Major bid to heatproof whole neighbourhoods
AMASSIVE drive is under way across Birmingham to try to persuade more families to heatproof their homes to cut fuel bills and carbon emissions, with community activists targeting whole streets to kickstart ‘the retrofit revolution’.
Now the Government is being pressed to invest more in the plans to ensure poorer families can take the plunge.
Social enterprise Civic Square, the Sultan Bahu Trust and climate change enthusiasts are among the groups working to help neighbours in Balsall Heath and Ladywood – two of the most impoverished areas of the city – to get the new measures.
In Ladywood, residents in Link Road are being supported by Civic Square to work through the practicalities and benefits of retrofitting and how to apply for grants and funding.
While in Balsall Heath the creator behind the city’s first ‘zero carbon house’ is working with the local mosque to reach neighbours with climate change messages.
It’s part of a citywide drive to ‘level up’ areas of the city with high numbers of social and private housing in poor condition or that are leaking heat, pushing up energy bills even higher for those who can least afford it.
Birmingham City Council has put home upgrades at the heart of its levelling up strategy, with a plan to retrofit 60,000 of its 61,000 council dwellings and create green jobs to design, innovate and deliver projects.
But private owners need to get on board urgently too. Grants and funding are available to drastically reduce costs, say activists.
Music teacher Eleanor Hewer and husband Scott, who live in Link Road, near Edgbaston Reservoir, in Ladywood, said they had “no idea” what retrofitting involved until they received information and a visit from Civic Square.
They used a thermal camera to show where heat was escaping from their home and talked through the various options they could take up.
“I am genuinely driven by all the positives,” said Mrs Hewer. “A warmer home without spending more, or the guilt of causing more damage, and long term, living on a street where life is safer and cleaner for all is the dream we have now.”
Charlie Edmonds, a Cambridge University architecture graduate who joined Civic Square last year, said the group is using a grassroots engagement model, “so you hear about retrofitting from your neighbour,” which he thinks will be more successful than conventionally advertising building services.
Focusing on a whole street at once “genuinely improves the ambition, because you’re not just sporadically at a house here, a house there,” added Mr Edmonds.
Working with neighbours in other ways would then come out of the engagement, which is all part of Civic Square’s vision to connect communities.
Meanwhile, in Balsall Heath home to a landmark property that was the first zero carbon house in the city, locals including Kamran Shezad from the Sultan Bahu Trust want the area to become a Zero Carbon Neighbourhood.
John Christophers, architect behind the inspiring eco house which is wholly self sustaining, said it was so well insulated and eco powered, via solar energy, that it feeds excess energy back into the electric grid.
He thinks retrofitting can add value and interest to older housing stock. “If we can reinvent, we can reinvigorate our old built heritage,” he says.
The Bahu Trust’s Kamran Shezad said cultural differences between how South Asian and white families lay out and heat their homes must be accounted for in retrofitting proposals.
“Our job is to localise it,” he says. “We need to educate the community about what retrofitting means. We have to make the language around insulating easy, to make people buy into it.”