Worth one’s salt

While property businesses are colouring their press releases green, Rupert Bates heads to Gosport to find a development built on more than just promises

PROMISES, promises, promises. A modern-day pledge is meaningless in a world heavy with bluster and lies, with debate and compromise for wimps. So, when just about every company under the sun commits to becoming carbon neutral, don’t be surprised when people reach for a pinch of salt. Property businesses were queuing up to shout their eco-credentials during COP26 in Glasgow. Never had so many press releases been pre-written, running alongside the green bandwagon trucking up to Scotland, ready to jump on board the moment the first ‘There is no Planet B’ slogan was trotted out.

Many period houses bring a smile to architect and aesthete, but not the climate quantity surveyor. Few new homes built in the past 100 years have been pillars of beauty but expect to hear more about houses becoming precision-engineered in factories with zero-carbon specifications driven by integrated low-carbon technologies, such as air source heat pumps and smart devices to monitor energy performance and collect data. Wherever there is money to be made there is data to collect.

According to the Committee on Climate Change, energy use in homes, such as heating and electricity, accounts for 14% of total UK carbon emissions. New homes, built from next year, have to reduce emissions by 31% ahead of the 2025 Future Homes Standard, with the likes of gas boilers replaced by heat pumps and solar panels, not to mention the huge costs of retrofitting.

I swam through the green wash and emerged in the waters of Portsmouth Harbour, or, more specifically, the Gosport peninsula, with the derelict home of the Royal Navy’s arsenal an unlikely location for best practice and collaboration when it comes to reimagining the housebuilding process and delivering zero-carbon homes in an historic setting, without compromising on design values – look good, feel good.

Priddy’s Hard, a mixed-use development on the Hampshire coast, is the work of housebuilder Elitenugen, polishing nautical heritage downstream from HMS Victory and working with core manufacturing partners to ensure every component part, every material, is wired into the environmental imperative, fashioning a blueprint for green living with its own timber-frame factory on site, using modern methods of construction.

A fortress in the 1750s, Priddy’s Hard became a gunpowder magazine, with munitions manufactured during both world wars, until being decommissioned in the 1980s. There are scheduled ancient monuments to protect, Grade Ii-listed munitions buildings to refurbish, military history to parade, wildlife habitats to enhance and even a micro-brewery and a pub on the site to refresh.

This derelict symbol of the Navy’s once-mighty firepower could become a template for sustainable placemaking, with the £30m regeneration project a partnership with the Portsmouth Naval Base Property Trust, building homes, creating jobs and unlocking private-sector investment. No pinch of cynical salt down here by the harbour, where salty old sea dogs still sail, for this is a promise kept, with not even Lord Nelson turning a blind eye to this flagship scheme.