What might we learn from the construction, between1438 and 1448 of the Hospital of St. John in Sherborne (see above) that might shape the way we think about construction in the 21st century?  While the bulk of the building was built using local oolitic limestone, it was dressed with Lias stone from Ham Hill, some 12 miles from the building site.  However, in those days, without the internal combustion engine, 12 miles was a long way to carry stone (you try it).  The meticulous accounts kept of the project at the time show that the cost of transporting the stone by cart cost more than the stone itself.  As Alec Clifton-Taylor says in his seminal ‘The Pattern of English Building’, “it was the great difficulty of transporting heavy materials which led all but the most affluent until the end of the eighteenth century to build with the materials that were most readily available near the site, even when not very durable”.  

I often use the analogy, in terms of food, of a cake.  Until recently, local production provided the cake (the bulk of our needs) and what was imported was the ‘icing’ and cherry on top, nice to have but we didn’t depend on it.  What cheap energy and globalisation has created is a situation where now the cake is imported from wherever in the world it can be found cheapest, and local production is just the icing.  In the same way that for food we need to urgently reverse this, for many reasons that will be only too familiar to regular readers of this blog, the same can be argued for building materials.

In the case of these alms houses in Sherborne, it literally was the building’s ‘icing’ that caused the difficulties.  With about 30% of UK road freight now due to the movement of construction materials, many of which already have a high level of embodied energy, I’d like to argue here that we need to think about construction in the same way we are starting to think about food, specifically in the context of the Atmos Project, a community initiative I am involved in in Totnes.

Historically, as well as being the only option people had, the use of local materials also led to the evolution of vernacular styles of building, so that each region had its own distinct styles of building, rooted in materials, culture and tradition.  As John and Jane Penoyre note in ‘Houses in the Landscape’ “in these simple buildings the available materials are the principal dictators of style”.  Mark Gorgolewski writes in The Green Building Bible:

“… as materials closer to their natural state will tend to have had less processing, which often means less energy use, less waste and less pollution.  Local materials can reduce the need for transport and benefits the local economy and community”.

Christopher Day writes that “local materials minimise transport energy, suit local climate, support local employment and society and reinforce locality identity, anchoring buildings into local culture … so roundwood instead of sawn, adobe or brick instead of concrete”.  As well as having far less embodied energy due to requiring so little transportation, they also often have far less embodied energy in their manufacturre, as the graph below showing overall CO2 emissions by weight [kg] released by production of 1 kg of twenty-four common building materials demonstrates (source).  Note that those materials on the right hand side actually lock up more carbon than they emit (depending on how far they are transported of course, a strawbale house in the UK built with Turkish bales would clearly not qualify):

Then there’s also the aesthetics.  The other day I was in Marlborough in Wiltshire, and took a walk around the town.  It is easy to be nostalgic about old buildings, and to assume that they are so characterful and attractive simply because they are old.  I would argue that the ambience that comes through in some of the photos below has more to do with the materials than with the age of the building.

The combination of brick, timber and cobbles is far more attractive than just one single material.

Clay wall tiles that were fired in kilns with variable temperatures produced tiles of a range of colours, from black to orange, which gives the tiled surface much more richness.

This timber frame house is a beautiful example of how the materials available locally dictated the design of the building and its character.

There has been a resurgence in interest in the use of natural and local building materials in recent years.  Cob building, strawbale, lime plasters, roundwood timber, hemp, clay plasters, have all experienced a renewal of energy, but are still almost only ever used in self build projects, and have yet to cross over into mainstream construction.  Yet, as Gill Seyfang points out, they are still very much in a niche and what is needed is “scaling up the existing small-scale, one-off housing projects to industrial mass production”.  She argues for the natural/local building niche “adapting itself to resemble the regime”.  Key to that will be scale.

Of course, running alongside the discussions about materials is the need to create truly low carbon buildings, in their construction, their inhabitation and eventual demolition/recycling.  The Larch and Lime houses built recently in Ebbw Vale are passivhauses (Larch House right), that is they are built in such a way as to require no space heating.  When I talked to the architect behind them, Justin Bere, he told me that most of the materials were local (stone, slate, locally made Rockwool etc) but hadn’t veered too far into the world of very local and natural materials.  Part of the reason for that is that for the kind of accurate modelling needed for passivhaus certification, data for many of these materials doesn’t yet exist.  I would argue that this is a pressingly urgent area for new research.

Enter the Atmos Project.   For the past couple of months, as well as my Transition Network stuff, I have been working a day a week on the Atmos Totnes campaign.  Atmos has been running for the past 5 years, since Dairy Crest closed their 8 acre site next to Totnes station, and since when it has sat and become more and more of an eyesore (you can read the story so far here).  The Atmos Project, as it became known, due to it being home to a building built to house Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s experimental ‘atmospheric railway’, has sought to bring the site into community ownership to develop it as a catalyst for new businesses in the town and as a demonstration of Transition in action.

The initiative did a lot of work, raised bits of funding to do design work, business planning and so on, but seemed to be getting nowhere due to the site’s owners’ unwillingness to engage seriously with the community.  So a couple of months ago we started a campaign, aimed to bring sufficient pressure to bear on the site’s owners.  We gathered voices from around the community, got a lot of media exposure, got people in the town out for a big photo opportunity and for a public meeting, and a couple of weeks ago, had a very positive meeting with Dairy Crest, and all of a sudden the project is moving forward with an energy that is a delight to see.

The tagline for the campaign has been ‘the heart of a new economy’, and it is seen as a development that in all that it does is focused on skills, training, the creation of new businesses and the boosting of the local economy.  It is of a scale where it can do some very exciting things in terms of construction.  One of the founding ideas is that the place that the development starts its very first question, is what are the local materials that we have to hand?  In the same way that I always used to teach on permaculture courses that the question should be “I’m going to cook a meal, what’s in the garden”, rather than “what’s in the fridge?”, that same principle could and should apply to building materials.

So, as the first part of the design process, and as part of what will form a key part of the brief for whoever ends up being the project’s architect, will be a list of the local materials available to such a project in Totnes.  We have commissioned a specialist in this to draw this up, including the places locally where they would be sourced.  My initial list off the top of my head is:

Timber: for construction grade timber, internal studwork, window and door frames, roofing shingles, laths, panelling, flooring, wattles, wood fibre insulation.

Clay: for rammed earth construction, cob walling, daubs, clay plasters, cob bricks, clay paints

Hemp: for use in hemp/lime construction, to make insulation, for hemp/lime or hemp/clay plasters and bricks

Slate: for roofing

Stone: for foundations, walls,

Reed: for thatching roofs, and also to make ‘reedboards’, an alternative to plasterboard

Lime: for plasters, mortars, renders, as well as in construction systems such as hemp/lime

Straw: baled, and used in ‘straw bale building’, chopped as an ingredient in plasters

Sheepswool: insulation

Horse hair/other fibres: used to strengthen plasters

Recycled Materials:  newspaper processed as an insulation product, car tyres, recycled bricks

It used to be that when a cathedral was built, a temporary village was built around it, with a stone masons’ quarter, a timber framers’ quarter and so on.  On the scale of something like the Atmos project, it may well be possible to do something very similar, processing the timber needed on site, making cob blocks, even hand-making tiles for external cladding.  If done skilfully enough, integrating training and apprenticeships, it could be a vitally needed new approach to development, especially when combined with the potential for the community to invest into the development.

Panels at Charing Cross tube station in London showing the various trades associated with the construction of Charing Cross in the late 1200s.

A development that from the outset seeks to source it’s metaphorical cake locally.  As the Euro crisis continues to unravel at a pace, as the academics are telling us that the only thing that will halt climate change is a massive economic downturn, or at least a huge rethink about how we make economic activity happen, we need a new approach to development.

Work in progress: Cob walls, hemp plaster on the walls, clay plaster onto lath on the ceiling, local timber window frames...

Could it be that we could create new housing, and new work spaces in such a way that each new development produces houses that lock up a lot of carbon in terms of their materials, generate very little carbon during their inhabitation, which create a diversity of new enterprises and livelihoods, show what deep public consultation in relation to development really looks like, all kinds of trainings, opportunities for people to invest in and benefit from the development, which create a huge sense of excitement and anticipation, invites the local community to get involved at regular stages and which create buildings and developments that feel timeless, rather than bound to a particular short-lived era of architectural fashion?  I think so.  I think the time is right for that, and that’s what we want to do with Atmos.  Watch this space.

“That’s why we’re staying up late, working on personal time, finding friends who don’t want to support this future, even though it seems unavoidable, and jamming with them, making it up as we go, sharing our personal stories, openly, our successes, our failures, our hopes, our dreams, our loves. Our vegetables. Wrestling with content management systems that aren’t as perfect as our hopes”.

Beautiful.  No mention of making your own paint out of cheese though.  So I thought I’d better put that right this morning.

In my kitchen is a big wall in need of painting.  One of those walls in need of painting that was actually in need of painting from the day you moved into the house but you get so used to its ‘in need of painting’ look that you never actually get round to painting it.  I’m sure you have one of those.  So anyway, amazingly, I was, one day recently, seized with the reckless notion that perhaps it might be time to actually paint it (I know… wild, impetuous creature that I am).  When I lived in Ireland, at The Hollies Centre for Practical Sustainability, the wonderful Ulrike Riedmuller was a great maker of her own paints, blends of pigments, chalk, lime, and all kinds of weird and wonderful things.  I have used all manner of shop-bought natural paints, but this time I wanted to do something a bit more experimental.

I rang Ulrike, she said just mix fromage frais (yes, the stuff you just buy in the shops which is like a low fat creme fraiche, the stuff sold as ‘quark’ is pretty much the same thing) with pigment.  Slap it on the wall.  End of.  That did sound just a little too experimental to me (although those super-expensive ‘traditional casein paints’ are basically just that).  I also did a bit of looking around and found this short film on YouTube.  Just in case you had been wondering why Cher has been so low profile recently, it’ll probably be because she would appear to have started her own DIY natural paints business.  Check this out: http://youtu.be/nb2pE6Ge-0Q.

So we thought we’d give that a go.  I had some lime putty in the garage, and some pigments left over from something else, and managed to find some fromage frais in Totnes.  Mixed a text batch, painted it on the wall, next morning when it was dry, it was amazing… no dusting, rub it, nothing comes off.  Hey, I like this, I thought.  So this weekend we mixed two coats and put them on.  I have to say, I’m converted.

If you are thinking Dulux matt emusion, you would, it is fair to say, be a bit disappointed.  Like the cheese shop owner in Monty Python’s famous ‘Cheese Shop Sketch’ would have said, “it’s a little runny sir”.  It’s more cream than cheese, if you like.  It’s not an opaque thick paint, rather something that needs to build up in a few layers.

However, that building up in layers is something that gives more of a depth, a sheen, than a single thick coat.  I think also it needs to go on a base of lighter colours, you couldn’t paint one coat onto a dark blue wall and expect to cover the blue.  Anyway, I think it’s great.

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Interrogate Festival at Dartington Hall, and had been asked to do a 12-minute ‘provocation’ on the theme of social justice.  Mine was on the idea that the relocalisation of economies was a key pathway to a more equitable world.  With “here’s one I did earlier” flash of brilliance that would not have been possible in the days when you had to take photos on slide film and then wait 10 days for them to be mailed back from the processing lab only to find most of the pictures you took were crap, I was able to show them pictures of my still-drying kitchen walls.

“Think”, I told the surprisingly-perky-for-10.30am-on-a-Sunday-morning audience, “of two kinds of paints as allegories for two kinds of economy.  A tin of, say, Dulux, is the product of the petrochemical industry, a complex chemical cocktail you allow into your home to make you feel queasy while using it and then allow to offgas for weeks after application.  It is designed for centralised supply chains, contains high “paint miles” which can be traced back to distant oil fields, and creates big problems in terms of disposal.  It embodies the kind of economy that the end of the age of cheap oil will consign to the great dustbin of history, and the kind to which we desperately need to build an alternative”.

“Then there’s my homemade paint.  The fromage frais could easily be made locally (mine, I’m ashamed to say came from the supermarket, but I could have made it myself if I were really keen).  So could the lime and the pigments.  Or the pigments could have been made locally by a pigment nerd who sought out the best different colours the subsoils of the region had to offer, and dried them and ground them and sold them.  Therein is an economy that shares ideas with others, but which, where possible,  seeks to create local livelihoods and business opportunities where possible.  These kinds of paints work best on natural finishes, clay plasters, lime plasters, cob walls, rather than plasterboard and concrete block.  They are therefore key to the buildings of the future where once again we build using what we have to hand, creating healthy, breathable, highly energy efficient, vernacular homes.   They therefore combine the best of the old with the best of the new beautifully.  They are a paint for the future”.

Well actually I didn’t say all that, but I wish I had.  I did show them the slide, and make that point in brief, but I wish I had let myself get this bit more carried away.  I should have rallied the throng with these words: “Reclaim the paint on your walls!  Rediscover the joy of mixing your own!  Don’t just storm the barricades, paint them a nice shade of red ochre as you go past!  You have nothing to lose but that horrible taste in your mouth that keep repeating on your for a couple of days after you’ve painted with an industrial paint!”.

I never realised there was so much power in paint.  I’m all a-quiver.  The kitchen looks nice too.

While most of the buildings were built in stone, considerable sections were built using cob.  Cob, for those of you who don’t know, is a building material which mixes clay-rich subsoil with water and straw to create a substance akin to plastercine which is then used to build load-bearing walls which set like rock, forming a monolithic structure which has incredible strength.  It can be found in patches across the UK and Ireland, depending on the subsoil available.  Often the houses around the village pond will be cob, as the pond marks the hole from which the subsoil had been dug (and the clay levels needed for cob would be sufficient for the pond to hold water without the need for a liner).  Provided, as the old cob builders used to put it, it has “a good hat and a good pair of boots” it should last indefinitely.

