Turning the Sod – Thursday 27th May 2010

Rod Bluh, leader of Swindon Council, bending the Minister's ear

Jonathon Porritt, general all round sustainability hotshot (oh, and non-executive director of our contractor, Willmott Dixon

David Ashmore, GreenSquare Group's Chief Exec

Men at Work

Hemp Glorious Hemp …

Bashing the Hemp

Yesterday we turned the sod – or more accurately bashed the hemp – on the Triangle.

Housing Minister Grant Shapps made a surprise appearance – so we set him to work …

Jam and Knitting

Last night I had the honour of delivering the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) Trust Annual Lecture.  My challenge was to hold the attention of 300 architects – a tall order at the best of times.  The lecture should probably have been entitled ‘Narrative and Context’ but I was pretty confident that nobody – not even a bunch of architects – would turn up to hear me talk about that.  So I called it ‘jam and knitting’, in a bid to sound suitably populist and obtuse.  But it could equally have been called ‘In praise of the higgledy piggledy and haphazard’ or simply ‘An Ode to Mess’.

Our obsession with bureaucratic neatness has eroded ambiguous spaces from our public realm.  Builders like straight lines, lawyers like clear boundaries.  Developers like empty sites and simple rectilinear plans.  Local authorities and the police force are united in their dislike of spaces that encourage people to loiter and lurk.  The market doesn’t like patches of land that can’t be easily parcelled up and sold. Housing Associations deliberately seek to minimise shared spaces in a quest to avoid neighbourly dispute.

But in banishing awkwardness and mess we lose the very areas where relationships are forged.  Making places is about more than increasing the range of goods and services to hand.  If a neighbourhood is to have its own centre of gravity, it needs an understanding of ‘community’ that is greater than the sum of the individual households.  It needs public space and shared space; places that allow for the possibility of sharing, working together, socializing.  Spaces that invite you to amble, linger, chat.

Kitchen gardens, shared vegetable plots, community buildings and car pools offer endless potential for disagreement and abuse, but are also fundamental in transforming discrete family units into a functioning community.  As with families, the most successful communities are those that can accommodate, and survive, a healthy dose of argument and chaos.

We’ve got planning permission!

After three years of hard work, blood, sweat and tears, and a great deal of money, Hab Oakus has finally gained planning permission for our first project.

The planning committee meeting at Swindon’s Civic Offices was a nail-biting affair, with criticisms and concerns falling thick and fast. We were not surprised by the objections. While the architecture of our development is deliberately low-key, there are many aspects of the scheme – a 42 unit community on land to the rear of Northern Road in Swindon -  which fly in the face of conventional planning.

We are introducing sustainable drainage systems and building in Hemp. Most controversially, we are providing far fewer parking spaces than would usually be the case. Instead we are relying on community car clubs, good public transport services and outstanding cycling facilities to alleviate the demand for second and third cars. 

Swindon’s Head of Planning Dave Potter summed up the challenge faced by the committee when he said ‘we were considerably exercised by this application as there is simply no precedent for it in the Swindon area’.

So it was a surprise, as well as an enormous relief, when the project was approved by eight votes to two. This is a test cast for Swindon, and it took courage to give us their support. Our job now is to make sure that their courage reaps rewards.

Colour and context

Something that’s very dear to the Hab fraternity is the idea of context. It sounds poncey, doesn’t it? But context for us is what makes places interesting and special and in my view accounts for about 50% of what makes good architecture, (the other half is all about how buildings respond to people).

So far on our Triangle scheme, we’ve been able to incorporate lots of ideas that root the design of the buildings in Swindon. We’re building terraced houses that mimic the 19th century terraced streets of Swindon in its heyday but do so with a contemporary twist. The general arrangement and density has been influenced by the listed Railway Cottages in the town – and so has one other strong characteristic: the colour of the buildings.

About two months ago I spent a day in the town mapping the colours of the local brick, Cotswold stone, roofing materials and (of course) Swindon’s famous pebbledash with which I am in love. Producing a colour palette is something I’ve done for several communities and it’s a rewarding and interesting process. I use large sample swatches and a number of formalised colour ‘models’ and systems for accuracy (but chiefly the paint swatches to begin with) and I’m always intrigued to find how narrow or broad a town’s colour palette is. Swindon is typical in that its distinctiveness lies in what is not in the palette. There are no greenish umber tints in Swindon’s world of colour, no orange ochre and precious little yellow ochre. The browns are warm, the greys are cool and brownish, the reds (of the brick and roof tiles) are gloriously warm. It turns out that the Swindon Colour Palette (I should really call it the Gorse Hill palette since that’s mainly where I worked and where we’re building) is magical and quite specific to where it is. Quite contextual in fact.

Join the campaign

Hab Housing emerged out of frustration with the poor quality of much of the UK’s new-build housing. But the truth is that the quality of our existing housing stock also leaves a lot to be desired.

Britain’s 26 million homes are responsible for around 27% of Britain’s carbon emissions. Which is why a number of august institutions like WWF, the UK Green Building Council and the Energy Saving Trust have combined forces with Grand Designs Magazine to launch a national campaign, the Great British Refurb. We’re on a mission to help and champion Britain’s homeowners and tenants. To develop the means to upgrade our housing stock so that it’s warmer, more comfortable, more efficient. And to persuade government to introduce new ways of financing the wholesale retrofitting of our homes and to turn them into low-carbon dwellings that can even produce energy and sell it back to the grid.

Visit www.greatbritishrefurb.co.uk to find out more.