Press
Kevin McCloud to work with HCA on exemplar community-owned housing scheme
Hab Oakus named as preferred partner for community-led development
Grant Shapps MP, the Minister of State for Housing & Local Government joined author and broadcaster Kevin McCloud and environmentalist Jonathon Porritt to turn the sod – or more accurately bash the hemp – on the Triangle scheme in Swindon last Thursday.
The Triangle, a development of 42 homes, is the first project by Hab Oakus, the joint venture between Kevin McCloud’s development company, Hab, and housing group GreenSquare. Houses will be built to Code 4 in the Code for Sustainable Homes with some units being built to Code 5. The project has been designed by Glenn Howells Architects and landscape architects Studio Engleback working with environmental engineers Max Fordham, engineers Curtins, and cost consultants DBK and is being built by Willmott Dixon.
The somewhat bemused housing minister was set to work shoveling hemp – walls are being built from Tradical Hemcrete, a hemp and lime wall thermal walling system that absorbs CO2 in its manufacture and so has negative embodied CO2.
Grant Shapps said: “I know that projects like the one we’re starting off today are really important because they lead the way, they show what’s possible, they give a sense of ambition. I have to say that we’re very grateful to everyone involved in this incredible project for getting it going, because you are showing the way, providing leadership and I know this is going to be an enormous success.”
McCloud was keen to stress that the project – which has been supported by grant funding from both the HCA and the DECC, and has received R&D support from the Energy Savings Trust, is being built to standard housing association budgets stating ‘Right now, it’s fundamental that we make houses affordable as much as we make them ambitious’.
He also extolled the environmental advantages of building in hemp adding, as an afterthought, ‘and if there happens to be a fire… you can smoke your own house’.
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