What was so amazing to see with these ancient cob creations was not the fact that they had weathered the centuries so intact, that was no surprise.  After all, I live in Devon which is the cob capital of the UK, and if you know what you’re looking for (rounded corners, stone plinths) you can see cob buildings all over the place, and most of them look like they’ve a few centuries under their belts.  In these days where we’re already tearing down some of the buildings we built in the 1960s, and much of what we built in the 80s and 90s wasn’t exactly created with longevity in mind, running your hands over a 500 year old wall is a fantastic, and very thought-provoking experience.

One of the beauties of building with cob is that it is a truly zero-waste building system.  Any cob that isn’t used can be reworked and put into the next mix.  Then, at the end of building’s life, the whole thing will simply return to the soil.  No PVC soffits, no concrete, no plastic insulation, no plasterboard.  What was amazing was how the wall had become much more than the wall, it had almost become its own ecosystem.  There was a hole where bees were coming in and out of a nest they had made.  There were plants growing up it.  There were bird boxes on the wall.  It felt alive, like a part of the whole place.  I was reminded of one of my favourite quotes from the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, which I put into the Transition Handbook:

“When we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone, let it be such work as our descendents will thank us for. And let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred, because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them, “see, this our fathers did for us?.

For indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold, its glory is in its age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, or stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in that golden stain of time that we are to look for the real light and colour and preciousness of architecture?”

The walls were in need of a bit of TLC, some guttering would help with their longevity, as would a coat of lime render.  There were some places where they had restored and patched with new cob, which looked great too (see right).   There is something about these materials, which are rooted in the landscape around us, and how they create structure that seem to have grown out of the place, which I find deeply nourishing.  Also, as an occasional cobber myself, to be able to touch the artistry of someone with the same skills, which have changed little over 500 years (although now you can do it with a digger which is fantastic!) gives a real sense of perspective.  When we build, let us think that we build for ever”.  Indeed.

I have, on occasion, reflected here at Transition Culture about how the natural building movement, with its leaning towards natural building materials such as straw, clay, hemp and so on, has yet to really explore how those materials might be used to retrofit existing homes.  Virtually all of the work done around those materials focuses on new build, but finally, it seems some work is happening on retrofits.  An MPhil dissertation done at University of Cambridge by Keven Le Doujet entitled “Opportunities for the large scale implementation of straw based external insulation as a retrofit solution of existing UK buildings: how much of a good idea is it to externally insulate existing UK buildings with straw bales?” explores this very question.  It is a fantastic and comprehensive piece of work which is a pleasure to read.

Keven’s research is very thorough, and looks at the practicalities of using external strawbale cladding to externally insulate the millions of poorly insulated homes and workplaces in the UK.  This is not the work of a romantic idealist, he is clear about the challenges of doing so on a meaningful scale.  He concludes that it “is a good idea but even if it reaches its full potential it will not be sufficient in itself to improve the sustainability performance of UK buildings to the level required to tackle to combined challenge of energy security, climate change and the sustainable use of natural resources”.  It is not, he argues, a “silver bullet”, something that would address the entire retrofitting challenge we face, but it could prove an excellent solution for around 5% of the UK’s housing stock.

The study looks at some amazing case studies (look at the back of the report), where unappealing buildings are transformed.  His sense of realism extends into his setting out of the obstacles to this, which include:

• Thickness (these walls are thick, and require a substantial roof overhang)
• Installation time (it’s a big project)
• Seasonality (you want work outdoors with strawbales all year round)
• Aesthetics (you can use them to make an ugly building more attractive, but not to retrofit a building considered attractive)
• Financial barriers (it is a realistic option for self builders, but quite pricey if you get contractors in to do it)
• Skills and knowledge gaps (it may prove tricky to find builders who know how to do it)
• Lack of persuasive information (in other words, there isn’t yet a robust knowledge base around this approach)

However, what shines through this excellent study, unusually for an academic study, is a real taste of what might be possible, and what it would actually look like if we used local strawbales to retrofit some of our worst housing stock.  The benefits, in terms of reskilling, locking up carbon, supporting local farmers, hugely increasing energy efficiency and so on would be huge.  Unfortunately the trend over the past 30 years in the UK has been to build houses with virtually no roof overhangs at all, which makes this very difficult for many homes.  However, I reached the end of Keven’s study with a sense of this being something that has just scratched the surface of the potential here.  How about pre-fabricated straw panels which can be made offsite and then put up against the wall?  Hemp and lime or hemp and clay bricks?  If we applied some of the creativity and research support that other approaches get I’m sure we could come up with all kinds of things.  If you are interested in natural building, you will find this a timely and fascinating study.

The 'Larch House' in Ebbw Vale, Wales.

The ‘holy grail’ in terms of the construction of new sustainable buildings is homes that reach the highest level of energy efficiency, whilst also using as high a proportion of locally sourced materials as possible, what we might call ‘The Local Passivhaus’.  Two buildings, recently completed in Ebbw Vale, known as ‘The Lime House’ and ‘The Larch House’ have moved this concept forward significantly.  As part of an EU-funded project, the Welsh government wanted Wales to take a lead in Passivhaus design, to show what is possible as well as bringing low energy design into the mainstream construction industry.  They ran a competition, and Justin Bere Architects won.  Their proposal was for more than just a house, they saw it as the possibility of kick-starting a radically new approach to housing in Wales.  As Justin Bere told me:

“Instead of a narrow vision to design a house, we want to get people fired up in to doing something much bigger.  I’d just love to see a successful example in Wales that would encourage other people and give them ideas of how they could do their own locally made, affordable, truly low energy buildings, and maybe we could get this sort of thing happening all over the country”.

The chosen site pushed the Passivhaus idea to its limits.  1,000ft up at the head of the valleys, very cold in the winter and misty for much of the year, a climate twice as hard to design for as Innsbruck in Austria.  The project also aimed to build to social housing budgets and to the Passivhaus standard, the first time this has been attempted.  As well as the attention paid to the design, a lot of thought was also paid to the materials used, with a focus on using Welsh materials where possible.  I asked Justin why:

“Local materials matter because they do two things.  They reduce carbon emissions from transportation, and they increase local employment.  Local employment, if it really is local, also requires less carbon emissions and travel from the factory or workshop to the site”.

The final buildings used Welsh timber (used in an innovative way to make up for its poor quality compared to, say, Scandinavian timber), Welsh-made Rockwool insulation, Welsh-made slates, local stone, and UK-made paint and sprinklers.  Things that were harder to source included lime render (a Welsh company but a French lime), and woodfibre insulation, which was imported from Germany but could easily be made in Wales.  The last challenge was the windows, which need to be of very high quality.

For the first house they were made in Germany, for the second house, a Welsh joiner produced them to a passivhaus certified design provided by the Scottish window designer Bill Robertson.  I asked Justin if he had a sense of the local/imported proportions in the materials used.  He said he thought the first house was probably around 80% Welsh, and the second house was closer to 90%.  Did he think, I asked, that, as has been discussed with food, an 80/20% local/imported ratio could work for construction in a powered-down UK?  “I think”, he told me, “that in time people will be forced to do better than 80%!”

I also asked him about what role he saw in the future for more genuinely local materials, such as hemp, straw, cob and so on.  He said that in the two houses built in Ebbw Vale, the original idea had been to use hemp/lime, but the data on its insulation properties wasn’t sufficiently well done to allow them to meet their efficiency targets, and that more research is needed, but in time, they would have a vital, and increasing, role to play.

One of the things that will be central to this shift to the local Passivhaus, he told me, will be a huge reskilling of young people and the creation of a new infrastructure of manufacturing across the UK.  He told me:

“I think we need to start right back at school.  Let me give you an example of Austria.  We employed an assistant here from the Vorarlberg region.  At the age of 14 he moved to a school that did the traditional subjects but alongside timber technology.  By the age of 19 he had a diploma in timber construction and was skilled in using timber with his hands, skilled in using timber with machinery, skilled in drafting, skilled in structural calculations and building low energy technologies.  In the UK by contrast, at the moment we’ve spent years dismissing technical skills as being for those who can’t do anything else, and if a young person is half able to do anything, they’re encouraged to go to university and not waste their life using their hands”.

The Ebbw Vale houses offer us a taste of what might be possible with some vision and some applied effort, and the potential benefits that such an approach would bring in terms of jobs, skills, local economic activity and a return to a more vernacular approach to building, where buildings are rooted in place and the local materials.

And now here, in full, is the interview I did with Justin a couple of months ago…

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?

I’m Justin Bere, I’m an architect, director of Bere Architects.  One of my main interests and specialisms in the practice is low energy building and in particular we’ve found that the Passivhaus methodology and standard gives us the best way of controlling the quality of what we are providing our clients with.

The two houses in Ebbw Vale, how did they come about and what were you trying to achieve?

They came about as a competition, which was the brainchild of Nick Tune of the Building Research Establishment to use European funding as I understand it.  I’m not sure exactly how it works, but it’s European funding to ensure that Wales gets the very latest Passivhaus, low energy thinking into their buildings and encourages developers to follow suit, having shown the way.  There’s a number of houses round there, so Ebbw Vale, or the local authority of Blaenau Gwent worked with BRE and set up a competition and found a partner in United Welsh Housing Association who would use their normal procurement route of contractor and so on to build the buildings – they were basically just given the money to do that.

Part of the exercise was to train an existing supply team and get their feedback on the viability of this.  The hope, before the funding cuts, was that housing associations would have a lot more money to be able to contribute to the 700 new homes in Ebbw Vale.  From our point of view, we entered that competition, and we were told that we had the best grasp of Passivhaus and technically they were confident in us succeeding.  They initially also employed another architectural firm to do the other passivhaus but lost confidence in them at the same time as they got interested in our ideas of making further savings in the future on our first house, nearing completion. So we were asked to produce the second passivhaus which was a great opportunity for us to put into practice our ideas of further cost savings that came out of building the first house.

What were you trying to achieve with those buildings, what was your intent?

To show how we can get the very lowest energy consumption and the greatest comfort in building by concentrating on the fabric of the building, and also showing how we use the techniques to invigorate the Welsh construction industry locally at least.   I described a vision that they all seemed to like, of starting something in Ebbw Vale and the means to that.  They had funding for a skills and training centre in Ebbw Vale which was going to be run by a big commercial outfit with all sorts of funny angles and things, their pictures were about students drinking caffe lattes in foyer areas and I said, “look, this isn’t about skills.  What you really want is a supershed with rectangular classrooms on one side overlooking the shed.”  In the classrooms you have new technologies, timber technologies that are to do with the fundamentals of building timber frame buildings and one production line.

There’s another one which is to do with laminating timber for window frames, there’s a number of technologies there which are tiny production facilities, which the students learn to use – because there aren’t many other opportunities to use these techniques in the UK and these are generally used in Germany and Austria and so on, and get them to learn and perhaps sell those products so it’s a resource to sell to local industry.  Then if production goes up and demand goes up then you perhaps spawn a little kind of science park for timber technology.  Someone comes along and says, “Look you’ve created a business case.  I’m going to take students, I’m going to build a shed, I’m going to buy this equipment and we’ll build a production line.

So there is now, resulting from that, and quite excitingly, Nick Tune at BRE has got so far £6 million of funding committed to building a low carbon technology training centre.  Maybe we will end up getting to be involved in the design of it, but my purpose is really just that it’s exciting.  Instead of a narrow vision to design a house, we want to get people fired up in to doing something much bigger.  I’d just love to see a successful example in Wales that would encourage other people and give them ideas of how they could do their own locally made, affordable, truly low energy buildings, and maybe we could get this sort of thing happening all over the country”.

The houses that were built – why were they significant and how do they move the idea of the passive house forward?

They’re significant because they are designed to be passive even in this extremely inhospitable environment at the head of the valleys.  People tend to think of a building regulations house being a building regulations house – same design – whether it’s in Swansea, Manchester or London.  What we found, or what BRE found for us, was that the weather conditions – because of the real misty conditions of Ebbw Vale, a thousand feet up and cold in the winter, are twice as difficult as Manchester and twice as difficult as Innsbruk in Austria.  That is using what they call the ‘extreme worst case’, they were being quite cautious because they want to make sure that they do work.  We have to make the building passive in that location.

In addition, we were designing for social housing, so they’re the first social housing, passive house prototype in the UK.  One of the primary requirements of the brief was to build them as closely as possible to the housing association average house price for a one off detached house for £1200 per square metre.  We came pretty close to that.  The first one, because it was a very rushed project, before we could really fully understand the cost we had to get on and build the first one, because of the opening date for the Eisteddfod.

The first house was coming out at something like £1700 per square metre.  At that point we realised there were ways of saving money.  We came up with the idea of doing an alternative technical approach, both Passivhaus: one is working on total annual energy consumption and the other is looking at total peak monthly energy consumption.  Normally those end up looking like quite similar buildings but in extreme conditions we end up with one house, the more expensive house, more traditionally passive house design with relatively big windows – because of the low amount of sun they get very big in order to grab every bit of sun that’s available and hold on to it.

