Reinvent terraces as eco-housing, says report

Architect Mark Hines has drawn up detailed plans showing how thousands of Victorian houses emptied under the government’s Pathfinder policy could be transformed into “eco-communities” at minimal cost.

In a report commissioned by Save Britain’s Heritage, Hines argued that streets of abandoned terraces could be refurbished and enlarged to become exemplars of retrofitting, at a fraction of the cost of rebuilding them.

He said this would also represent a far cheaper and more efficient way of tackling climate change and housing shortage than the previous government’s controversial eco town plans.
Save’s president, Marcus Binney, said Hines’s “bold vision” was one which no government could afford to ignore.

In the report, Reviving Britain’s Terraces, which is due to be published next month, Binney called on the new government to scrap Pathfinder, the housing market renewal programme launched in 2003 but derailed by the recession.

“Pathfinder programmes are among the most destructive and disgraceful official policies of recent years, callously pursued by both central and local government,” he wrote.

“They have caused appalling anxiety and actual misery to the people evicted from their homes… As well as the destruction, there is the waste. To date, the Pathfinder scheme has cost in the region of £2.2 billion and has knocked down four times more homes (16,000) than it has created.”

Save commissioned Hines to investigate how 500 condemned houses in Manchester could be rehabilitated to a high level of sustainability and energy efficiency.

The report shows how the two-up, two-downs could be upgraded to reach level 4 or 5 of the Code for Sustainable Homes for a cost of between £30,000 and £60,000.

It also suggested knocking through party walls to create large family homes for a cost of £126,000 – £25,000 less than building a three-bed house from scratch, said Hines.

David Ireland, chief executive of the Empty Homes Agency, lent his support, saying: “Terraced houses are amazingly adaptable and with imagination can be transformed into exciting places to live.”