“We’ve got a once in a generation chance to get this right.”

John Christophers is the architect behind the UK’s first zero carbon retrofit. A flagship example of retrofitting a Victorian house. He is one of the driving forces behind Retrofit Balsall Heath, a social movement to transform the energy efficiency and aesthetic of the built environment in his hometown.

The house is performing better than zero carbon, and John has been hosting open days at his home in Balsall Heath to start conversations about how to retrofit homes across the UK at a community-led level. This feels particularly urgent within the context of the energy, health and climate crisis and colder weather around the corner. “We’ve got a once in a generation chance to get this right,” John says.

Currently, retrofit funding is designed to address one thing at a time, for example, to replace the windows in one privately owned house, when what we really need is to bring energy use right down by fully insulating the walls, roofs, floors, windows and doors, and get the remaining energy needed from renewables and heat pumps. “If we only put in half the insulation, we’ve still got all the disruption, all the overhead costs. We must go the whole way.”

Community-led When it comes to retrofit every detail matters. A housing development for 450 homes had received planning permission on the basis that they put heat pumps into the development, but they planned to put in gas boilers instead. The news came as a letter through the door with a variation of the planning condition application. Most people would probably just put the letter straight in the bin, but someone picked it up. They worked out that in fact, if the development went ahead, and they changed the heat pumps to gas boilers, then there would be 2 million extra kgs of poisonous nitrous oxide as well as CO2 emission “in the middle of a very dense urban area,”

Lots of people, once this was explained to them, wrote letters of objection. “And I’m really pleased to say that in the end, the planners didn’t even have to refuse the application… the developers withdrew it”. The power of winning a campaign like that, locally, has just been fantastic in terms of people understanding what the issues are, and feeling that we the people can do something.”

A key thing for a large-scale retrofit project is that it cannot be top-down, with a bit of community involvement. It must be community-led. There’s a precedent for this in Housing Action Trusts, an urban regeneration model that was used in Castle Vale, which brought together local residents and legal, finance and design professionals. Decisions were made by the community, and then supported by that process.

John is also inspired by models like People Powered Retrofit in Manchester, which pairs residents with trades people who’ve got skills to retrofit their homes. He sees opportunity for new jobs and skills in this movement, if we can create the infrastructure to train people. What John would really love to do, is to upskill experts who have lived in the area for twenty years, and get them accredited to do the work and affiliated to other organisations that the Council would be willing to contract.

The Role of Creativity

Arts has an integral part to play to explain, interpret and celebrate what needs to be done within the community. At the Balsall Heath carnival, the zero carbon house hosted a theatre performance to demonstrate retrofit. Actors in builders hats went through the motions of reimagining a Wendy house, by lifting the roof, putting the insulation in the walls, fitting a few triple glazed windows and a heat pump. “There was a lot of fun and laughs in bringing that together,” John says.