The co-heating tests at the moment show that they get a little bit of sun and they hold on to that heat for 5 hours.  That means that in the summer, in order to avoid overheating, you need retractable blinds, another cost.  Our alternative design can be rationalised by saying well, there’s not very much sun so we’ve got super insulated walls, 400mm of insulation, there’s 600mm of insulation in the roof.  These super insulated buildings can make a lot of use of the internal heat gains so we’re not getting much from outside, so let’s not bother much about the outside.  The windows are a bit smaller – they’re still bright interiors with plenty of daylight, but make them smaller than the traditional passive house and because a 400mm thick wall is going to lose less heat than a triple glazed window even.  So we concentrate on holding on to the internal gains from people, their pets, their oven, their TV and so on, to supply a great deal of the warmth in the house.

The significance of the project is that we’ve got one down to about £1300 per square metre on the second option, and I think we can do better still.  We’ve achieved low costs.  Basically it would be about £8000 more for a two bedroom house than a standard building regulations house built over the last ten years.  It’s not bad considering the reduction in energy and the pay back period of about 14 years.

What about the role of local materials in the building – what have you done that’s innovative in that regard?  Why do local materials matter?

Local materials matter because they do two things.  They reduce carbon emissions from transportation, and they increase local employment.  Local employment, if it really is local, also requires less carbon emissions and travel from the factory or workshop to the site.  The factory, the timber workshop that we were employing to build the timber frame, have built the factory on supplying Premier Inns around the country with horrible, cheap 140 mm thick stud walls so because Wales has plenty of these 140 mm sized timber sections.  I should explain that mountain timber in Germany, Austria and Scandinavia can come in larger sections than our fast growing timbers in the UK, because our moist and relatively warm climate means that we end up with less good quality, less dense timber and it tends to twist a bit more and be a bit more sappy and is generally not regarded as being suitable over about 140 mm, that’s the ideal.

At 140mm we have thin, poorly insulated walls zooming off all over the country to Premier Inns.  What we needed was about 400mm of insulation and we wanted to use local materials.  Now the biggest, most reasonably accessible timber grown in Wales is about 215mm as a sawn timber stud.  So 215mm, as your central core of insulation, still requires another 200mm of insulation so we’ve found a reasonably economical way of achieving this.  215mm is in the centre – that gets built up on site – then we put 100 mm stud on the inside of that, the services zone, build that with fibre insulation, get our extra 100 and then 100 mm wood fibre insulation on the outside.

The heart of what we were trying to do was also stimulate and show markets for local timber so we weren’t absolutely having to use local all the time, we didn’t think that was always the best thing to do.  We could, on the inner and outer surfaces, have had that 100mm zone of insulation on the inside and 100mm of insulation on the outside as Welsh Rockwool, or we could have used some horrible oil based foam insulation, or we could have used Warmcell recycled paper but the problem with that is that it’s not energy efficient and we couldn’t get that in 100mm studs so the logical thing to us is to use wood fibre insulation.  It’s really healthy, it’s truly a renewable material and it’s more efficient than Warmcell, so it worked in 100mm zones.

There is no wood fibre insulation made in the UK so we bought it from a UK distributor and it’s made, some in Switzerland, some in Germany.  As part of the exhibition, to say this is what we think a Welsh manufacturer could and perhaps should be making, does anyone have an interest out there?  We were looking for opportunities of growth of Welsh industry.  With the first house, the most reliable Passivhaus windows produced come from Germany and they’ve being doing this for 15, 20 years.  They make windows that last generations that don’t twist that have insulation in the frames so they remains warm, as warm as the triple glazing almost, and they’re well sealed to avoid cold draught leakages.  German houses are quite famous for not having draughts, just as English houses are famous in Europe for having draughts!

We thought we’d play it easy on the first one, we must get a draught free construction – we will be air tested so we don’t want to risk it on the first one, get a British one and find our house is not certified.  So we got the German windows.  But then on the second one we said, “Look, now let’s try and push things.  We know we’ve made it work – we’ve got certification on the first one, it’s not so important on the second one so let’s get a designer I knew who designs passive house windows, learn his trade.”  We designed Passivhaus windows and the front door – got them certified in Germany (which was quite a rushed process) and got a partnership of five or six Welsh joiners together to buy in to this process.

One of the joiners went great guns for it and said, “I’m going to build these”, and imported the insulation from Germany.  Part of our message was that we could be making these in the UK – maybe someone like Kingspan or whoever would be able to do that with relatively small changes to their production lines.  But at the moment anyway it needed to be imported from Germany and then laminated to the wood, made up and installed.  So in the second house we had Welsh windows – the first UK, passive house certified windows; UK designed and made.

Are you able to put a percentage to the amount of local materials in both houses?  Presumably by local, in that context, you mean Welsh?

Yes.  Well I can’t at the moment…do you mean in quantity, volume, cost?  It’s a very difficult, if not impossible question to answer.  I’ve got a list on the two houses of the Welsh sources, which I could quickly read through, scan and send to you.  Some of it’s a bit confusing…

• The timber frame: I’ve listed the company and it’s local
• Roofing:  it’s a local company and they were using Welsh made tiles
• Local plumber, local electrician, local scaffolder, local carpenters
• External blinds:  well it’s a British company that distributes them but they import them from Germany.  We don’t have anyone that does it in the UK – that’s on the larch house.  We don’t have anyone who makes retracting solar blinds in the UK, it’s just incredible really.
• Sprinklers:  a UK company, parts probably from overseas.
• Plaster: a UK plastering company.  The plasterer may be from the UK but half the plaster in the country comes from France
• Flooring:  a UK, local company but who knows where the….well linoleum is British, yes.  Normally they put horrible vinyl down which makes you sick when you walk in and breathe the fumes, and that’s what goes into most social housing Passivhauses.  Well I insisted, for a small amount of extra money that we used linoleums which is made from plant resins and smells lovely – except they put the disgusting vinyl in the kitchen and the bathrooms for some unknown reason
• Stonework – a local company and local stone
• Painting: a local company.  The paint was an Earthborn, British, organic paint
• Wall tiling: a local company though not sure where the tiles came from because the design build company, United Welsh Housing said, “Normally we get rid of the architects at this point.  We don’t want to be told where to get our tiles from, we have our own normal suppliers.”  It was the same with the kitchen which is why they put the vinyl flooring down, “We always use vinyl flooring – we’ll use our local people and do that.”

I remember when I talked to Rob McLeod, he said that he thought the first house was about 80% and the second was about 90%.  But as you say, it’s of what – weight?  Volume?  Price?  Was he getting a bit over excited?

Yeah, I wouldn’t be being completely honest if I said I thought he was absolutely right, put it that way!  Maybe it is 80 and 90, but if you look down the list of names here, they’re all Welsh or British, but hidden behind that, for example there’s a lovely Welsh company doing the render for the Lime House.  Where does the lime come from?  Germany.  In Wales they’re really proud of Tir Mawr lime, but little do they know that a lot of the products come from Germany.  It’s just so frustrating.

The reason, to be completely fair to Tir Mawr, they use Welsh lime on very traditional lime rendering where there’s no external insulation, straight over stonework and it’s quite chunky material, thickly daubed-on stuff.  However, when you’re going to do a low energy building you need wood fibre insulation, or you need an insulation on the outside – it’s much better than inside for all sorts of technical reasons.  Then if you put a lime on, you need a very thin coat of lime.  You can’t use the traditional lime, so we have to develop that technology.

It’s interesting, because I was talking to a guy called Mike Small who works for the Fife Diet up in Scotland where they’re promoting the idea of local food.  They started out saying, “You should eat all local food, all seasonal food,” but then people come and say, “I like the idea of eating local and seasonal but I couldn’t live without chocolate and wine and coffee.”  If people say, “OK, list the things you really couldn’t live without”, they don’t make up more than 10, 15% of the diet so they now say, “90% local food, 20% imported feels like an achievable context.”  It sounds like with construction, you might be able to say that 80 – 20 is a rough target in terms of the target between local and imported materials, if and when we get to a stage where we have all the infrastructure in place to make that possible. Would that be reasonable?

Yes, I think that is reasonable.  I think that in time people will be forced to do better than 80%.  In the food thing, I’m sure you know Professor Tim Lang, and I completely subscribe to his thinking.  My parents ran a small organic farm in their retirement and personally I haven’t been to a supermarket for 10 years or more.  I would only go to the local shop round the corner, the farmers’ market or Mother Earth health food shop.  Mother Earth produce our lunches here and I was a bit concerned because as they winter was coming on they were producing salads with tomatoes.  I went round and had a chat to say, “I’d far rather go to the market – there are some much nicer greens than you’re providing.  Let’s forget about tomatoes.”  They’re nice but they’re importing them all from Italy.

She said she goes to the farmers’ market and she’s been telling her boss she would happily get the greens that come from Cambridge rather than him importing this stuff from the wholesaler.  That’s what she’s now doing and our salads have got much better, they’re much more tasty, they’re fresh…and I think everyone here feels better about that and partly it’s a matter of people understanding what the alternatives are and having some pleasure in doing it without chocolate…..on the other hand one doesn’t want to get the message over that to be green one has to live a dull and sad existence!

If the aspiration, similarly, is that we want the buildings of the future being local, seasonal, organic, far more nutritious houses in that kind of a way – what role do you see in the idea of a local Passivhaus for some of the materials that would be more prevalent in the natural building scene in terms of hemp, straw bale, clay plasters and these kind of things….they would ultimately be much more rooted in the local vernacular of the place, so what role do we have in a rediscovery and a re-embracing of those materials in the context of a Passivhaus?

I think there’s tremendous scope and opportunity.  I know Rob looked at hemp insulation because we were keen to use that instead of the wood fibre, but the U-values claimed by the hemp insulation people Rob discovered were extremely dubious and he was quite shocked at how poor the testing methodology.  He said, “No, we cannot achieve anything better than Warmcell – it may be not as good as that; we can’t rely on it.  We need to be sure our first building are going to work.”  We don’t want to be experimenting so much that all the opportunities to experiment in the future are lost because we blew the first one.

The approach has got to be that we build really successful, true to performance, passive houses, get that recognised as being a really good methodology.  Then I’d love to work with rammed earth technologies, cob and so on and work out how we can use those really local materials, get them well insulated and draught free.  I know that probably sounds controversial to some people.  They’ll say people have lived in cob buildings for generations and they didn’t worry about the odd draught, but unfortunately we were talking about a different mindset – people that didn’t mind putting pullovers on, who got up and went outside and did a lot of manual work.  Even if they were Wordsworth writing poetry, he was also walking the hills, getting exercise and coming home to write poetry.

Now we expect to do no manual work, sit in jeans and Tshirt in front of a computer for 8 hours and feel warm.  Because most people don’t see the energy going into their houses, they’re not carrying logs and buckets of coal, they’re completely obvious to what’s going on.  If they were carrying logs in they’d be shocked at how much needs to be carried in just to keep that lifestyle going.  In an ideal world, yes people would behave like our grandparents did and we wouldn’t need so much insulation, but what we’re trying to do with the Passivhaus is to bring people into a low energy way of living without having to compromise anything.  In fact, they’ll actually have better comfort in the building because they’ll get fresh air through the heat recovery ventilation.

In terms of the hemp, you were saying that the testing wasn’t good enough.  In terms of hemp and straw bale having sufficient data behind them for you to feel confident in using them….where’s that testing going to come from?  Who should be doing it?  Who’s going to move it forward?

I think that could be done by us as architects and inventive clients.  So a client comes to us and says, “We’d like to use cob because it’s a local material and we’re passionate about doing that”, then we would think through the design in order to come up with a solution that dealt with the really positive attributes of cob and part of that would be thermal mass and it does add to insulation.  I don’t know how much insulation it provides, I doubt there’s any data around so we would do some research and see if there’s something in Germany, someone may have done some cob prototypes.

Then we’d look at how to externally insulate the wall appropriately because we’d need more insulation than the cob alone I think, but we’d need to maintain the breathability of it.  That’s one route, I’m not trying to shirk that responsibility but I think the best place for this work is for universities to have some good tutors – some of them do – inspiring them to think in this way and saying, “Let’s build this prototype.”  This is perhaps the one opportunity in their lives when they’re going to be able to dedicate this amount of time to experimenting and research and actually producing something that’s useful at the end of it.  I’m trying to encourage that.

We’ve started the UK Passivhaus conference and the same time we’ve started the UK Passivhaus student conference and that’s been largely run…we did the first two years’ conferences but it’s now been taken over by the Passivhaus Trust, and I’m on the steering committee and we’re trying to positively engage the universities, both in presenting papers and encouraging to do the research in the first place; and hopefully giving them feedback of these sorts of ideas.  At the moment, no-one has said from our group to the universities, “What about research into cob passive houses?”  It’s a great idea but they need guidance and help from the cob experts, from people like myself doing Passivhauses and so on.  The universities being aware of this as an opportunity as well and asking us and getting involved.

The idea of buildings being built to Passivhaus standard but the design starting with what materials are available, so that they’re designed specific to that place, that you could almost have a way of designing Passivhauses rooted in place in terms of the materials and the whole idea scaling up – what do we need to put in place?  What infrastructure do we need?  You talked about the need for the windows to be made here and that kind of training, but presumably you also need woodland being planted and managed properly, you need retraining, young people – what infrastructure do we need to scale this up meaningfully?

I think we need to start right back at school.  Let me give you an example of Austria.  We employed an assistant here from the Vorarlberg region.  At the age of 14 he moved to a school that did the traditional subjects but alongside timber technology.  By the age of 19 he had a diploma in timber construction and was skilled in using timber with his hands, skilled in using timber with machinery, skilled in drafting, skilled in structural calculations and building low energy technologies.  In the UK by contrast, at the moment we’ve spent years dismissing technical skills as being for those who can’t do anything else, and if a young person is half able to do anything, they’re encouraged to go to university and not waste their life using their hands.

