses what estate agents call ‘kerb appeal’.

To be fair to the house builders many are now singing from the same hymn sheet and paying rather more than lip service to conservation issues, partly because they are obliged to but partly, also, because it is seen as good marketing practice.

More emphasis is being put on gardens and estate design. Reed beds and ‘grey’ and rain water cisterns are being installed, as are bat and bird nesting boxes.

One enlightened house builder enlarged areas of wetland and woodland with a series of lagoons, streams and lakes, at a development in Essex, partly to control water dispersal but also to provide diverse habitats for wildlife.

Meanwhile, another has built an experimental eco-village near Chorley, where wind turbines, solar panels and geothermal technology are being tested. The seven so-called ‘eco-smart’ houses produce a staggering 16 tonnes of carbon emissions a year less than similar ones without them, but they cost as much as 10 percent more to build.

With annual savings of only about £270 the ‘pay-back’ period would be three score years, even if nothing went wrong with the ‘gizmos’ – so some form of government grant would have to be introduced before schemes such as this became commonplace. House buyers may want to save the planet, but they need to save money as well.

So the moral is to build with cheaper but more energy efficient materials. At CAT the boffins reckon they can build a well-insulated house that cuts the cost of heating by 80 percent. Careful orientation helps, as do conservatories capturing the sun’s energy.

So homes built of earth or waste materials such as straw bales, insulated with sheep fleeces and capped with soil, grass and flowers could soon be the norm. Then and only then we can start thinking of more economical ways of generating our electricity.

After all, as the CAT reminds us, a third of the world’s houses are built of earth and 30 square metres of vegetation on the roof would absorb carbon dioxide and enable one person to be self-sufficient in oxygen.

For more enlightenment write to the Centre for Alternative Technology, Machynlleth, Powys SY20 9AZ, phone 0845 330 8355 or visit www.cat.org.uk and prepare to be amazed.