At the start the idea was simple…renovate. Then slowly it became “retrofit”! The old Victorian house was for our family of four to simply live in whilst trying to make it comfortable and a little stylish, but on a budget of about £80,000. After all, the estate agent had said some local developers had looked at it and thought it needed about £40,000 worth of work to do a basic job.
So, someone, quite reasonably, had said, “It should be done sustainably too!”. Which, in January 2016, just a month after agreement was reached by 196 countries at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris, seemed like a very sensible idea. We didn’t know at the time but paragraphs 6.4-6.7 of the Paris Agreement established a mechanism “to contribute to the mitigation of greenhouse gases and support sustainable development”.
The concept of sustainable development is written into every section of the UK’s National Planning Policy Framework and declares that the concepts of planning and sustainability are inextricably linked. In other words when you build you’d better build as sustainably as possible, or so you might think.
Luckily (some might say unluckily) I have supported Everton Football Club since I was a small boy growing up on the Wirral, Merseyside. Out of that allegiance I have collected a tight-knit group of fellow game-going blue noses over the years. One such weary traveller, Sean Griffiths, also happens to be an architect and artist. Sean was one of the founders of the now disbanded FAT, is a professor of architecture at Yale and Westminster universities and now has his own practice called Modern Architect. We asked Sean to redesign the house and he did a fantastic job. We explained that we wanted open-ish plan on the ground floor, two bathrooms and four bedrooms plus a loft den. So not much to cram into an 1890s Victorian terrace! We told him that the spaces we were going to live in were more important than the materials/finishes because we knew the budget wasn’t much for what we wanted. To get everything in we needed to be able to take the whole roof off and build up to the ridge and one metre higher than the rear bedroom’s pitched roof (the one the council planners really wanted to keep, see planning). I vividly remember a conversation in what is now Fred’s bedroom between me, Sean and another mate Pat Cray (the draughtsman or “CAD monkey” as he would often self-deprecatingly call himself). The conversation went something like this,
Sean: You could get an extra bedroom and a den in the loft but you’ll need to lose both roofs and have a square box on the back of the house.
Me: OK. What’s the chance of that getting planning approval?
Sean & Pat: (Hesitation as they looked at each other) 50/50-ish! (followed by laughs)
Me: OK. Sounds do-able.
What I have since found out is that they were being, for them, unusually optimistic. In my head 50/50 meant the outcome was in my hands. If I did a good job with the planning application I felt I could swing it. What I didn’t know at the time was anything about planning and planners, nor how long and expensive the campaign to get it approved would be.
The first brush with the planners of Weymouth & Portland Borough Council wasn’t how I’d imagined it. Pat’s drawings didn’t have the solar PV on the rear and side walls of the rear structure (the box!). The officer we spoke with in the council offices couldn’t have been less helpful if she’d tried. It was a kind of “over my dead body” vibe emanating from across the other side of the table. I started going down the passive house/sustainability track hoping to see a glimmer of interest. Nothing. In fact, we were told, quite emphatically, that no amount of planet saving design and kit would get “that” through.
Funnily enough in the end we didn’t make the house passive (or EnerPHit which is almost passive and for old house retrofits rather than new builds) because we were worried that we didn’t have access to expert passive builders and that mucking about with the original house fabric could cause us trouble down the line. For example, there is no insulation in our wall cavities. We figured that cavities existed for a reason! You can find out exactly what we did and how we did it by going here.
I found the council’s response rather disappointing and started looking into this thing called planning. At Sean’s suggestion I Googled for a local planning consultant who might be able to help in some way and found the absolute legend that is Charlie Hopkins, whom I later discovered had founded the UK’s first specialist eco legal firm at a time when people put leaded four star in their 3 litre cars, cigar firms made the best ads on the telly and Britain’s beaches and rivers were so heavily polluted that falling into the river Mersey near where I grew up warranted a mandatory stomach pumping in A&E.
Charlie taught me that the National Planning Policy Framework, the document that informs and guides every local authority’s Local Plan (i.e. the local planning bible), had a self-proclaimed “golden thread of sustainability running through it” but though there were a lot of “fine words” in the documents actually getting planners to apply them was a constant source of huge frustration. In planning departments across the UK, it seems, unchecked global warming and the subsequent demise of the human race always comes a very poor second to the retention of a nice pitched roof.
Somehow, as the process continued, I came to the conclusion that the offending box we needed in order to get the space we wanted stood a better chance of obtaining planning permission if it was integral to the eco-credentials of the house. Figuring out how to do it and how to pitch it to the council planners really was a leap into the unknown (and the utterly uncertain).
But, we did it and we think you can too, if you want to follow us and learn how to take an old Victorian house from EPC ‘F’ to ‘B’ you can download all of our house data to inform your work on your property or those you are working on commercially as a contractor.