If someone is utterly useless and persuaded by other people that they’re utterly useless they’ll think, “Oh, there’s nothing for it, I’ll end up in construction” and it becomes a very negative choice.  We need to start by making practical things: if someone enjoys playing with water and things like that then maybe plumbing’s for them.  If someone enjoys fiddling around with electrics, then maybe an electrician.  We should try and get a more positive approach.  There seems to be from the intake here, and the applications we get, my impression is – and it may just be that they’re finding us more – but my impression is there’s a growing appreciation of what humanity and the planet faces, and what local communities and the UK faces.  People want to do more and I’m sure that a lot of these young people feeling they’d like to do something…..although they realise construction is part of the problem, very few of them think that going off and being a builder with a load of layabouts isn’t really going to get anywhere.

If we can give them a more positive view of the opportunities of working within construction, it could achieve much more.  I think also that this can attract those people that don’t like wearing pullovers and want to sit in an office, to show them that they can also do the Austrian thing, going off and by the age of 19 having a diploma in timber technology.  I’d start right back there and get the really good people coming into the industry.

There are really good people coming in to architecture now but it’s a bit more difficult in other fields.  As architects, I see the role we’re playing as Passivhaus architects, a lot about rebuilding by one, showing appreciation of people’s interests and two, encouraging those interests.  On the Welsh Passivhauses we ended up having a site manager who is now quite knowledgeable, he succeeded in achieving one of the best, or probably the best air tests in the country, having never done that before because we gave him sympathetic designs and training and so on, which we’d learnt in Germany, and he’s really enthusiastic.

Likewise a contractor, a site manager locally here at the Passivhaus community centre, he’s had training in air tight construction, avoiding leaks and draughts and so on.  He’s spent a career in construction, knocking things up any old how and he’s really rising to the challenge of doing this and making comments and alerting us to concerns he has and asking our advice and so on.  You often hear architects saying, “We don’t have the skills, it’s hopeless,” and so on.  We can’t take that attitude – we have to learn those skills ourselves and teach those skills.

It’ll be a slow process but we can do that.  That’s why, as I say with the cob building, I relish that challenge and I regard it as an opportunity to do more research and try and pass this learning on and collaborate with people and get them set on a trajectory that they master themselves and we just help to get it going.  The other really strong thing about local materials is that we start to build local specialist industries and everything from the Japanese electronics industry that thrived because of the density of companies in a locality, in a relatively small nation, around Tokyo or somewhere, that were supporting each other, where anything you needed you could get – to timber where in Germany, they say, “Look, we’ve been around since 16^th 17^th century and we’ve got everyone from the growers to the mills, with their production line geared specifically for us.  They know what we want and they supply us exactly the right materials.  It means that we have faultless products that we can supply to the joinery workshops”.

It’s about building those connections.  If you’ve got an area rich in timber like Wales, relative to the rest of the UK they’ve got 3 times as much wood per hectare as England and twice as much as Scotland – that’s a place to set up that would do well by saying, “Let’s use these resources, let’s go to furniture shows, let’s send people out to find the best furniture designers, bring them back to Wales, to offer them space, to enhance the value of the raw materials that we have, to build an industry to work locally with house builders in timber frame, and gradually you find all the machinery, suppliers, makers, maintenance people move in to the area and you get a whole buzz and the whole thing takes off”.

Vorarlberg region in Austria decided that low energy building was central to its success in achieving its ambition of self-sufficiency.  If someone is building a house using local timber, and burning local timber to keep warm, if they’ve got a very insulated house they won’t use much timber to keep it warm and that means there will be more land available for growing food.  As a result, Vorarlberg has, through this combined vision of wanting to do really high quality, low energy buildings, have got everything – not just timber but they’ve got a really good low energy heating company, really good low energy heat recovery manufacturers, really good insulation people.  All these organisations support each other.

I just think whatever the focus, it’s really good to get a focus in a region and get a vision.  That’s what you’re doing with Transition Towns – you’re getting this shared vision, bringing communities together and saying, “Let’s go in a direction and make a success of this” and then everyone starts supporting this.  And I think local materials can fit into that because around a Devon cob industry that used to be dominant in construction in Devon and is now a niche thing, one could potentially rebuild this and we’ve got all the raw materials, it’s really cheap, we could get young people off the streets, somehow…….people with the enthusiasm and vision that this is an exciting force.

Some people may think that’s a funny thing for the future, that it’s going backwards.  But that’s where I think potentially allying something like cob with passivhaus could actually make people think this is the future – it’s not backward at all.  This is a fantastic new technology, or a new way of working with cob.

If you imagine in 20 years time this has been successful and any new house built in the UK is built using 80% local materials and the structure that has sprung up to support that – can you describe that to us?  How would that be different from now?  What would be our experience of the building industry?  Could you paint a picture of what that would be like?

One would be choosing a house from local companies and there’d be perhaps in one’s locality 5 or 10 smallish companies, each with a proven track record of building wonderful, low energy houses, using local people one knows in the pub or knew at school who are running or working in these organisations and you choose between the pros and cons of the various techniques.  There probably isn’t a great deal between them, and some of one’s choices may be made as a result of who one knows or who is nearest to one’s building plot.

Those organisations or companies are buying raw materials locally that are also employing people in the area, and there’s a tremendous pride in the kind of results that are being produced in that area.  Traditionally, Herefordshire and East Anglia, on opposite sides of the country, have similar technologies in terms of timber frame buildings.  Somewhere else you’d have stone buildings.  We’d be going forward to a new regional interest, attention to detail, producing buildings, results and products for local people.

You’d have a pride in doing something well.  You don’t want it to fall apart and you want to do your best for the people you know and care for.  We get a completely good culture, as I see it, and the same with food.  It’ one of the nice things about going to farmer’s markets – you’re buying from people who are producing and they know who they are selling to each week and they’re going to make sure – they want to produce the best for regular friends that come to the market.  One will want to do that for the local community, whether it’s food, building, whatever and as a result we’ll all have a much more enjoyable, fulfilling lives.  Yes there probably will be some things that are transported around, but hopefully we’ll need so little power going into our buildings that we’ll be able to use some nice big wind generators to generate electricity for vehicles so that when we do have to move things around, it’s done by electrically run vehicles.  It’ll all be low carbon, healthy and rewarding.

I know that I have officially signed off for Christmas, but I can’t resist the temptation to post this now, think of it as my Christmas gift.  About 3 weeks ago, I travelled to a snow-covered West Sussex to meet one of my heroes.  Christopher Alexander, architect, thinker, designer, author of the seminal ‘A Pattern Language’ and of the more recent extraordinary ‘The Nature of Order’ series of books, has long been someone whose work I have admired greatly.  It is sometimes said that it is generally best not to meet your heroes as they usually disappoint, but that wasn’t the case here.  I met Chris and his wife Maggie in their beautiful old home (I’m starting to sound like a writer for Hello! magazine), and after lunch and a general chat about the Transition approach (about which Chris knew very little in advance of our conversation), we did the following interview.  I am deeply grateful to them both for a fascinating and illuminating afternoon.

The first question is, how did A Pattern Language come about?  Where did the idea come from?

Oh that I can tell you very simply.  In 1961 I went to India – lived in a village.  I was a fellow at Harvard and I just wanted to go to India, I always wanted to go there.  I had Indian friends from all over the shop but I’d never been there.  So the Society Fellows were kind enough to send me out there.  I was living in this village – just mud huts, there was only one brick building which was vaguely temple-ish….at a scale and finish of a porch in a cow barn.  I actually did something quite similar to what I was describing to you, in one of my books – it contains that analysis – and they’re all about issues pertaining to a simple Indian village.  I made a set of diagrams – it was very early on in my career, it was one of the first projects I ever did.

Then it was time for me to go back to the States, so I went back to Harvard where I still had about another year to run of my Fellowship.  And then one day I get a letter from a fairly high official in the state of Gujurat.  He had somehow seen or heard of these diagrams I had made and so they wrote to me and said,  look, would you be willing to come and plan a village because a dam was being built in the vicinity and so all those people were going to be dispossessed.  My first reaction was, how fabulous, I must try to do this.  Then I sat and brooded about this thing for a couple of weeks before answering the letter.

This was the first sizeable commission of any sort that I’d ever had.  I wrote them a letter and said, “I’m very, very sorry but I can’t take this project on.  I’d love to do it, I have the time and the energy but I’m not sure it would work because although I made and an analysis of all kinds of cultural issues, having to do with that kind of village, number one I don’t know for sure……it’s classic for someone who thinks he’s a semi-anthropologist to come in and completely mis-understand or screw it up”.  I said I really couldn’t take the risk of doing that when I think there were a thousand people involved.  I said I’d love to do it but I just can’t do a good enough job, so I don’t want to do it.  And that was it.  There was no come back to it – I was serious and I meant what I said.

I was pretty annoyed with myself because I really wanted to do something like that – but I knew I was making the right choice.  And then….that Spring I sat and thought in my apartment in Cambridge, Mass., about this problem and how aggravating it was, and what could I do about it.  I actually read quite a lot of anthropology, particularly anthropology governing human settlements, villages and houses.  I became familiar with the literature of fifteen or twenty different cultures, just to see how it worked.  What I was asking myself when I read these various ethnographies, was what was going on?  How come people knew how to build beautiful and practical buildings without any architects?  Sounds like a ridiculous question, but it was really troubling to me.

Then I finally realised that every one of these cultures had essentially a system of rules – though ‘rules’ is too strong a word because they were not binding. They weren’t being forced down somebody’s throat, but they were rules that everyone understood and which had to be used to get a good result.  So I started experimenting with this and the work of decomposing the issues that surrounded that village – not the one I was asked to build, but the one where I was living, I had to find some practical way that I could put this to use, and make it into something practical that Indian village people could use.

But of course, my knowledge of Gujarati and Hindi was minimal – I couldn’t actually communicate with them on that level.  I had some friends that would translate for me and there were a number of people in the village that could understand English as well as I could understand Gujarati.  But anyway, we got along great and I built a school with them while I was there just in order to keep my hands busy.  But when I was done with that, then I realised it was effectively the seed bed for trying to write A Pattern Language.  The first project we actually did was A Pattern Language for something called ‘multi-service centres’ in the U.S. Do you know what they are?

Are they like what they call a Hub now where you have different businesses based there…?

No they weren’t businesses but social services, but it was a hub anyway.  We did a whole thing and wrote a book called A Pattern Language for Generating Multi Service Centres. I knew that that would be something that could have worked in India if I hadn’t lost the opportunity.  They had to move those villagers, and they weren’t going to wait for a couple of years for me to figure this out.  But anyway, that’s how I came to the concept of Pattern Languages.

Looking back, what do you see as having been its strengths and its weaknesses as well, over the 30 or 40 years since it was published?

Well the strengths are fairly obvious because they do encapsulate the things that are important to the people that live there and work there, whether we’re talking about a village, urban community or whatever.  So it’s the input of the people and their affectionate cooperation. That was one of the obvious strong points and was relatively easy to do because I liked asking people questions and talking to them.  Probably the most serious negative was that there was a certain mystery to how these various patterns would be combined, and although I’d tried to give an account of that in the Pattern Language book, the main one I mean, it was very rudimentary.

It does describe some things that are true and helpful and correct, I think, but it never got to the point of elegance, let’s say, of a Japanese tea house where it’s a definite language. The people who built those things, not all alike necessarily, but they all have roughly the same patterns across Japan.  Of course these tea houses are not being built now – occasionally they are but the traditional ones were being built a couple of hundred years ago, and more.That language was different – it was a sequential series of actions that you had to take which is much more like the morphological unfolding of an organism.

As you probably know, when an organism is being built – obviously it’s happening over the course of time.  At each moment or at each stage in the history of the unfolding, certain morphological structures appear, or are given certain characteristics.  It’s a one way process, so it’s not like an architect playing around on a piece of tracing paper trying to see if it can work.It’s one of those things where you do something and then it’s there; you do something else and then it’s there,There’s no going back.  These generative processes are the essence of it. It has a lot to do with biology. I’ve never yet given a fully coherent account of how these generative sequences work, but I have written about them and I feel now that that would have been a better approach.But I didn’t know that at the time.

It’s not so simple because the canons of Pattern Language, like the book A Pattern Language, are sort of multipurpose.  You’re trying to achieve many, many different things with this one book of patterns.  These traditional ones aren’t like that at all, the biological ones aren’t like that.  With the biological ones there’s no fooling around – this is how this one works.  You want an embryo for a locust, there’s only one way to do it!  So that was, I would say, my biggest failure.  Incredibly, so many years later, I have not solved that problem to my satisfaction.  Part of my trouble is I have so much work so….

What’s been your opinion of subsequent peoples’ attempts at doing Pattern Languages – I’ve seen a couple of different ones, have you seen many?

Some.  They’re not that good.  The reason I say that is that the people who’ve attempted to work with Pattern Languages, think about them, but are not conscious of the role of morphological elegance in the unfolding.  In a biological case, they always are elegant and the unfolding morphology is a sort of magic.  But it’s very simple.It’s not as if it’s magic because it’s complicated, it’s just….like that.

I guess when we were talking before about how a Pattern Language goes from the large down to the small, maybe when we were talking about it as going outwards maybe it is more like an unfolding process?

I think it is yes.  The business of going from the large to the small was more for convenience….you could make sense of the book most easily like that but it isn’t necessarily the way to actually do it.

