The largest ever housing estate to be built in a UK national park has won planning permission – and it is fantastic. In a breakthrough for British sustainable housing, a new district of 685 super-insulated homes and workspaces on the site of a former ironworks in Lewes, East Sussex, got the green light from the South Downs National Park authority last week.
New homes that can ease Britain’s housing crisis are a good thing, but it’s rare to feel genuinely excited about a large housing development these days. Most projects currently approved in the UK tend to be the usual car-dominated and shoddily constructed identikit new-build suburbs, built by one of a handful of mega-developers that dominate the industry. However, Lewes has a different approach – one that offers an environmentally sound model to rescue Britain’s broken private property sector.
The Phoenix, Lewes’s new 7.9 hectare neighbourhood, is set to be both ecologically and socially ambitious. Designed by a dream team of 12 architecture practices, the estate will include 18 mixed-tenure housing blocks set around courtyard gardens and public squares, interspersed with a canteen, nursery, health centre and workshops.
The property developer, Human Nature, says the homes will be built primarily from wood, and will reduce residents’ heating bills by 80% compared with conventional new-builds. It also promises a fleet of 50 shared vehicles to reduce car ownership, upgraded flood defences along the River Ouse and the refurbishment of existing heritage buildings for community use.
Most remarkable of all, while many new UK housing developments are bitterly opposed by nearby residents, The Phoenix has been met with virtually unheard of enthusiasm from the community, with 67.5% of consultation respondents in Lewes supporting the scheme.
As housebuilding falls to its lowest level since the Conservatives came to power, amid spiralling waiting lists and record-high private rents, Lewes’s new eco homes demonstrate what could be possible all across the country if Britain fixed its dysfunctional housebuilding sector. The Phoenix is not a charity, nor is it publicly funded, but it proves what even private-sector property development could achieve if it embraced a more ambitious, community-centred approach to construction.
A key figure behind the project is the former managing director of Greenpeace and co-founder of sustainable developer Human Nature, Jonathan Smales. He told me that the current approach to homebuilding in Britain is “catastrophic”, and that “bad urban planning exacerbates loneliness in a profound way, contributing to an epidemic of mental health problems. We need to design the environment we live in to encourage far more social interaction.”
This approach appealed to a Lewes community group, which invited Smales and his colleagues to submit a plan after conventional developers had, for decades, failed to bring forward schemes of genuine social value. A previous design proposing 700 car-parking spaces for just 400 homes fell through, receiving more than 2,500 objections from the community.
When asked what he thinks of the UK’s major housing developers, such as Persimmon, Taylor Wimpey and Barratt, Smales grins. “I can’t say good luck to them – their model needs to be outcompeted and displaced,” he says. “We aim to show that living sustainably can be a joy.”
The UK private housing market is desperately in need of a revolution. The majority of new homes in Britain are built by a tiny handful of large and powerful companies. With toothless regulation and almost no competition to challenge their market dominance, the volume housebuilders can turn a profit churning out small, carbon-heavy, generic and poorly constructed homes, knowing buyers have little choice other than to cough up.
In contrast to Austria, where strong public-sector housebuilding programmes drag standards up, or Belgium, where families can more easily build their own home if they don’t like what developers are offering, in Britain most of us are stuck with whatever substandard box the market flings together. To make ecologically sound and community-oriented new neighbourhoods like Lewes’s the norm, rather than the exception, Britain’s housebuilders desperately need bolder leadership.
“Building low-carbon, high-quality housing that enhances biodiversity and doesn’t leave a harmful ecological footprint is absolutely possible, but it is challenging,” says Smith Mordak, the chief executive of the UK Green Building Council, who fears many developers still believe building sustainably is risky and expensive. “We need governments and large developers to publicly commit to ambitious ecological standards to give supply chains the confidence to invest.”
Stronger commitments from the public sector can quickly translate into real change. In 2009, for instance, Exeter Council set high insulation standards for all its new buildings. Initially, this move pushed up construction costs by 20%, but within a few years, local builders had learned that to win work in the city they needed to build sustainably, and today costs are 4% lower than before the new standards were introduced.
With or without public sector leadership, we desperately need a new generation of developers with the bravery and patience to design and build homes that communities can cherish. It’s no wonder nimbys often fight against new housing estates when, too frequently, a fresh planning application heralds shoddy construction and even worse architecture.
But the rise of the Lewes Phoenix proves that another model is possible – one where developers, architects and communities make places that address local and global concerns together. Places where older people on electric cargo bikes can whiz their grandkids to the shops and where everyone can afford to live in decent double-aspect apartments and share childcare with the family next door. So, while 685 timber homes and workspaces in East Sussex winning planning permission isn’t a revolution, it may just be the start of one.
Phineas Harper is a writer and curator