In the Luminous Ground – I’ve got the first two books in the Nature of Order series, but I haven’t got very far with them because they’re very big!  They’re wonderful – if I’m ever on Desert Island Discs, they’re my desert island read.  That would be the only time in my life I’d ever get to sit and read them!  You wrote in Luminous Ground:

“Space itself is somehow being-like, has the potential for beings to appear in it – not in a mechanistic sense of assembly from components, but in the far more startling sense of something within space and matter.  That something within space and matter could be awoken by the presence of proper configurations.”

So how does one, in the light of that, go beyond a patterned language just being a collection of things, like Lego, that you would start to assemble…

Well they’re not actually things.

Elements…

They’re not elements either. They are actually field-like structures that appear in space. They are not sharp to define. They’re not like sets.  As an organism grows, it’s a very fluid entity which is fluid at every moment including its later stages when it’s maturing into a functioning atom.  I think that is the nature of space – when it has that fluidity it has unbelievable capacity to form morphological structures, much more than anything remotely resembling tinker toys and the like, so it’s just not similar.

The problem in our society in the last forty years is that some people have thought it is like a tinker toy, and it’s just nonsense!  So that’s one of the most absorbing questions in all of biology and architecture, is how that works.  I’m hoping to have a few more years left to be more precise about it.

Maggie: Wouldn’t you say that’s one of the draw backs of Pattern Language, that people could treat it like tinker toys?

Absolutely, yes.  I forgot to mention that.

Pattern Language looks at built environments and space – what does the concept of wholeness or ‘The Quality That Has No Name’ look like in terms of a community or a bottom up process like transition.  How would you know that a process like Transition has the quality that has no name?

My hope is, (I’m guessing, just from what I’ve heard and picked up) that the people who are building communities on the basis of Transition thinking would not be inept enough to make those kind of mistakes.  I would think they would make things that are somewhat more rough and ready.I don’t mean anything disrespectful by that — I think rough and ready is good, just like this house.   You probably saw reference to the fifteen morphological generators (in The Nature of Order) and those things are by nature fluid, even though they are quite precise actually.  The book that I have coming out called Sustainability and Morphogenesis – we’ll probably change the title before we get to it – but anyway it’s a book that’s almost complete.

Those 15 properties  are the kind of essential generators which, when they knock up against each other, because they’re all over lapping and it’s a very tight squeeze.  What I mean by that is that every one of the 15 properties is very powerful as a configuration generator and, in order to manage to have the result come out, you have to do an incredible amount of pushing and shoving and squeezing and pulling.  I’m not talking literally, but I am talking literally in terms of this morphological process.  Heaven is a cloud, you know!

If you see there’s a fence over there beyond those rose bushes – it’s just a bunch of sticks stuck in the ground with some wire.  Obviously it did not come from the drawing board of an architect.  It’s the product of some very simple things – cutting some poles, sticking them in the ground at approximately equal centres.  By the time you put it up, it’s never going to be perfect, it’s just impossible.  After a couple of years of rainfall and frost and snow and sun, it’s already developed a whole set of complexities.  Architecture as per the RIBA knows nothing about that – they don’t know anything about it, they don’t know how to create it, they don’t want to create it.  That’s my opinion on that!

One of the things that struck me…..I’ve been involved in doing lots of natural building projects, straw bale building, cob building, round timber that kind of stuff – it’s very hard to make anything ugly out of cob.  What’s your sense of that movement, the natural building movement and if we’re looking at relocalisation and the move back to predominantly local materials … I mean, this house, for example, is the result of people being able to build with what they can get to this site on the back of a horse and cart.  Is your sense that returning to more local materials, more vernacular forms of building, inherently we end up with more beautiful buildings?

Vernacular buildings have always been a huge influence to me, that’s obvious from what I’ve built, but that’s not because I’m trying to copy the vernacular. All people who have built vernacular buildings in any culture all do the same things, and I do what they do.  I’m copying nothing except the process.

Were people taught that process?  Did they absorb it by osmosis?

Common sense really.  People have an amazing amount of common sense.  And now, the RIBA is trying to prove that’s impossible … and by the way, I hope to defeat the RIBA.

Good luck!

Oh I will do it.  It’ll be posthumous but I will do it!

In The Nature of Order books you argue that some built environments are inherently more beautiful and life affirming than others.  But couldn’t you argue that each generation bemoans the architecture that follows it and that actually the Gherkin that you and I might think is repugnant – kids growing up today see it as part of their world and they celebrate it?

This is a huge issue, not one that I can embark on right now.  But believe me, it’s not like that.  There are real tests – and the morphology is essential to making buildings work and people have forgotten, have no idea what that morphology is.  I’m speaking about the morphological process, not the particular morphology of a flint barn or something.  I’m talking about the way people think and act with their hands that produces things.  From what you’ve built you know all about that – a lot about that, and I’m afraid you won’t build a Gherkin like that…

You couldn’t build a gherkin out of cob!  In The Nature of Order you talk about the word ‘sustainable’ and you say: “in a deeper and more comprehensive sense this is a deeper and more technological sustainability than that has become fashionable in recent years.”  What does sustainability mean to you?

I’m trying to think – when did I give that lecture?

Maggie: 2004.

2004, so that’s only 6 years ago.  I was asked to give one of the Schumacher lectures.  At that time it was very clear that the word ‘sustainable’ meant a certain kind of technological track.But at that time, it meant doing technological gimmicks which were believed to be important.  And some of them we’re still suffering from.It’s beginning to disappear.  I think people are now somewhat more sensible, so that they’re more likely to make friends with materials that are potentially more organic, more malleable, cheaper, better!  I actually don’t use sustainable as a term.  I think I understand what people would like it to mean.  I suppose in that sense, many of my buildings are sustainable, but not because I went through a technological check list, and they’re not green listed.  I think it’s probably not a terribly good word, actually, because again, it separates things from one another, so that it artificially creates divisions.  I think it’s a silly idea but it’s understandable that people use it.

Maggie: Would you say that if you follow a morphological process would you end up with something that is sustainable?

Not automatically, there are considerations to do with stability and heat and moisture and so on. You can’t remove all those things obviously.  I think that the architectural establishment has just done incredible damage, much during the course of the twentieth century.The way architects talk and gesture and draw is ludicrous in my opinion, and it sets up conditions that make it virtually impossible to make a good building or a beautiful one.

I always think it’s also the fact that very few of them do draw anymore…

That’s true.

I increasingly think Transition isn’t an environmental approach but more a cultural one – about how you build a culture better equipped to build resilience….and to see these times as an opportunity.  How do you see your work informs and deepens a process like that?

Well, the answer to that question is sitting on my desk but it’s not published yet, and it’s a long story, it’s not a simple thing to answer.  I hope we’ll send it to the printer in the spring.  This is called Battle.

The last question is just what do you think about the idea of using the Pattern approach to look at how Transition works, what your thoughts are on what we discussed before…?

I think this is very interesting.  I would caution you – I’m not trying to knock my own work – but I would caution you.  Don’t automatically say I’m going to do a Pattern Language because it’s such a great idea or whatever.  I would want to know a little bit more about Transition and what it means. As I hear it in my head, Transition could be like the word ‘sustainability’.  I would hate Transition to get coupled with that whole insufficient idea of sustainability.

I think if it’s understood as a transition to an enlightened form of living, that’s something else and then I’m completely behind it and all for it.  But I do think that has to be made incredibly clear, though not if you don’t agree with it – but I think you probably do.  It’s a source of confusion I think for people who haven’t thought very carefully about it.  I think it would be very sad if it did get coupled with that mechanistic sustainability thing, or a mechanistic Transition either.

I suppose the tension now is always around – if you’re working with very diverse communities and you’re doing a process, which is ultimately not purely a transition about local food and energy but a big cultural shift in reconnecting with each other and coming home to each other, building those relationships.  There’s always a tension between what’s made implicit and what’s explicit.  Because if you start the process and you say up front, ‘This process is about the collective enlightenment of this community’ there’s a handful of people up at the front that say, ‘yeah, fantastic!’.  But actually a lot of people….we have to be very careful with the language I think.  There’s always a tension within Transition and the wider movement about how much is made explicit and how much is implicit.

I understand exactly what you’re talking about.  I would say that what needs to be said can be said in common sense language and words like ‘enlightenment’ do not need to be used.  There’s no point and it’s just pretentious.  It’s not really pretentious if that’s what you think about, but to drag it in by the heels is not going to help because people will freak out or turn away.  I try to keep my own language pretty down to earth if I can, unless my wife drags me into……

Maggie: Actually I was just thinking about simpler language in reaction to your question – if Transition was successful, what the community would feel – it would feel like home.  Simple.  Everyone can feel that feeling.  You know it when you see it; it just feels like home.  You walk down the street and somebody’s planted nut trees and they’re excited to tell you about all the nut trees they’ve planted and about how much protein….just like you rattled off.  And how it can replace wheat or what it was you said.  They’re excited because they’re making their home – that’s what it looks like!

We just had a conference in Scotland, Transition Scotland, and it was called ‘Diverse Routes to Belonging’ and it was all about….particularly that question of being indigenous to place.  And one of the exercises was about tracing where your grandparents came from and where your own parents came from, and where your life has taken you.  The question was ‘where is home?’  It was interesting because I was saying, ‘well, I guess where I live now.’  But in terms of home home I can’t think of anywhere because I’ve moved around so many times.  And the guy on my table lived in Glasgow, grown up in Perth in Scotland and his mother lived on the Isle of Skye – he’d never been to the Isle of Skye but he’d grown up with her telling stories about the Isle of Skye though he’d never been.  His mother was in her 80s and he took his mother to Skye on a visit, the last visit she’d be able to take there, and he said he just had this aching feeling of home, though he’d never been there.  I think so many people, we’ve lost the connection to that, but it’s about creating home wherever we are…

Maggie: I never felt it until I came here.  Now I feel like I have roots into the ground and I ache when I leave but I was 52 before it happened.

I hope to die here.  You never know where you’re going to die so you can’t ordain it but that’s what I hope for.

Thank you very much.

Context

The actual practical work of implementing STRATEGIES FOR PLUGGING THE LEAKS (5.6), making LOCAL FOOD INITIATIVES (3.10) a reality, creating a community culture of  SOCIAL  ENTERPRISE/ENTREPRENEURSHIP (5.2)  and enabling the COMMUNITY OWNERSHIP OF ASSETS (5.8) and COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE/FARMS/BAKERIES etc (5.9), all ideally in a way that has, perhaps, been identified in your ENERGY DESCENT ACTION PLAN (5.1), will require new infrastructure, whether physical or notional, to be put into place.

(We are collecting and discussing these Transition ingredients on Transition Network’s website to keep all comments in one place. Please leave feedback and comments, suggestions for alternative pictures, anecdotes, stories and projects for this ingredient here).

The Challenge

The infrastructure required for a more localised and resilient future, the energy systems, the mills, the food systems and the abbatoirs, has been largely ripped out over the past 50 years as oil made it cheaper to work on an ever-increasingly large scale, and their reinstallation will not arise by accident.  They will need to be economically viable, supported by their local communities, owned and operated by people with the appropriate skills, and linked together.

Core Text

“ The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity.  The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty”.

Winston Churchill.

The picture above shows the last working mill to close in Totnes.  It was situated in the centre of the town, was powered by the river than runs past it, and deliveries were made to and from it using a horse drawn wagon.  How’s that for a low-carbon local food enterprise?  Now it is the town’s Tourist Information Office, and a very good one at that., but clearly it is much easier to turn a flour mill into a Tourist Information Office than it is to turn a Tourist Information Office into a mill again.

Much of the infrastructure that would have traditionally supported a more local food economy, and have generated much of the employment in our communities has since been dismantled, converted into flats, converted to other uses.  Quite clearly, the infrastructure most settlements have today is completely unequipped for functioning in an energy-scarce context.  We aren’t able to grow much of our own food, process the milk from our local fields, turn our local timber into useful things, process milk into cheese, apples into cider, wool into, well, wool (clean, useable wool that is).  We will need to put it back, but it won’t look like it used to look, and it probably won’t work the way it used to either.  It will be appropriate to now, based on the best way of doing things that we have figured out thus far, and it will be managed for the benefit of the community.

So what new businesses, buildings, livelihoods and infrastructure might a Transitioned community need?   Here is a list I came up with in order to get your Transition initiative started with coming up with its own…. just a few initial thoughts…  you will notice that actually there are lots of things, lots of opportunities for local economic development, that actually require very little in the way of infrastructure, or perhaps it shifts our thinking away from a nuts and bolts interpretation of the word ‘infrastructure’:

Looks to me like a huge range of opportunities for new livelihoods.  In an interview I did with someone who grew up in Totnes in the early 1960s, he told me:

“…all of the little back streets had some kinds of artisans or builders yards or something going on in them.  You didn’t have to go very far out of the High Street before you were in light industrial premises.  All of the top of town, like Harris’s ironmongers, they had their big ironmongery shop, but on the other side they had … an agricultural machinery shop.  Can you believe it?!  There was agricultural machinery sitting there which was for sale!  They sold harrows and seed drills and things to go on the back of tractors!  They had a little showroom of all that sort of stuff.  Then they had the blacksmiths forge just round the back there”.

This diversity of businesses, workshops and enterprises gives a place a far richer, more vibrant tapestry than most places have today, with our ‘Clone Town’ High Streets and out-of-town arcades and business parks.  A more resilience community will surely be a richer and more nourishing place that what many of our towns and cities have become today. 

The Solution

Make one of the key focuses of your Transition initiative’s work and thinking the practicalities of stimulating the infrastructure required by a more localised future.  Ideas as to which will be the key pieces of infrastructure will emerge from the EDAP process.  Ensure that thinking is strategic and connected, and that it is based on considering the viability of each enterprise.  Where elements still exist, find innovative ways, such as the community support model (as in CSAs) to enable them to continue.  Where they don’t exist, your Transition initiative might create some, some might be created by social entrepreneurs, some by private businesses, and some by the local authority.

Connections to Other Ingredients

The creation of such an infrastructure will require THINKING LIKE A DESIGNER (1.4) in order to design it to be as efficient as possible, BUILDING STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS (2.12), ENGAGING THE COUNCIL (4.4) and WORKING WITH LOCAL BUSINESSES (3.12) and other organisations in the community who may well have been planning to do the same thing anyway.  It is worth thinking how such enterprises can contribute to FINANCING YOUR WORK (3.3).  The role of a Transition initiative is not, it should be remembered, to necessarily actually do all this, rather, as is captured in the ‘PROJECT SUPPORT; CONCEPT (2.13), to inspire and support it.  You may also find that you learn a lot about what might be appropriate when it comes to a new infrastructure though ORAL HISTORIES (4.7), although always with the consideration that this is not about ‘going back’, rather about applying CRITICAL THINKING (1.2) and good business planning to planning the most appropriate way forward.

Please leave any comments here.

The de-tiled, de-woodchipped bathroom awaiting its Tadelakt...

So, I am redoing my bathroom.  When I moved into my current house, we inherited a bathroom that almost certainly wasn’t even fashionable when it was installed in the early 1970s, but certainly pale blue bath, toilet and sink and brown tiles with gold flower motifs don’t really do it for me.  Anyway, that certainly isn’t sufficient excuse to toss out a functioning bathroom, so it was only when the bath sprung a leak, the toilet sprung a leak in sympathy, the sink came away from the wall, the toilet seat broke free from its moorings and the floor started to go rotten that we decided it was time for a change.

After a couple of weeks of stripping the last section of woodchip wallpaper left in the house (we have stripped acres of it since we moved in) and smashing tiles off the wall, we finally got back to the bare bones of a bathroom.  Most of the room I replastered with a lime plaster (gorgeous, and bought ready-mixed, a revelation!), but around the shower we had a choice.  Did we do tiles, which are a lot of work, easy to get a bit wrong so that water gets in behind them, and often not that nice, or did we perhaps do something else?

A couple of weeks ago I went round to my friends Paul and Ivana round the corner who are building the most gorgeous cob house in history, and checked out the bathroom they had just finished, and it blew me away.  They had rendered the whole room with Tadelakt, and it looked and felt like the inside of a glazed pot. It was warm, curvy, beautiful, with a gorgeous lustrous shine to the whole thing.  “That’s what I want” I decided…  Luckily, after I had dragged my family round to see it, they agreed too.

Paul applying the first layer of Tadelakt.

I ordered 20kg of it from Mike Wye Associates who are suppliers of natural building stuff here in Devon.  They supply Tadelakt mixed to one of 54 colours on their lime pigment chart.  It comes as a powder which you mix up to the consistency of stiff icing in the tub, using a plasterer’s whisk.  Paul (he of gorgeous cob house fame) kindly came round to give me a hand on Saturday, and so, with Man Utd against Aston Villa playing on the radio, we set to work.  The plaster went on easily enough in two layers, the second of which we trowelled as smooth as we could with a plastic float.

The wall after its first waxing (not all the wax has been absorbed, hence the swirl patterns...)

When the second layer had had a day to dry, I applied a Moroccan Black Soap and rubbed the wall up with a smooth stone, which compacts the surface.  It is hard work, very physical, but it is the energy you put into it that gives it the finish it is famed for.

I still need to give it a couple more layers, but already it is looking gorgeous.  Much nicer than tiles.  But can it really bear up to the wear and tear of being the shower for a family of six?  Time will tell, but I have to say it is far more enjoyable to put in place than tiles, far more beautiful, and has a quality to it that is really very special.  It already feels like stone, with a lovely irregular patterning to it.  I’m hooked.  No more tiles for me….

“The process of building with bales includes the possibility of making a profound change in the fabric of human societies around the world.  In fact this vision is not exclusively a matter of straw bales: the questions we are trying to pose…. are basic: how do we build, and how does that process occur in relation to the community and to the life around us?  Straw bales happen to be the material that has inspired many to look at the process of building in a different light”.  (Steen et al.1994: xvi).

In the same way the local food movement shifts its focus from out-of-season, long supply chain, high embodied energy foods towards more locally sourced, low impact foods rooted in the local region or ‘foodshed’ (Kloppenberg et al. 1996), an emerging branch of architecture and construction examine similar transitions with building materials.  The ‘natural building movement’ (e.g. Kennedy et al. 2001, Kennedy 2004, Woolley 2006, Broome 2007, Bevan & Woolley 2008, Jones 2009) argues that an architecture based predominantly on local materials is the most appropriate for  a lower-energy context.  Seyfang (2009) noted the evolution of the natural building movement from the ideas of Schumacher’s (1974) concept of ‘appropriate technology’, through to the Vales’ (Vale & Vale 1975) concept of the ‘Autonomous House’, to Pearson’s (1989) term the ‘natural house’.

She observed how, given the need for reductions in carbon emissions from buildings (around 50% of total emissions), there is a need to go beyond focusing solely on energy efficiency and building performance, and to look at the materials and techniques developed/rediscovered by the natural building movement to scale up.  However, she noted “fundamentally different discourses, practices and governance of sustainability between the mainstream system of housing provision and green builders” (Seyfang 2009a:1), adding that “the challenge therefore is to better understand and therefore harness the creative energies of community-led solutions and adapt them for wider mainstream setting” (ibid).

Figure 5.7. Overall CO2 emissions by weight (kg) released by production of 1kg of 24 common building materials (Source: MacMath, 2000).

The concept of using local building materials in a modern context is not novel.  Seyfang (ibid.:3) wrote that “there has been a resurgence in traditional building materials which could be locally sourced from renewable or recycled materials such as strawbale, wool, cob (mud and straw mixtures), reed and thatch, as well as alternative formulations of concrete-using natural materials such as ‘papercrete’ and ‘hempcrete’”, due in part to an emerging recognition of the potential of such materials to lock up carbon, rather than to emit it (see Figure 5.7).  A number of architects working in the developing world now argue that the use of local building materials offers the advantage of sustainable materials which produce healthier buildings while also strengthening the local economy.  One of these is award-winning German architect Anna Heringer who has worked in Bangladesh to build a school, predominantly from earth and bamboo (Ashraf 2007:114).

Some commercial projects in the UK that feature local materials are already underway.  The first Council houses built using straw bale construction, by North Kesteven District Council, are soon to be completed (Shah 2009), two Council houses were built by the Suffolk Housing Society in 2002 using hemp and lime construction (Clarke 2002) and a new school in Newquay, Cornwall, is to be built from cob (Yeoman & Taylor 2006).  The challenge though, is that although these building techniques and materials have undeniable advantages in terms of embodied energy and healthy building, what is lacking, according to Seyfang (2009a:8) is “scaling up the existing small-scale, one-off housing projects to industrial mass production”.  Also, most of the techniques require intense manual labour and tend to be built on one-off cheap rural sites rather than in urban development contexts.  What is required, as Seyfang put it, is the natural building niche “adapting itself to resemble the regime” (Seyfang 2009a:8).  This is starting to emerge with examples including prefabricated straw bale panels (MacKeown 2008), offsite construction (Sassi 2008) and hemp/lime construction (Bevan & Woolley 2008), although they still have some way to go before becoming a feature of mainstream construction.  It is instructive to note, from the oral history interviews, how the shift from traditional natural building materials to modern industrial materials did not necessarily bring the benefits that it was hoped they would (see Text Box 5.8.).

Alan recalls his grandmother, with whom he and his mother lived, keenly moving out of an old house that was a converted cider press.  “She just wanted modern.  She wanted electric fires, electric cookers, electric everything.  She wanted automatic this, that and everything.  So we moved, at my grandmother’s insistence, from this wonderful rambling old building…. to a brand new house, typical of its time.  Wooden framed, single glazed windows, open fire for a chimney which she quickly replaced with an electric fire, “I’m not having any more of that dirty coal business”.  The winters were actually colder than the previous house!  You’d wake up in the morning, and your breath would have condensed on the window, frozen on the inside. Inside it was cold, outside it was cold.  Eventually my mother paid for an electric fire to be put in so you could reach out of the bed and turn it on.  Electricity was cheap in those days”.
Text Box 5.8 The Energy Efficiency of Modern Housing in the early 1960s.    (Source: author’s oral history interview with Alan Langmaid)

A recent paper by the Prince’s Foundation (Hulme & Radford 2010) explored the economic and social impacts on local economies that the move to building systems that utilised local building materials would deliver, in particular in relation to using locally manufactured aerated clay blocks.  As well as analysing the potential of this one product, the authors reflect on the potential of scaling up the approach;

“Although this study only explored a single element of the building supply chain – structural clay blocks – these findings suggest that certain general lessons include tailoring construction techniques to local skills, designing building components which provide a range of secondary and tertiary benefits, and taking advantage of the positive impacts of simplified, generalisable approaches to complex, high-tech, specialised ones” (ibid:18)

The paper identifies a range of benefits that such an approach would bring:

• The simplicity of the systems means “it enables a local workforce to be used … this ensures that a greater proportion of economic value is captured in the local economy”
• Jobs would be created by the manufacturing of the materials
• It would also result in “professional skills development, a heightened sense of personal dignity and respect resulting from long-term professional employment, enhanced social well-being, improved social capital, healthier buildings, a more resilient building supply chain, reduced CO2 emissions, and increased longevity of the building stock” (ibid:15).

While many of the natural and local building materials and techniques outlined above have advantages from a Transition perspective, what has almost never been mentioned in the natural building literature is the potential for local materials in the retrofitting of existing buildings.  Given that, of the country’s approximately 24 million homes, at least 87% are projected to still be standing by 2050 (Kemp 2010), and that retrofitting existing homes saves 15 times more CO2 than demolishing and rebuilding them (Jowsey & Grant 2009), this is clearly an important future focus.  This theme of retrofitting is, however, picked up in the Prince’s Foundation paper; “beyond new build construction, a natural approach to materials sourcing means many of the products identified are equally suitable to retrofit in buildings of traditional construction” (ibid:19).

The recently completed 'Larch House', one of the two local Passivhauses.

Rob Scott McLeod, Technical Manager for the Building Research Establishment in Wales and the South West has been developing the concept of the ‘local passivhaus’.  A passivhaus has been defined as “a building in which thermal comfort is guaranteed solely by re-heating (or recooling) the fresh air that is required for satisfactory air quality” (NBT 2009:2).   McLeod is taking the idea one step further, seeking to build homes that reach passivhaus standard, but use predominantly local materials (McLeod 2007).  Currently under construction in South Wales are two houses built to passivhaus standard, one of them using 80% local materials (mostly timber and recycled newspaper, ‘local’ here being defined as from within South Wales), and one aiming to go beyond 90%.  The approach is one of on-site construction, site-specific design, minimisation of waste, and of a close coupling of design and materials (McLeod 2010:pers.int.).  Some of the ‘natural’ building materials discussed above are not, as yet, felt appropriate for inclusion in such buildings, hempcrete due to not demonstrating sufficiently high levels of insulation, and strawbale due to not yet having sufficient certification to satisfy insurers.  The key to reaching and exceeding 90% is training local companies to build windows to passivhaus standard using local timber, and this is already happening in South Wales as part of these projects.

The area of building and housing was explored in the TTT EDAP.  It suggested how the current building standards could be improved and used to not just address carbon emissions but also to build resilience and strengthen local economies.  One key element of this is what was called the ‘Transition Code for Sustainable Homes’.  This suggests that by 2014, SHDC has taken a proactive stance of low carbon building, developing the Transition Zero Carbon Homes Code (see Table 5.4.).

Such an approach would lead to a more vernacular building style and opening up of a potential market for local manufacturing and processing of building materials.  This principle of what Shuman (2008) called ‘import substitution’ would mean that money currently leaving the area for imported building materials would be retained in the local economy, creating new livelihoods and new small-scale industries.   Some of the building materials that could potentially be produced within Totnes and district are identified in Table 5.5.

SP1 reflected on the practicality of such an approach of deliberately promoting and prioritising local materials through the planning process.  He argued that, in the current context of planning driven by land availability and commercial viability, such restrictions would be unfeasible.  “That’s quite a challenge”, he argued, “because the planning system isn’t all-powerful.  It has to work within the government framework (i.e. Building Regulations, the Appeals process and so on), and of course you can set all those targets.  However, you have to be confident that if a developer says “no, I’m not doing it”, you are able to defend it at a planning appeal, because if you make a hash of it you’re going to get pretty big costs against you”.  He continued;

“[We can’t] say “you must use….” because then you almost create a ransom for the developer to be tied in with those local businesses.  Now I don’t think you’d ever get that through the planning system, where you actually created a complete local monopoly because the developer would still want to go for value”.

Simon Fairlie, a planning consultant specialising in low impact development agrees that imposing ‘green’ conditions through the Planning System is close to impossible.  According to Fairlie;

“At the moment even conditions imposing Code 3[1] are being overturned at appeal, because government guidance is so weak. Local materials would be resisted by builders as being “anticompetitive” and both a Tory or a Labour government would see it that way” (Fairlie 2010 pers.comm).

Some recent developments however offer the prospect of a more proactive, but less problematic approach to insistence on local building materials.  The first is “the Merton Rule” introduced by Merton Borough Council in 2003, and widely copied in other council plans.  It demands that at least 10% of energy needs must come from on-site generation, and comes into force at a threshold of 10 homes (residential) or 1,000m² (non-residential).  North Devon chose to demand 15%, and Kirlees Council are currently considering 30% by 2011, and the Merton Rule is now part of Plymouth’s Local Development Framework.  The Merton Rule was sustained on appeal from the Building Federations which argued that it made developments commercially unviable.  The Merton Rule is now endorsed in PPS1 Climate Change[2] which requires all UK local planning authorities to adopt a ‘Merton Rule’ policy.  As Fairlie (ibid) points out, renewables are different from local materials, given that renewables can be sourced from anywhere in the world and hence circumnavigates concerns about ‘protectionism’ and lack of ‘competitiveness’.

The Merton Rule has since been incorporated into the Code for Sustainable Homes (CSH), which sets out the stages of the UK’s move towards zero-carbon housing by 2016.  It includes the requirement for on-site generation which rises as the Code level rises, with the expectation that Code 6 buildings install “on or near-site zero carbon generation for all energy needs” (Hall 2008:89).  In terms of building materials however, CSH is disappointing.  It defines a ‘zero carbon home’ as one in which “net carbon emissions resulting from ALL energy used in the dwelling is zero” (DCLG 2008a:46), focusing on the performance of the final building rather than the carbon embodied in the materials.

If a legislative approach to scaling up the use of local building materials looks unfeasible, how about a criteria-based system?  This, Fairlie (2010:pers.comm) argues, would “create an opening for best practice in places where conventional development would not be allowed”.  The best current example of this is the Welsh Assembly’s ‘(Draft) Technical Advice Note 6. Planning for Sustainable Rural Economies’, published in July 2009.  This presents the concept of ‘One Wales: One Planet’.  It states that:

“the Sustainable Development Scheme, “One Wales: One Planet” includes an objective that within the lifetime of a generation, Wales should use only its fair share of the earth’s resources, and our ecological footprint be reduced to the global average availability of resources – 1.88 global hectares per person” (Welsh Assembly Government 2008:21).

This objective is then linked to planning, and in particular to the criteria that “planning applications should be accompanied by supporting information confirming that the development will be zero carbon in construction and use” (ibid:23).  Fairlie notes that “priority for local, renewable building materials can be quite easily written into a policy like this, there are no anticompetitive issues, because it is a “consumer choice” rather than a trade restriction, and builders and other vested interests do not object” (Fairlie 2010: pers.comm).

There is a chicken and egg situation here though of course.  If SHDC tomorrow were to pass a policy enshrining that a given percentage of materials were mandatory in all new buildings, there would not currently be capacity to meet demand.  Conversely, nobody would invest in setting up such businesses without the knowledge that those markets will be in place.  Hence the suggestion of a change in planning policy, flagged now, to come into effect in, say 2014.  Perhaps the key is to begin developing buildings in the area that utilise these materials, in order to start creating demand and to lead by example, an idea explored in more depth in 7.4 in an exploration of the role social enterprise might play in Transition.

In terms of what is emerging through TTT and other local initiatives, some initiatives are starting to gain momentum in modelling this approach to construction.  As with energy, housing projects are much higher capital and longer term, although some strong projects have begun to emerge.  These include;

• The Totnes Sustainable Construction company, set up to pioneer these kinds of development
• Transition Homes, which is proposing to build a small settlement of low impact houses on the Dartington Estate
• ATMOS Project (see Section 7.9.), which aims to convert the derelict Dairy Crest site into a mixture of affordable housing and business start-up units
• Work is also beginning in relation to the drafting of a policy along the lines of those outlined above.

As Seyfang (2009a) notes, there is more to low carbon, community-led building than just materials.  Other elements include what she calls ‘new living arrangements’, such as co-housing and low impact development, as well as the importance of communities owning and developing their own assets.

No questions specific to housing were asked in the survey or in the focus groups, although in the focus group of work and skills, unhappiness about the most recent large development in the town, the Southern Area development, and its low standards of energy efficiency, were voiced.  One participant said “why did they put heating in those Southern Area houses?  Why didn’t they make them energy efficient?  All of them….”  This was picked up in more depth in the in-depth interviews, which highlighted the fact that SHDC’s insistence on the lowest possible levels of energy efficiency in new buildings currently runs counter to the approach set out above.  DC2 said “SHDC don’t impose the highest standards in new build, which I think disappoints a lot of us”.  SP1 justified this approach when I asked him “the perception that is often voiced in terms of SHDC’s take on climate change and building standards is that rather than some other local authorities in the UK who take a visionary and bold stance, SHDC is happier taking the minimum set by Government?”

He replied that SHDC had tried to impose more stringent standards, but “you’ve got to make it viable.  You can make your visions so challenging to deliver that nothing happens”.  When asked whether actually taking a more stringent approach would mean that that would be precisely why businesses would want to come to the town, i.e. a selling point rather than just an insurmountable obstacle,  he replied “yes, that could be a choice… my gut response would be that it would mean we had very little development in the town over the next few years.  There’s an incredible pressure for housing in Totnes, and there are people coming through our reception facing homelessness.  It is getting that balance between the vision and somebody facing homelessness today”.

SHDC’s approach is hardly unique.  According to Gibbs et al. (1998), their approach is common.  Sustainable development or environmental issues, they argue, appear to be a relatively unimportant concern for local authorities.  Among the reasons cited for this are the limited influence local authorities are able to exert over private businesses and individuals behaviour, due, in part, to constraints imposed by central government.  Sustainable development, they argued, is “a fundamentally political concept” (ibid:unpaginated).  Ultimately, “creating and keeping jobs are ranked higher than environmental protection, and members remain to be convinced that the two areas are compatible” (ibid).  Although written in 1996, the above could still apply to SHDC in 2010.

[2] Planning Policy Statement: Planning and Climate Change.  Supplement and Planning Policy Statement: December 2010 (CLG 2006). States its aim as being to set out: “how spatial planning should contribute to reducing emissions and stabilising climate change (mitigation) and take into account the unavoidable consequences (adaptation)”.

References

Ashraf, K.K. (2007) This is not a building!  Hand-making a school in a Bangladeshi village. Architectural Design 77 (6). 114-117.

Bevan, R, Woolley, T. (2008) Hemp Lime Construction: a guide to building with hemp lime composites. IHS BRE Press.

Broome, J. (2007) The Green Self-build Book: How to Design and Build Your Own Eco-home. Dartington, Green Books.

Clarke, S. (2002) Client Report.  Final Report on the Construction of the Hemp Houses at Haverhill, Suffolk. Suffolk Housing Society Ltd.

Fairlie, S. (2010) Personal Interview.

Gibbs, D, Longhurst, J, Braithwaite, C. (1998) Struggling with Sustainability: weak and strong interpretations of sustainable development within local authority policy. Environment and Planning A 30. 1351-1365.

Hulme, J, Radford, N. (2010) Sustainable Supply Chains That Support Local Economic Development. Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment.

Jones, B. (2009) Building with Straw Bales: A Practical Guide for the UK and Ireland (2^nd edition). Green Books, Dartington.

Jowsey, E, Grant, J.  (2009) Greening the Existing Housing Stock.  Sheffield Hallam University.

Kemp, M. (ed) (2010) Zero Carbon Britain 2030. Centre for Alternative Technology Publications.

Kennedy, J. (2004) Building without Borders: Sustainable Construction for the Global Village. New Society Publishers

Kennedy, J.F., Smith, M.G., Wanek, C. (2001) (eds) The Art of Natural Building: design, construction, resources. New Society Publishing.

Kloppenburg, J, Hendrickson, J, Stevenson, G.W. (1996) Coming in to the foodshed. Agriculture and Human Values 13 (3). 33-42

McLeod, R.S. (2007) Passivhaus – Local House. MSc thesis, University of East London.

McLeod, R.S. (2010) Personal Interview.

NBT (2009) Timber Frame System Passivhaus: the science of nature, the future of construction. Natural Building Technologies http://www.natural-building.co.uk/PDF/Pavatex/090216_Technical_Manual_PASSIVHAUS.pdf

Pearson, D. (1990) The Natural House Book: creating a healthy, harmonious ecologically sound home. Prentice Hall.

Sassi, P. (2008) Taking Construction off-site. In: Hall, K. (ed) 2008.  The Green Building Bible, volume 1. Essential information to help you make your home, buildings and outdoor areas less harmful to the environment, the community and your family. Green Building Press.

Schumacher, E.F. (1974) Small is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered. London, Sphere Books.

Seyfang, G. (2009a) Community action for sustainable housing: building a low carbon future. Energy Policy doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2009.10.027

Shah, D. (2009) Council to build houses of straw. BBC News.  20^th January 2009.  Retrieved from  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lincolnshire/8266515.stm on 22nd January 2010.

Shuman, M. (2008) The Small-mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition. Berrett-Koehler.

Steen, A, Steen, B, Bainbridge, D, Eisenberg, D. (1995) The Straw Bale House. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Vale, B, Vale, R. (1975) The Autonomous House. New York, Universe Books.

Woolley, T. (2006) Natural Building: A Guide to Materials and Techniques. Crowood Press.

Owing to its size (475 pages) and to printing costs, it is being made available only in PDF format (3.7MB) which will be sent out by email.  Some tasters from this thesis have already been posted here at Transition Culture, such as Local Food and Relocalisation, and Localism or Localisation?.  More will be posted over the coming weeks.  Personally speaking, I am delighted to have completed it, and even more delighted to be able to make it available, as I think it is something that explores Transition in a depth which people will find really useful.  I tried very hard to write something un-dusty and un-overacademic, and had a wonderful compliment the other day, when a local historian who had contributed to it, told me that he was two-thirds of the way through the book and that he found it ‘rivetting’.  Not many PhDs out there that find themselves attached to that particular adjective.

Here is the Abstract, which gives a more detailed overview of what to expect:

“This thesis provides a critical review of the Transition movement, a grassroots response to peak oil and climate change, co-founded by this author. It focuses on two key aspects of the Transition approach, resilience and economic relocalisation, with the aim of analysing whether and how they can be implemented in a locality based on the Transition approach, and assessing what socio-economic and community-related structures would be necessary to implement such a process. The focus of the research is Totnes, Devon, which because of its status as the UK’s first Transition initiative and the longer history of various initiatives to promote local resilience, offers a valuable case study of attempts to practically implement resilience and localisation. A variety of research methods were employed, including surveys, focus groups, oral history and in-depth interviews, as well less conventional public participation methods such as Open Space and World Café.

The first major finding was that Transition Town Totnes (TTT) has become a significant organisation in the town, with a high level of popular support. It was also found that the obstacles to resilience and relocalisation lie not, as was hypothesised, in a lack of skills or an absence of community cohesion, but in issues of governance and the need for increased social entrepreneurship. It was found that what researchers call the ‘Value Action Gap’ (i.e. the gap between people’s declared sympathies and intentions and their actions) exists in Totnes as much as anywhere else, but that some of TTT’s projects, such as Transition Together, are working imaginatively to overcome this and to reduce emissions.

From this evidence is it concluded that Transition’s approach towards relocalisation and reducing carbon emissions can be argued to be effective in, generating engagement and initiating new enterprises. Like other ‘green’ initiatives, it struggles to engage those from more disadvantaged backgrounds, but some of its initiatives are showing promise for overcoming this. Its primary contribution is in suggesting a redefining of resilience, not as a state of preparedness for disaster, but as a desired characteristic of a sustainable society. A more resilient community, it is argued, would be one more in control of its food and energy production, as well as being one that enables inward financial investment. It also argues that the government focus on ‘localism’, the devolving of political power to the local level, ought to be expanded to include ‘localisation’, the strengthening of local production to meet local needs, a shift which would financially benefit local communities. It argues that the key challenge for Transition initiatives such as TTT is going to be scaling up from being ‘niche’ organisations to become economically viable organisations with a broad appeal and engagement, and also articulates the need for ‘Resilience Indicators’ which would allow communities to measure the degree to which their levels of resilience are increasing”.

So Chris, how does ‘Local Sustainable Homes’ differ from all the other green building books out there?

You could fill a bookshop with volumes on green building. There are so many works on sustainable design and construction and green materials that choosing what to read has become almost as difficult as deciding which spectacle frames to wear! But this book is different because it concentrates on how individuals, groups and communities are making it happen. Okay, I admit that in places the book does drift into looking at materials and construction methods but the bread and butter of the text deals with examples from around the country of how people are making sustainable homes a concrete reality – but without the concrete!

What do you think is unique about the Transition take on housing?

In a word? People and communities. Oh, that’s three! The transition movement is making resilient communities the central plank for building a sustainable future. Perfect eco-homes, whatever they might be, won’t solve the problem of climate change or prepare us for a future without cheap fossil fuels. We have to see sustainable housing in the context of sustainable communities. Imagine a house built with local timber, insulated with strawbales from a nearby farm and roofed with slates from a local quarry.

The window frames and doors are supplied by a local carpenter and the energy comes from a district heating system and a community owned wind turbine. The occupants get much of their food from a community supported agriculture scheme and also work locally. Not only does their home have a much lower carbon footprint and less embedded energy but it’s also stimulating a virtuous circle of local enterprise. When homes like this, whether they are newly built or refurbished, become the norm, then our communities will be more cohesive and better equipped to tackle climate change and cope with the problems that peak oil will bring.

What surprised you most while researching this book?

Almost as soon as I started gathering information two things became clear. First, there were lots more interesting projects going on than I had thought       possible. I could have filled the book just with stories about low impact developments or what housing associations are doing. Second, the pace of change means that new projects are being launched all the time so I was constantly rewriting to keep up to date. Fortunately the whole project, from start of researching to publication, was only just over a year so the book is pretty up to date. So I suppose the big surprise was just how much is happening out there. But that doesn’t mean we can be complacent. At a rough guess I’d say we need to increase the scale of our activity around sustainable homes a thousand-fold to really deal with the problem!

What does ‘Local Sustainable Homes’ teach us about the current state of the Transition movement?

It would have been much more difficult to write this book as an individual rather than as a transition activist. Access to transition initiatives around the country and overseas through the Transition Network was immensely valuable so, even at this early stage of development, the movement is a valuable tool for learning from and disseminating local experience.

But we need to recognise that, despite our successes, the Transition movement is still just a small part of the picture. Most of the people and projects described in ‘Local Sustainable Homes’ have either no links or a very tenous connection to Transition and very few sustainable housing projects are formal Transition initiatives. Is this a problem? Not really. The fact that so many projects are happening already is really encouraging. The fact that they don’t have a Transition label is not an issue.

Cloughjordan, which is now linked to the Transition movement, and Totnes sustainable housing projects like Transition Together and Transition Homes, are valuable examples that I’m sure will be surpassed by communities all over the UK and elsewhere. The Totnes Pound has been eclipsed by the success of local currencies in Lewes and Stroud and the same process of leapfrogging will happen with sustainable housing.

What do you feel are the key ingredients in a community housing project?

Community. By that I mean the things that bind people together for the common purpose of making their homes and neighbourhoods more sustainable. There are many examples in the book of people coming together to face a threat to their communities such as an unwelcome housing or office development or unnecessary demolition, then using this new cohesiveness to launch something positive. But community cohesion can develop in other ways. Building links between people in existing communities through programmes such as Transition Together or  people with a shared vision such as low impact development or cohousing develop shared goals that see them through the difficulties they encounter.

Of course there are ways of building and laying out homes that foster productive interactions. George Monbiot dealt with this in a recent article but most of the estates we want to turn into communities have already been built so our starting point must be the people themselves.

Transition promotes the use of local building materials.  How big a part do you think they will play in the future, or can industrial materials do things that more local, natural materials simply cannot do?  How purist should we be?

One of the points I make in the book is that we need to reduce the embodied energy in new homes and refurbishments as well as everyday energy consumption. An ‘eco-home’ built with high energy fossil fuel based materials may consume very little energy in the long term but it will take decades to pay back the carbon debt created by building the house in the first place – and climate change is a problem NOW! Even if the problem of carbon emissions was not so urgent why develop a dependency on construction methods and materials that will be unsustainable with the end of cheap oil?

Local materials are vital to sustainable construction because you immediately reduce the transport emissions associated with materials carried from across the country or half-way round the world. What’s the true cost of slates from China or paving slabs from India when we include the environmental damage their production and transport cause?

Using local timber, straw, hemp, earth, stone, wool and a host of other materials also boosts local economies, helps create resilient communities and brings back a regional identity to our buildings. And many of these materials lock up carbon so new buildings and refurbishments can actually be carbon negative

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting a return to the cold and drafty buildings of the 18th or 19th century. We need a new synthesis of modern construction methods and traditional materials to create homes that are a pleasure to live in but don’t cost us the earth.

Some specialist materials and products – glass, photovoltaics, heat pumps – may best be sourced from outside the local area. We shouldn’t lay down rigid rules but use common sense. So no, we shouldn’t be purists, but neither should we give up too easily in the search for local and sustainable low energy alternatives.

In the book you tell the story of the TTT Building and Housing group and what it has achieved thus far.  You have been involved since early in its evolution, what lessons do you feel you have learnt about what is possible for such groups to achieve?

Wow! The sky’s the limit. Set realistic goals but never imagine that there are limits to what can be achieved. Build on what’s already happening in your area but don’t be constrained by it. Aim for a mix of education, practical action and inspiring projects. Remember that the dividing lines between different transition theme groups are arbitrary so don’t be afraid to work with other groups on joint projects. Be organised with regular business meetings, mailing lists, events and discussions and try to involve as many people in conducting the business as possible. This creates a sense of ownership and involvement and prevents a few people getting burnt out because they are doing everything – but that applies to almost any campaigning organisation.

I think the key factor in the success of the Building & Housing Group in Totnes is that we have a solid core of people who have been involved for the past few years and just keep coming to meetings and getting involved in projects. How to build and maintain such a group will vary in each area and we don’t have any magic formula. Just use whatever mix of education, agitation, organisation and inspiration that works.

Any final thoughts you would like to share?

I’ve really enjoyed researching and writing this book and I hope people learn as much from reading it as I have from creating it. When we first discussed the idea of a book on sustainable housing for the Transition series I envisaged a very different end result from the book that will be published in a few days. So the book really is the product of what I came across while traveling around the country, trawling through the internet and talking to hundreds of people rather than just flesh on the bones of an original concept. I hope people beg, borrow or hopefully buy a copy and I really hope they’ll be kind enough to tell me what’s wrong with it!

In The Pattern of English Building, his seminal review of vernacular English construction techniques and the wide range of building materials that have defined English architecture – from flint and chalk to clay, oak and straw – Alec Clifton-Taylor wrote:

“all these different materials imposed architectural forms appropriate to their character and, despite the many visual improprieties of the last century and a quarter, the pattern is still remarkably complete. It was the great difficulty of transporting heavy materials which led all but the most affluent until the end of the eighteenth century to build with the materials that were most readily available near the site, even when not very durable.”

In a world that lacked the hydrocarbon punch that today bestows the ability, which we take for granted, to move mountains, people in a wide diversity of locations developed forms of construction that reflected local materials, the local climate and other cultural influences particular to that place. From Devon’s curvaceous cob cottages to the limestone roofs of Dorset; from the intricate timber framing of Suffolk to the granite-walled homes of Leicestershire, it was the materials that defined the forms of building – leading also to a wide range of artisans and craftspeople: masons, ironmongers, lime kiln-keepers, thatchers and so on.

Over the past hundred years, during what one might call ‘The Age of Cheap Oil’, the process of building shelter has, like most other aspects of our lives, become increasingly industrialised. A recent study by British Gas found that houses built during the 1960s were built to such shockingly poor standards of energy efficiency that they performed worse than the Tudor homes of the 1500s. In an oral history interview I did in Totnes, Devon, a man who grew up in the town in the 1960s recalled his grandmother, with whom he and his mother lived, keenly moving out of an old house that was a converted cider press.

“She just wanted modern. She wanted electric fires, electric cookers, electric everything. She wanted automatic this, that and everything. So we moved, at my grandmother’s insistence, from this wonderful rambling old building to a brand-new house, typical of its time. Wooden-framed, single-glazed windows, open fire for a chimney which she quickly replaced with an electric fire (“I’m not having any more of that dirty coal business”). The winters were actually colder than in the previous house. You’d wake up in the morning, and your breath would have condensed on the window, frozen on the inside. Inside it was cold, outside it was cold. Eventually my mother paid for an electric fire to be put in so you could reach out of the bed and turn it on. Electricity was cheap in those days.”

These days our challenges in terms of shelter are different from those of the 1960s. We no longer live in a world of cheap and abundant energy. Promises of ‘electricity too cheap to meter’ have been and gone, and the climate change caused by our burning of fossil fuels is an increasingly urgent issue. It is clear that the target of avoiding a 2°C rise in greenhouse gas emissions is being overtaken by reality: feedbacks not expected for 50-100 years are already under way – the melting of Arctic ice, the release of methane from the seabed, the melting of permafrost, the disappearance of glaciers; the list goes on . . . This is all happening just because of a 0.8°C rise in the levels of CO2 in our atmosphere since fossil-fuel burning began in earnest. The urgent need is not only to reduce emissions, but to seek to phase them out altogether by 2030.

Over the past four years, the rapidly growing Transition movement has argued that climate change cannot be looked at in isolation from the imminent peaking in world oil production, with the resultant price volatility and interruptions to supply. This realisation has mobilised thousands of communities around the world to start planning for life beyond cheap energy – to see the end of the age of cheap energy and the need for urgent decarbonisation not as a disaster but as an opportunity; a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rethink basic assumptions. Transition Initiatives can now be found in villages, islands, cities, districts, boroughs, universities and schools around the world. They focus on the practicalities of relocalisation, offering a creative process of engagement and awareness-raising that seeks to involve the community in designing a new, and more appropriate, way forward. The impact of Transition thinking is starting to emerge in the most unexpected places. A report in 2010 from Lloyds Insurance and Chatham House argued, as Transition has for the past four years, that peak oil needs to be looked at alongside climate change, and the following quote from that report could have been taken straight from a Transition publication such as this book:

“Energy security is now inseparable from the transition to a low-carbon economy, and businesses plans should prepare for this new reality. Security of supply and emissions-reduction objectives should be addressed equally, as prioritising one over the other will increase the risk of stranded investments or requirements for expensive retrofitting.”

Just as they have in all other aspects of our lives, cheap fossil fuels have come to underpin the way in which we build our homes. In the same way that it has been argued that our current food system means that we are, in effect, as Dale Allen Pfeiffer put it, ‘eating oil’, such is the embodied energy in new buildings that it could be argued that we now live in buildings made from oil too.

In the same way that, across the world, the Transition movement is arguing for seeing peak oil and climate change as two sides of one coin, Chris Bird’s book represents an important shift in the debates around what the housing of the future will be like. Much of the literature on green building focuses on new build using local and/or natural materials – what is often termed ‘natural building’ – as self-builders discover the possibilities presented by materials such as cob, straw bales, hemp and so on. I have been involved in a number of natural building projects, and have taught straw-bale, cob, cordwood and hemp/lime construction courses. These are all wonderfully democratic materials; anyone can get the hang of them and use them to create individual spaces that feel so different from our everyday idea of what a house should feel like.

The point Chris makes in this book, however, is that the decisions about housing we need to make will bring together the challenges we face today (peak oil, climate change, the need vastly to reduce our energy consumption) with the challenges faced in the past (the need to rediscover local building materials). Much of what is known as ‘green building’ sources its materials from far and wide – sheep’s-wool insulation from Germany; lime from France; shingles from Canada. Like a delicious but distantly sourced organic meal, this represents an approach that is highly vulnerable to volatile energy prices.

The core argument of Local Sustainable Homes is that housing ourselves can be, and needs to be, about far more than simply having a roof over our heads. The model today is one of homes designed for us, built from high-embodied-energy materials, with a high carbon footprint; materials sourced wherever in the world they can be found cheapest; and the property purchased in a way that saddles us with a debt we then spend many years struggling to pay off. How would it be if, instead, we were more involved with our homes’ design, if our choice of materials meant that it became possible for local businesses to emerge to provide them, if the construction process worked in such a way that people could be trained to engage with construction for the first time, and if the homes were built in such a way as to require no space heating at all? We could, by building ‘sustainable homes’, produce buildings that lock up more carbon than they produce, that have a local distinctiveness, and that stimulate the local economy rather than leaching from it.

Of course, it is not all just about new buildings. Of Britain’s approximately 24 million homes, at least 87 per cent are projected to still be in use by 2050. Retrofitting existing homes saves 15 times more CO2 than demolishing and rebuilding them. Over the past 30 years we have also used our housing stock to introduce the ruinous idea that our houses will increase in value for ever, and that we can use them as a cash-dispensing machine. In the UK, and especially in Ireland, this has led to a huge problem of overpriced, energy-inefficient housing that nobody can afford, and historically unprecedented indebtedness. Alongside energy efficiency and local materials, it is clear that we also need to find new models for how we ‘do’ housing – such as cohousing, housing cooperatives and so on. Many such models are explored within these pages. As the implications of the bursting of the debt ‘bubble’ continue to unravel, the owner–occupier model will become increasingly difficult to sustain, and we will need to look at a variety of ways in which we may house ourselves.

Possibly the greatest challenge, however, is tackling the low energy efficiency of our housing. The UK has some of the worst housing stock in Europe in terms of energy efficiency. How to retrofit buildings of such wildly different types? Many innovative schemes are under way, and Chris explores some of these here.

The question this book addresses, ultimately, is: What is a ‘local house’? In ten years’ time, might it be possible that the building standards require that new buildings be constructed using almost entirely local materials, but built to very high energy-efficiency standards, and that the existing housing stock be made vastly more energy-efficient, again using mostly local materials? While little is yet happening in terms of the use of local materials for retrofits, one very exciting development, under construction as I write, is the building of two ‘local Passivhauses’ in Wales. These use largely local materials (over 90 per cent local for one of them), and are built to the Passivhaus standard, requiring no space heating at all. Their construction involves the seeking of local materials, the training of local builders, the recycling of local newspaper (for insulation) and the engagement of local window-makers to manufacture high-performance windows from local timber. It is a project that is beginning to model the future of construction in such a way that the future comes into distinct focus.

The challenge, though, as Gill Seyfang of UAE puts it, is “scaling up the existing small-scale, one-off housing projects to industrial mass-production”. Housing ourselves, and reducing the energy consumption of our existing homes, if done well, could become one of the key drivers of the regeneration of our local economies. These challenging times demand that we think smart, and that is just what Chris Bird does within these pages.

Rob Hopkins, September 2010

First up was Hank Dittmar of the Princes’ Foundation who spoke about the Foundation’s work in relation to green building….

[Part Two here]

Then Jonathan Porritt spoke, setting that work in a wider context….

First of the 4 panel speakers was David Orr, who was interviewed recently (an hour or so after this event!) here at Transition Culture…

… then, after me, it was Tim Jackson, author of ‘Prosperity without Growth’…. excellent…

… and the final speaker was Stewart Brand, author of ‘Whole Earth Discipline’….